harrym, a thousand thank-you's for describing the journeys from Halifax (Did I say NY? Sorry, must take more notice!) to Moncton, and Moncton to Assiniboia. I must now admit to my guilty secret. Like you I am a steam enthusiast, and am allowed by SWMBO to attend the Bluebell Railway twice weekly as a volunteer in the Carriage and Wagon Works at Horsted Keynes. So your obvious love of the genre comes across loud and clear as you describe the fluctuating levels of comfort afforded you and your companions in your great trek west.
The vital importance of the railways in opening up Canada and the USA in the 19th Century can be easily understood from your description of endless wilderness with only the railway and its attendant settlements to witness the presence of modern man. What a contrast to the technology that you represented, abeit as an apprentice, yet what an appropriate setting to learn that trade, for aviation was to become the modern railroad in those lands, 'from California to the New York Island' as Mr Guthrie would have it.
Once again I must congratulate you on your literary style. You may not have possessed a camera but you possessed something far more valuable, an enquiring and observant mind together with a photographic memory, and all topped off with the seemingly effortless ability to recount it so vividly that we share the journey with you. Thank you Harry, and thank you Grandma!
Danny, thank you for so willingly slipping into harness yet again, all the more so as it was purely voluntary and in no way under any duress ;-) Now at last your peregrinations have found territory shared with your readership. This is perhaps the very point of your long and varied journey, for it connects the past with the present and tells us how we got here. The greatest change has to be in shear numbers, an RAF over 1 million strong in WW2 to well under 40,000 today. Units in every continent of the world in 1000's of Stations, now shrunk to a handful overseas and not many more at home:-
List of former Royal Air Force stations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
List of Royal Air Force stations - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Perhaps we should give thanks that the million secured our future and enabled us to shrink to so few. Or perhaps we should reflect on the dire necessity that the BCATP for instance responded to, and vow that we should not be so desperately short of trained aircrew again.
British Commonwealth Air Training Plan - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
...or is it already too late?