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| Ottawa Citizen, March 18 1949 |
Call me Miniver Cheevy, just don't call me late for dinner. God, I slay myself sometimes.
Srsly thought, I'm one of those guys (there's a whole bunch of us apparently) who miss having big fat hooting stinking trains slime-trailing their way through the city at all hours of the day and night. Give us a time machine and you'll find us visiting any and all local train yards, any time before, say, 1949 (per above), rolling around with the rolling stock on the dirty ground like dogs on a dead deer.
Well of course, "smokeless" locomotives were a step in the right direction — all progressive and vegan and so forth. But they weren't enough to stop Jacques Greber, the French urban planner, from banishing them from downtown Ottawa like a latter-day Saint Patrick going all auto da fé on the serpents of iron. What he couldn't banish, he hid behind screens of Lombardy Poplar.
As always, I over-simplify. Check out Alain Miguelez's Transforming Ottawa for the lowdown on Monsieur G, French gun-for-hire, with his French snake-gun thingy and what-all.
