Southern Plains Railfan
Published Jan 6, 2024In today’s video, we recount the time Penn Central let nearly all of Maine’s potato harvest rot in Selkirk yard; ruining thousands of lives and nearly taking down other railroads in the process.
Merch Shop: http://okieprint.com/SPR/shop/home
April 15, 2024
The MOST INCOMPETENT Railroad You’ve Ever Seen!
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April 13, 2024
When there was an active counterculture
Ted Gioia on a recent oral history of the countercultural touchstone, The Village Voice:
At the start of her oral history of The Village Voice, author Tricia Romano provides a “cast of characters”. It goes on for 15 pages, and includes 216 people — each with some connection to the alternative newspaper.
Many people nowadays have never lived in a society with such a vibrant counterculture. In a time when official sources all seem part of a predictable Disney-fied monoculture, just reading this list of names and mini-bios can be a revelation.
Many of these individuals are now revered as historic figures who changed society. They had power and prestige. It’s easy to forget that most of them operated as outsiders.
That’s how they wanted it.
These renegades at The Village Voice knew that working outside the system — and typically against the system — was their superpower. They could criticize ruling institutions. They could speak harsh truths. They could go against the grain.
One thing is certain: They didn’t align their interests with globalist corporate CEOs, billionaire technocrats, the surveillance state, and establishment bureaucracies. They would have laughed at journalists who did that — believing, rightly, that honest media requires distance, or even an adversarial stance, vis-à-vis entrenched powers.
Because that’s what a counterculture does. That’s what it’s expected to do.
Romano captures the peculiar vibe in the title of her book The Freaks Came Out to Write. She makes clear that The Village Voice wasn’t The New York Times and it definitely wasn’t The New Yorker.
Nobody ever stepped into its madcap offices and said “Ah, the Gray Lady”. No reader ever picked up a copy and expected to see Eustace Tilley on the cover.
Can you tell the difference between culture and counterculture?
And The Voice was heard. Even establishment insiders knew they needed to listen to these “Freaks”. Sometimes they feared The Voice, sometimes they secretly agreed with it, but they always treated it as a force deserving respect.
Until recently that’s how it worked. The tension between insiders and outsiders was a source of creative energy in society. The upstarts provided alternative views and new ideas. They kept everybody accountable.
I’m pointing this out because this no longer happens. This is the world we’ve lost.
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April 11, 2024
The CIA would “brief the press on matters of national importance … when ‘we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue'”
Jon Miltimore outlines the fascinating revelations from 1983 about how the CIA directly manipulated American journalists to propagandize certain issues in the way the Agency desired:
One of Snepp’s many jobs at the Agency was to brief the press on matters of national importance. Or in Snepp’s words, when “we, the CIA, wanted to circulate disinformation on a particular issue”.
Snepp made this statement in a 1983 interview (see above) that I’d encourage readers to watch. In the video, the former CIA analyst discusses how the CIA manipulates journalists with lies and half-truths in pursuit of its own agendas.
For instance, if we wanted to get across to the American public that the North Vietnamese were building up there force structure in South Vietnam, I would go to a journalist and advise him that in the past 6 month X number of North Vietnamese forces had come down the Ho Chi Minh Trail system through southern Laos. There is no way a journalist can check that information, so either he goes with that information or he doesn’t. Usually the journalist goes with it, because it looks like some kind of exclusive.
What Snepp was describing was one of the most simple tactics the CIA has used for decades to control information. He said the success rate of planting these stories in the media was 70-80 percent.
“The correspondents we targeted were those who had terrific influence, the most respected journalists in Saigon,” Snepp said.
Snepp even offered the names of the journalists he successfully targeted: Bud Merrick of US News and World Report; Robert Chaplin of the New Yorker; Malcom Brown of the New York Times; and others.
Snepp worked his way into these journalists’ trust exactly as one would expect.
“I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them at the Caravel Hotel or the Continental Hotel, to socialize with them, to slowly but surely gain their confidence,” Snepp said.
All of this sounds sleazy, but it gets worse.
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March 25, 2024
One major change in sexual behaviour since the mid-20th century
David Friedman usually blogs about economics, medieval cooking, or politics. His latest post carefully avoids (almost) all of that:
I didn’t have a convenient graphic to use for this post … but I know not to Google something like this.
My picture of sexual behavior now and in the past is based on a variety of readily observable sources — free online porn for the present, writing, both pornography and non-pornographic but explicit, for the past. On that imperfect and perhaps misleading evidence the pattern of when oral sex was or was not common in our society in recent centuries is the opposite of what one would, on straightforward economic grounds, expect.
Casanova’s memoirs provide a fascinating picture of eighteenth century Europe, including its sexual behavior. He mentions incest, male homosexuality, lesbianism, which he regards as normal for unmarried girls:
Marton told Nanette that I could not possibly be ignorant of what takes place between young girls sleeping together.
“There is no doubt,” I said, “that everybody knows those trifles …
I do not believe he ever mentions either fellatio or cunnilingus. Neither does Fanny Hill, published in London in 1748, when Casanova was twenty-three.
Frank Harris, writing in the early 20th century, is familiar with cunnilingus, uses it as a routine part of his seduction tactics, but treats it as something sufficiently exotic so that he had to be talked into trying it by a woman unwilling to risk pregnancy. I do not think he ever mentions fellatio.
Modern online porn in contrast treats both fellatio and cunnilingus as normal parts of foreplay, what routinely comes between erotic kissing and vaginal intercourse.
One online article on the history of fellatio that I found dated the change in attitudes to after the 1976 Hite Report, which found a strongly negative attitude among women to performing it. In contrast:
Today, the act is something more like bread before dinner: noteworthy only if it’s absent. (Fifty Shades of Grey and How One Sex Act Went Mainstream)
And from another, present behavior:
Oral sex precedes and often replaces sexual intercourse because it’s perceived to be noncommittal, quick and safe. For some kids it’s a cool thing to do; for others it’s a cheap thrill. Raised in a culture in which speed is valued, kids, not surprisingly, seek instant gratification through oral sex (the girl by instantly pleasing the boy, the boy by sitting back and enjoying the ride). A seemingly facile command over the sexual landscape of one’s partner is achieved without the encumbrances of clothes, coitus and the rest of the messy business. The blow job is, in essence, the new joystick of teen sexuality. (Salon)
Contrasted with:
When I was a teenager, in the bad-taste, disco-fangled ’70s, fellatio was something you graduated into. Rooted in the great American sport of baseball, the sexual metaphors of my generation put fellatio somewhere after home base, way off in the distant plains of the outfield. In fact, skipping all the bases and going directly to fellatio was the sort of home run reserved only for racy, borderline delinquents, who enjoyed a host of licentious and forbidden activities that made them stars in the firmament of teen recklessness.
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March 23, 2024
QotD: The SCIENCE was SETTLED in the 1970s
When it comes to Leftie, it’s really hard to sort out what’s intentional from what’s merely wrong, or outdated, or stupid, or some combination of the above. So while there really does seem to be some kind of coordinated push to get us to eat grass and bugs, the red meat thing is, I think, just old misinformation that Leftie can’t admit has been overtaken by events (because, of course, Leftists can never be wrong about anything). And I’ll even kinda sorta give them a pass on that, because I know a lot of medical people who learned the “red meat is bad for you” mantra back in the days and still haven’t gotten over it …
For younger readers, back in the late 70s the nutritional Powers That Be got in bed with the corn lobby. It sounds funny, but they were and are huge, the corn lobby — why do you think we’re still getting barraged with shit about ethanol, even though it’s actually much worse for the environment than plain ol’ dinosaur juice, when you factor in all the “greenhouse emissions” from growing and harvesting it? Anyway, ethanol wasn’t a thing back then … but corn syrup was, and so suddenly, for no reason whatsoever, the PTB decided that fat was bad and carbohydrates were good.
Teh Science (TM) for this was as bogus and politicized as all the other Teh Science (TM) these days, but since we still had a high degree of social and institutional trust back then — living in a country that’s still 85% White will do that — nobody questioned it, and so suddenly everything had to be “fat free”, lest you get high blood pressure and colon cancer and every other damn thing (ever notice how, with Teh Science (TM), everything they decide is bad suddenly correlates with everything that has ever been bad? Funny, that). But since fat is what makes food taste good, they had to find a tasty substitute … and whaddya know, huge vats full of corn syrup just kinda happened to be there. Obesity rates immediately skyrocketed; who’d have thunk it?
