Danger: do not walk or play on tracks

As a child I walked the tracks every day, and played on them too.

Yesterday afternoon, walking west along the beach at White Rock, I saw a glaring light round the peninsula from Crescent Beach. I watched the freight train move toward me as the glow resolved into the triple headlight of an engine.

I calculated that I would I reach the railway crossing first, then watch the train pass from the beach side.

But the train was moving faster than I realized. It reached me before I reached the level crossing. As it thundered by, smelling of hot grease and metal, I read the lettering, Burlington Northern and Santa Fe, and remembered how impossibly exotic those places seemed when I was a young child in a northern town, watching trains go by.

A song came into my head then -- by Sylvia Tyson. "I walk these rails." Here it is: hope you enjoy its mood of ineffable yearning as I do.