A Rambunctious Ride to Halifax

Rambunctious Ride To Halifax
We took the train to Halifax and this was another experience, if you’ve never done it. They keep picking up people all the way along plus all the troops that were going overseas, hundreds of guys. I remember some of the incidents... In northern Ontario, the guys wanted to stop to get some beer, see, a place called Little Longwack (sp), which is just somewhere in the bush, but there was a beer store over there. And the train would stop for 20 minutes for water and whatever else, see, and the guys would hike off there to buy some beer and tried to hold up the train. I’ll never forget this one time, Bill Barker was waiting there; his buddy has taken off and the train was going to go. So he went out and layed down on the track in front of the big engine, see. And I can remember the engineer looking out the window and thinking, saying, “What’s that man doing up there? ” So he got the conductor, number one conductor and said, “Go and see what that man’s doing out there on the...We’re going to go pretty soon!” And he’s laying down, holding onto the rails, see, for dear life! And he’s going to hold up the train until his buddies get back. It’ll be a few minutes but... Well, finally the conductor can’t do anything so the engineer gets down out of there, which is a big deal, and he goes up to old Barker and he’s saying to him, “Young man, we can’t have any of this. Come up out of there.” And of course, by then, everybody’s arriving. They’re jumping on the train and Bill sees them, so he jumps right up and he salutes the old engineer and he says “Yes, sir!” and hikes back and everybody breaks out in a big laugh and they all get back in the train. Anyway, they all got the beer, cases of beer. Cause I didn’t drink, see, so I was just watching all of this.