… but again, this isn’t a deliberate thing with your average Leftie. You know how they are about Teh Science (TM), even Teh Science (TM) produced by people who thought polyester bellbottoms were a great look, which alone should tell you everything you need to know. They just learned “red meat is bad”, and so, being the helpful sorts they are, decided to boss you around about it. You know, for your own good.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-06-25.
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February 29, 2024
Ukraine asks for mothballed Canadian missiles that should have been destroyed 20 years ago
In The Line, Alex McColl makes a case against granting a Ukrainian request for obsolete CRV7 70mm air-to-ground rockets:
An SUU-5003 bomblet dispenser with six CRV7 air-to-ground rockets (left) and six BDU-33 bombs (right).
Photo by Boevaya mashina via Wikimedia Commons.
Canadian parliamentary committees — and even the leader of the official opposition — are endorsing a request by the Ukrainian military to send that beleaguered country thousands of mothballed rockets that have not been adequately stored or maintained. The plan has received nothing but approval from Canadians; however, according to multiple sources I have interviewed, the rockets in question are probably useless. In a worst case scenario, a few could go off and hurt or kill the Ukrainians trying to jury rig them into a short-range rocket artillery weapon.
This is about Canada’s stockpile of expired CRV7 rocket motors, which were slated for environmentally responsible disposal twenty years ago. Despite this, these weapons are being requested by the Ukrainian military, which is desperate for any kind of munitions as the war with Russia drags on.
[…]
During the Cold War, the Canadian-made CRV7 was one of the best 70mm NATO rockets thanks to its powerful motor, high speed, and consistent accuracy. It was carried by NATO fighter jets and attack helicopters. In the early 1970s, it could outrange most Soviet short-range man-portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS), giving pilots an advantage in air-to-ground missions. Our pilots could shoot at the bad guys from far enough away that the bad guys couldn’t shoot back.
That was then. Today, surface-to-air weapons have advanced to the point where unguided rocket attacks are rarely worth the risk, which is why these rockets were retired 20 years ago.
One of the CAF officers I interviewed reached out again the next day to get in the final word. Here’s what I was told:
“In general, I’d say that the phase when donating from existing inventory was relevant ended in early 2023. Canada has donated many useful things, but focussed on what Canadian industry can provide, not what Ukraine desperately needs. Unarmed ACSVs and drone cameras are useful, but Ukraine needs predictable and reliable supplies of battle decisive munitions, most of all air defence missiles and artillery ammunition. The conversation Canada should be having isn’t about rotten surplus, but how we support new production of key ammunition, ideally at home but ultimately whoever we can fund to get it to Ukraine fastest.”
I couldn’t agree more.
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February 19, 2024
Justin Hayward performs “Forever Autumn” after telling the story behind it
RockEm Live Music
Published Jul 20, 2023The Justin Hayward Band performs “Forever Autumn” at the Plaza Live in Orlando, Florida on February 3, 2023. “Forever Autumn” was written by Jeff Wayne, Gary Anthony Osbourne and Paul Anthony Vigrass, and Justin explains how he got involved in the project at the beginning of this video.
Justin Hayward – Lead Vocals & Guitar
Mike Dawes – Guitars
Julie Ragins – Keyboards & Vocals
Karmen Gould – Flute, Percussion & Vocals
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January 22, 2024
“He lied. That was what he had to say at the time.”
At First Things, Robert Carle reviews Tania Brannigan’s Red Memory: The Afterlives of China’s Cultural Revolution:
At a 1979 White House dinner, actress Shirley MacLaine told Deng Xiaoping, China’s new leader and the guest of honor that evening, about a Chinese scientist she had met. He said that he’d been happier and more productive when he worked on a Chinese farm. Deng cut her short: “He lied. That was what he had to say at the time.” Deng spent three years working in a tractor factory during the Cultural Revolution, and he refused to romanticize it. The memoirs of Cultural Revolution survivors written in the 1980s echo Deng’s view that it was a brutal and pointless experiment.
