Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
Between MB and SK it's actually a correction line up to more or less around Pukatawagan MB (2/3 of the way north), and then for the final 1/3 it's a longitude line.
I swear, looking at a MB highway map, the discordance between the jagged correction line and the smooth meridian line triggers some kind of latent OCD impulses in me.
The lines are gone for good... in many ways rail serves customers better now than 100 years ago. My grandfather would have taken literally hours to haul grain by horse-drawn cart for the relatively short distance to the nearest elevator. These days the nearest rail line is much farther away from the old family farm, but the time it takes to get there and back is a fraction of what it once was thanks to (semi) modern rural highways.
I just can't see those old rural branchlines ever coming back.
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Oh I know they aren't coming back, although riding the train is a very plesant experience.
The initial concept of settlement was that each elevator (or group of elevators) would be far enough apart so that the farthest farmer would be able to take a load of grain to the elevator and then return within a day. All of those elevators, sidings and even towns are gone now. I'm old enough to remember riding in the truck with dad as he took a load of grain to Rhodes Siding, which was 5 miles from the farm, Ninga was 7 miles, and Killarney is 10miles. Rhodes is gone now, the Hutterites own the Ninga elevator and Killarney has 2 wooden elevators left (the last one was built when I was 18 years old) but there are 3 modern grain terminals there now.