Jasper: Love Those Trains

Even visitors who have no interest in trains, like my family, ended up watching and discussing them in Jasper. In Scotland, we live by a railway track, and hear the morning goods train rumbling Northwards every day so it's not that we've never seen a train before. In fact, when they were small, all my children used to take great delight in waving to the passing trains. What was eye-catching in Jasper was the length, weight and enormous size of the trains and the massive power of the locos, hauling them up and over The Rockies. One such train, powered by four huge locos, took more than twelve minutes to go past us, it was that long! The loads were interesting too. Minerals, potash, cars, vans, lorries, and countless containers bearing the logos of manufacturing plants all over the Asian Pacific, and shipping companies all over North America. US and Canadian hunger for manufactured items, coupled with Asia's ability to undercut their production costs, seems to have created a railway boom, on lines serving the Pacific coast. The resulting trains, running just in front of our hotel room in Jasper were quite remarkable.