Today, there is widespread nostalgia in China for the Cultural Revolution. President Xi Jinping has reflected positively on the time he spent exiled in the remote town of Liangjiahe in Shaanxi province, living in a cave, hauling coal carts, carrying manure, building dikes, enduring bitter winters, flea bites, and hunger. This experience, Xi claims, bonded him with China’s common people and prepared him to be an empathetic ruler. Liangjiahe is now a “red tourist” attraction where students can visit Xi’s old home and admire the well he built.
Xi’s glamorization of the Cultural Revolution is reflected in Beijing’s chic dining scene. In Red Classics Restaurant, for example, waitresses in Red Guard uniforms serve meat and vegetables in plain style to invoke an era of stark living. You can have a fully themed wedding in this restaurant, posing for photos in matching Mao suits on a tractor parked in one corner.
In her new book, Red Memory, Tania Branigan describes the clashing memories of the Cultural Revolution. Those who suffered under the brutality of the Red Guard describe an infernal decade when Mao turned his murderous paranoia on his own people, leading them to tear each other to pieces. Children denounced their parents, and students murdered their teachers. In Mao’s campaign against the four “olds” (Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Customs, and Old Habits), traditional Chinese culture and morality became targets for destruction.
But Branigan also tells stories of people who are nostalgic for a time when life was more austere and when people lived for a cause other than individualism and materialism. Some former Red Guards have set up a bookstore and website called Utopia. Others organize trips to North Korea to admire society as it should be, or set up rural communes for students. One Utopia co-founder, a professor, made headlines for slapping an eighty-year-old “traitor” who had dared to criticize Mao.
Red Memory is full of chilling stories of brutality and betrayal. Fang Zhongmou witnessed the torture and beating of her husband by adolescent Red Guards. She endured years of interrogations at her workplace because her father had been a landowner. One night in 1970, while doing laundry at home, she launched into a tirade against Mao. Her son told her, “If you go against my dear Chairman Mao, I will smash your dog head in”. He reported her to officials. After two months of violent “struggle sessions”, Fang was executed. The son grew up to be a guilt-ridden adult who agonizes over his mother’s gravesite.
Song Binbin was eighteen when she viciously denounced her school’s deputy principal, Bian Zhongyun. Bian had told the students that they should run out of the building in the event of an earthquake. Because she did not instruct the students to take Mao portraits with them, Red Guards hunted her down and beat her to death with nailed clubs. As the Cultural Revolution swept China, beatings and executions became increasingly baroque. Students poured boiling water over teachers’ heads and made them swallow excrement, crawl over embers, drink ink and glue, and beat one another.
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January 15, 2024
SS77: South Africa Builds a GPMG on the Shoulders of Giants
Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 Oct 2023In the 1970s, South Africa began looking for a domestic-production GMPG to replace its inventory of FN MAG machine guns. The MAG was an excellent weapon, but the ones in South Africa were getting old and worn out, and with the country under international embargo over Apartheid, new guns and parts were not available from FN.
The SS-77 (named for its two designers, Richard Joseph Smith and Lazlo Soregi) began development in 1977, with initially prototypes built by Lyttleton Engineering Works in 1978. The design took elements from several other excellent machine guns — the side-locking action form the SG43 Goryunov, the barrel release and feed mechanism from the MAG, and the gas system from the PK. After an extensive series of testing and tweaking, the gun was formally adopted by the South African Defence Forces in 1986, and went into serial production. Despite the development cycle, the guns still proved to have significant problems in the field. The gas piston was liable to break, along with problems of broken extractors, loose pins, and other issues. The guns were actually recalled from military service and rebuilt in the early 1990s. Following that redesign program, the gun has proven very reliable and successful in service.
A Mini-SS design was also adopted, essentially the same gun scaled down to 5.56mm. Initial plans were to produce a conversion kit to allow the regular SS-77 to use either caliber, but these were never actually produced.
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January 2, 2024
QotD: Cigarette smuggling and the powers-that-be
At that point, the Powers That Be were in trouble. Butt-smuggling was cutting into their projected tax revenues — tax revenues which, being governments, they’d already spent several years in advance. That’s bad.
