You can tell a lot about a place by looking at how people travel. Winnipeg Beach, for example, was born a creature of the Canadian Pacific Railway and train travel helped define the community’s life in the first half of the twentieth century. This was a shared moment for people who hurtled back to Winnipeg together on a raucous Moonlight Express after an evening of dancing or even for those who joined the crowd that flowed out of the train and onto the resort’s boardwalk. It’s through the shared stories of these people that we get a sense of Winnipeg Beach and the mythologies that have been created around it. A half-century after it stopped running, the train is still a vessel for transporting people’s memories of the past.
I had about 30 hours to contemplate trains when I was travelling from Toronto to Winnipeg this spring on VIA Rail. The train used to be … [read the rest on the CBC Manitoba website].
