Static

I like static displays, but at the same time I find them heart breaking. They are reminders of a former glory that has been swept away by the passage of time. I have rarely found static displays in locations where railroads are still a hustling, bustling enterprise. Usually I find them in areas that have long since peaked and in some cases they stand as mute monuments to a railroad glory that has vanished. Kensington Station on Prince Edward Island is one such place.

Kensignton Station is  the train station where Matthew Cuthbert picked up 11-year-old orphan Anne Shirley to start the novel Anne of Green Gables. It's a lovely building in a nice little town in the center of Prince Edward Island, but it has been almost 50 years since it saw a train pass by. If you look closely you can see a short section of track in place just in front of the platform. A few hundred feet away, one of the last locomotive that worked on Prince Edward Island sits waiting for another chance that will never come.

 

I found the entire display a little sad and wished someone with money had come in to save the Island's railways or at least a small part of them. Instead, the locals doing the best they could, preserved some pieces of their past but it seemed more like a rusted piece of playground equipment and not a machine built to haul passengers and freight. I am not trying to be insulting, it is just part of what I said earlier -- there is a  heart breaking aspect to some static displays. Prince Edward Island was one of those places. 

 

 I had a similar feeling in Deer Lodge, Montana. A Little Joe electric locomotive stands fenced in a few feet away from the town's ``Gold Spike'' memorial celebrating the completion of the Milwaukee Road's transcontinental line that took place a few miles away. The Little Joe is so big it was hard to get a good photo of it even with a wide angle lens. It stands in Deer Lodge to let visitors know that once upon a time, a major railroad used to roar through town using these giants of engineering to pull its trains. I tried to imagine such a sight. It was pretty hard to do. 

Deer Lodge is a nice little town, but to see it now and to think of what it was took more mental gymnastics than I was able to conjure. A train might show up in Deer Lodge once a day. I was there for quite awhile and didn't even hear a distant whistle. But as distant as Deer Lodge's glory may have been it was still closer than poor Kensington's. At least trains still come to Deer Lodge from time to time.

Still, wouldn't it be something if the Little Joes or some modern equivalent were powering through Deer Lodge bringing passengers to this beautiful country and revenue for the town and its people.