Much worse, though, was the realization that, the more people bought their smokes off the back of a truck in Weehawken, the more those people realized that 99% of law “enforcement” is really “convincing people to voluntarily comply with the law”. As they should’ve realized from Prohibition back in the Twenties, and would soon have the opportunity to learn again with the War on Drugs, 1980-present, lifestyle laws are effectively unenforceable. Not even the most draconian techno-fascists, armed with 100% realtime surveillance, can stop people from getting high off something.
And that’s the worst knock-on effect of all, because the attempt turns “getting high” into a rebellious little thrill. You’re not just getting drunk / burning one down / smoking a Mob-supplied cigarette, you’re sticking it to The Man. If you don’t believe me, watch what happens to pot consumption in college towns once it’s fully legalized. Hint: It’s the same thing that happens to college kids’ alcohol consumption after they turn 21 — now that the cheap little thrill of being the rebel with the fake ID is gone, drinking loses a lot of its charm. Similarly, 99% of the “legalize it!” crowd’s “arguments” are just virtue signaling — they’re letting you know what rebels they are by breaking the pot laws. If you really want to cut down the consumption of intoxicants in a college town, at least, simply legalize ’em all. Your few true addicts will provide a spectacular lesson in Darwinism to the student body, but the vast majority of kids will be all but straight-edge.
Severian, “The Mob, Faux-tism, and the Ever-Rising Costs of Compliance”, Founding Questions, 2021-02-02.
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December 31, 2023
The British army in Northern Ireland, 1966-1975
Patrick Mercer reviews Huw Bennett’s Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966-1975 for The Critic:
Seen from today’s perspective, the litany of campaigns Britain fought between the World Wars seems unimportant. Yet disasters such as the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in Amritsar in April 1919, and the depredations of the Auxiliaries or Black and Tans in Ireland at much the same time, imperilled imperial strategy. [Richard Dannatt & Robert Lyman’s] Victory to Defeat underlines the actions of relatively small numbers of troops which threatened to unhinge whole campaigns. It makes the perfect counterpoint to Huw Bennett’s Uncivil War, which covers the opening years of the crisis in Northern Ireland in meticulous detail.
Bennett looks at operations in Northern Ireland only up until 1975 — arguably the most intense period — with a promise of further volumes to follow. This is the first, comprehensive attempt to deal in parallel with the political aspects of the campaign as well as the purely military ones. Although densely written, Uncivil War gives a very readable account of the first of three decades of conflict which dominated the everyday life of most of the combat arms of the Army. It now seems ironic, though, that Ulster was always treated as something of a sideshow when compared with the “real soldiering” of deterring the Soviets in Germany.
Central to Bennett’s book is the debacle of “Bloody Sunday” in January 1972, when paratroopers ran amok in Londonderry at a point of the campaign when the IRA was exhausted and finding it almost impossible to recruit. Politically, there might have been a breakthrough; militarily the terrorists were teetering on collapse, but one black sheep unit and the ham-fisted response by the chain of command galvanised the IRA. With a rifle’s crack, they guaranteed bloodshed for years to come.
If ever a victory was turned into defeat in modern times, this was it. Bennett pulls no punches in pointing that out. The interesting contrast with Lyman and Dannatt’s work is that no matter how much had been learnt from the Second World War, the doctrine that emerged could only be tested by blank firing exercises in Germany. Whilst the highly unlikely possibility of a war in Europe was constantly analysed, very little strategic thinking was put into the grinding, long-term campaign in Ulster that was actually killing people.
Certainly there were political initiatives and the intelligence machinery was constantly evolving, but the many battalions and regiments who were charged with everyday deterrence and occasional attrition wandered the streets with little imagination or flair, often only seeming to provide targets for the terrorists. If war against the Soviets was remote, bombs, snipers and ambushes in Ulster were certain. By contrast, the Field Service Pocket Book (India) of 1930 laid out clear advice and principles for operations on the North-West Frontier. In Ulster, we just blundered on.
If the lessons of 1918 were neglected, those that led to victory in 1945 were carefully studied, although any coherent tactical doctrine took until the 1980s to be published. Perversely, the operations that followed both world wars were much the same: small, far-flung, post-imperial scuffles which owed little to “conventional” fighting. Indeed, it might be argued that the real lessons that the Army needed to heed after 1945 were not those of a European war, but those which might have prepared it for long years in Northern Ireland or the former colonies.
