Choo-chooing through history
Engine 374 and Me: True (and Partly True) Stories of a Celebrated CPR Locomotive
by Lisa Anne Smith
Vancouver: Time Talk Press, 2024
$20.00 / 9780968786512
Reviewed by Ron Verzuh
*
Riding the cowcatcher at the front of CPR Engine 374 with Lady Agnes Macdonald, our first prime minister’s spouse, is a great way to open this collection of historic events billed as part true and partly not true.
The not true part is a signal to historians and serious history buffs that Engine 374 and Me is storytelling more than genuine history. Still, readers get a good glimpse at the engine in “Lady Macdonald’s Ride” as it travelled from Montreal to Port Moody in 1886.
And that’s just one stop on this reading journey.
The stories go all the way to the present with the engine still thrilling tourists today at a permanent pavilion.
By introducing fictional narrators, Vancouver author Lisa Anne Smith (Hastings Mill: The Historic Times of a Vancouver Community) enhances these tales about the famous engine as it puffs its way across the Canadian West. Lady Agnes’s adventure is pulled from her own published account of the journey.
Others, however, are from fictionalized accounts like those of two Chinese brothers, whose “The Jade Cow” tells of the harrowing experience of the thousands of Chinese labourers who built the railway.
Other narrators share personal memories as Canadian Pacific Railway workers, school children, extras in a movie called The Great Barrier, a play about a bank robber, an old army major who cherishes the engine as his own, and Engine 374’s rescue from oblivion.
Many of the stories will be more appealing to young adult readers. They are fun and involve the kind of exploits that captivate that age group. “The Elephant in the Park” (set circa 1947) fits this category well, but it also offers a vivid childhood memory of the Second World War and a son’s loss: “‘Meet Locomotive 374,’ Dad said enthusiastically. ‘This old engine is going to help us win the war.’” Sadly, that moment was a fleeting memory for the storyteller.
“Playground Capers” from 1964 is another example. In it, a gang of kids uses the engine as a prop for a play that reenacts the capture of notorious Robin Hood-style bank robber Bill Miner. A photograph of one of the players standing on the engine’s big smokestack was used as the book’s cover. The action took place while Engine 374 was still stationed at Kitsilano Beach.
Author Smith has her own memory of meeting Engine 374. It was associated with the death of her brother Michael, a “train man.” It spurred her to quickly become “enamoured with the engine’s colourful history and ongoing survival.”
Smith, with four other books to her credit, is a former docent with the Museum of Vancouver’s Education Department and part-owner of Old Hastings Mill Store Museum (Vancouver’s oldest surviving building, c. 1868); she also volunteers at the Roundhouse Community Centre’s Engine 374 Pavilion.
Readers interested in learning more about BC’s railway history should contact the West Coast Railway Association. Based in Squamish, it operates the Locomotive 374 Pavilion in Vancouver. Among others, Smith also salutes the Friends of Locomotive 374 whose dedication “brought the restoration and preservation of Engine 374 to reality.”
*
Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron recently wrote about Tom McGauley and has reviewed recent books by Charles Demers, Graeme Menzies, Angie Ellis, Mark Waddell, R. Bruce Macdonald, George M. Abbott, and Barry Potyondi for BCR.]
*
The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster