There is always a guy with a guitar on a cross country train.
It’s never Gordon Lightfoot or Eric Clapton.
~
(Toronto to Edmonton, nineteen eighty something)
♦
Other (not always) wordless friends:
Cheryl Andrews
Allison Howard
Barbara Lambert
Allyson Latta
Elizabeth Yeoman
Matilda Magtree 
I love your photos with these wild and crazy colour blocks. Such whimsy. And it really makes the lines of the train and bridge stand out. On the subject of guys with guitars on cross-country trains, I … On second thought, that story’s not for public consumption. But I did once take the train from Ottawa to Jasper (to work at Jasper Park Lodge), then later from Jasper to Vancouver and back. And a few months later, I returned by train from Jasper to Ottawa. Those trips and the people I met were world-expanding experiences at the age of 20.
I’m sorry. You’re not allowed to submit one-word sentences composed of *I*. I’m surprised the one-word-sentence filter didn’t kick in. So…. if you’d like to finish that sentence [ahem] we’re all ears.
That was a teaser Allyson! There is something about trains that says comfort to me (maybe because the train tracks ran behind my house when I was a kid and I was soothed by the sound of a train passing in the night) – and I love your treatment of this Carin! And as for the guy with the guitar…!
Allison, a train *does* run behind our house, not directly but near enough that I can clearly hear it and it’s true, there’s something both exciting and comforting about that sound, especially, mainly, at night. I love it. It used to sound its horn as it came through town but that apparently upset a few of the local cows, or so a farmer once told us, and they had it stopped. (:
Carin this is brilliant, literally of course, but figuratively as well. Makes me dream of whatever is going on in each vividly silhouetted section of the scene. And I too used to lie in bed and listen to the train pass by; the Kettle Valley line, just below our house; and I would pretend I was snugly on it in a sleeping coach and that would lull me to sleep.
A universal lulling. (:
(Also something about the idea of the Kettle Valley Railroad… not sure what, but so romantic.)