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December 12, 2023
Rolling a Reliant Robin | Top Gear | BBC
Top Gear
Published 26 Nov 2010Jeremy takes the extreme sport of Reliant Robin rolling to the streets of Barnsley, aided by a string of celebrities who just happen to be on hand to help keep the fabled three-wheeler upright.
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November 28, 2023
Pierre Trudeau and Canada’s choice to become an international featherweight in the 1970s
In The Line, Jen Gerson endures a foreign policy speech from Mélanie Joly that takes her on a weird journey through some of Canada’s earlier foreign policy headscratchers … usually leading back to Justin Trudeau’s late father:
A Toronto Sun editorial cartoon by Andy Donato during Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to pass the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. You can certainly see where Justin Trudeau learned his approach to human rights.
If I saw a statue of P.E.T. on the roof of a foreign affairs building that looked like it were competing for a 10th place spot in the Eurovision tourney, I don’t know how I’d feel: embarrassed, touched, certainly too polite to say anything honest. I probably wouldn’t be so struck with awe by the sight that I’d be keen to shoehorn the anecdote into a major policy speech in front of the Economic Club.
And yet.
Joly’s speech was striking in that it could be divided into two distinct parts: The first half was a cogent and clear-eyed examination of the state of play of the world, one that acknowledged a fundamental shift in the assumptions that underpin the global order. Nothing one couldn’t glean from the Economist, but grounded nonetheless. The global order is shifting, the stakes have increased, and the world is going to be marked by growing unpredictability.
“Now more than ever, soft and hard power are important,” Joly noted, correctly, ignoring the fact that Canada increasingly has neither, and doesn’t seem to be doing much about that.
And this brings us to the second half of the speech, which was an attempt to spell out the way Canada will navigate this shift, by situating itself as both a Western ally and an honest broker: we are to defend our national interests and our values, while also engaging with entities and countries whose values and interests radically diverge from our own. “We cannot afford to close ourselves off from those with whom we do not agree,” Joly said. “I am a door opener, not a door closer.”
This was clearly intended to be analogous to the elder Trudeau’s historic policy of seeking cooperation with non-aligned countries — countries that declined to join either the Communist or the Western blocs throughout the Cold War.
[…]
If our closest allies treat us like ginger step-children as a result of our own obliviousness and uselessness, our platitude-spewing ruling class is going to seek closer relationships in darker places: in economic ties with China, and in finding international prestige via small and middling regional powers or blocs whose values and interests are, by necessity or choice, far more malleable than our own.
These cute turns of phrase are a matter of domestic salesmanship only. “Pragmatic diplomacy” is a thick lacquer on darker arts.
Which brings us back to Macedonia, again. Or North Macedonia, if you’re a stickler.
Before it declared independence in 1991, Macedonia was a republic within the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. During much of Trudeau Sr.’s time, Yugoslavia was led by Josip Tito, a Communist revolutionary who broke with Stalin and spearheaded a movement of non-aligned countries, along with the leaders of India, Egypt, Ghana, and Indonesia. Tito was one of several despotic and authoritarian leaders with whom Trudeau Sr. sought to ingratiate himself to navigate the global order.
P.E.T.’s most ardent supporters maintain a benevolent amnesia about just how radical Trudeau Sr. was relative not only to modern standards, but to world leaders at the time.
During the 1968 election, Trudeau promised to undertake a sweeping review of Canada’s foreign affairs, including taking “a hard look” at NATO, and addressing China’s exclusion from the international community.
In 1969, America elected Richard Nixon a bombastic, controversial, and corrupt president who forced Canada examine the depth of its special relationship with its southern neighbour. At the time, this was termed “Nixon shock.” And it could only have furthered Trudeau Sr.’s skepticism of American hegemony.
It was in this environment of extraordinary uncertainty, and shifting global assumptions and alliances, that Trudeau Sr. called for a new approach to Canadian foreign policy. He wanted a Canada that saw itself as a Pacific power, more aligned to Asia (and China). Trudeau also wanted stronger relationships with Western Europe and Latin America, to serve as countervailing forces to American influence.
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November 11, 2023
The Mississauga Train Derailment (1979)
The Raven’s Eye
Published 8 Nov 2022It was called “The Mississauga Miracle” — a train derailment involving 26 cars of toxic and flammable materials, just a few miles from a major Canadian city center. Faced with the prospect of a cloud of killer phosgene gas being released, authorities had no choice but to order the mass evacuation of an entire city …
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QotD: Diary entry, 11 November, 1979
I hope you’ll forgive my self-insert here, but watching the video on the Mississauga train derailment prompted me to dig up a bit of personal history related to this thankfully non-tragic event in Canadian history. This is what I wrote about the events of that week not at the time (I was far too busy living it to record anything) but a couple of months after the fact. Samuel Pepys I wasn’t. I note in passing that my memories today don’t exactly match what I wrote in early 1980, which does bring home to me the fallibility of “eyewitness” reports after the fact.
On the night of November 10, 1979, a 106-car Canadian Pacific freight train derailed at Mavis Road, north of Dundas Street. As a result of the subsequent explosion, when one of the tank cars carrying propane exploded, and because other tank cars were carrying chlorine, the decision was made to evacuate nearby residents in one of the largest peace time evacuations in history. This photo shows flames from the wreckage, with hoses pouring water on it.
Photo from the Mississauga Library System website, Identifier M466. Full gallery here.
In November of ’79, on the 11th actually, a chemical train derailed just northwest of [our apartment near Dundas and Hurontario Streets]. It spilled 16 tank cars full of propane and one full of chlorine all over the Mavis Road crossing.
I was driving back to Hamilton on Saturday night to drop off [my girlfriend]. Rockney was inexplicably along with us that night. Around midnight, I noticed the road all around us light up as though dawn had come early. Also noticed a pronounced mushroom-type cloud and lots of incident light at its base. Right there, my mind kicked into Hyperdrive and I analyzed the data, assumed the worst, and nearly swung off the highway to protect us behind an embankment. [The others] saw that it wasn’t an H- or A-type of explosion, and so we didn’t worry too much. Flames [on the eastern horizon] were easily visible from Hamilton.
I went back [to Mississauga], dropped Rockney off [and] noticed a police car blocking the intersection of Dundas and Hurontario with its lights going. Talked to Mum, who was still up, and went to bed at 3:00am.
We were woken up at 10:00am by police evacuating the building. I called Rockney and we all trooped over to his place. I stayed for 1/2 an hour, and decided to go back to the house, change into [my army reserve] uniform, and go up to Brampton for our Remembrance Day parade. On the way, I was stopped by the police and directed to go to Square One, where an evacuation centre had been set up. As I arrived there, the last bus-load of evacuees left headed for Streetsville Secondary School. I arrived there in time [to be given responsibility for security] with 15 assorted army and navy cadets [who were in uniform for their respective Remembrance Day services] who had no officer handy. We cleared the halls [at the direction of police and school authorities] and tried to maintain calm among the evacuated throng.
By 8 that evening, my force had shrunk to seven cadets led by Petty Officer Linda P. An officer cadet of the Air Reserve and five air cadets with him refused to assist me or the police. [I was angry at the time, but he was probably worried about the legal side of providing “aid to the civil power” while in uniform without permission from his chain of command. I was a junior NCO, so that thought never crossed my mind until much later.]
By this time, I had attached Chris P. [a friend of Rockney’s who was evacuated to Streetsville] and several other husky teenagers to my “security force” and we were able to keep things fairly quiet.
As people [started to realize] that they would be there all night, most of them settled down very nicely. [My team of cadets] issued blankets we’d received on a truck from CFB Downsview and shared out the available gym mats [as makeshift mattresses].
A local McDonalds sent in a “breakfast” of cold Big Macs [I’m sure they were hot going out the door, but they took a long time to get to us] — [the non-cadet members of] my security force got more than their fair share, but that was expected. Most of the media had disappeared by this time so we soon got involved in minor disputes with some irate citizens.
Sometime during Monday afternoon a Master Corporal from CFB Downsview called me to arrange a coffee run down to the [emergency crews working to contain] the fire. Nothing came of it in the end [I have no idea why they thought I’d be a useful participant, as I had no transportation other than my own car … maybe I was the only member of the military in the immediate vicinity].
Tried calling Rockney’s place [to see how my family were doing] but got no answer, same at Bill & Clive’s apartment [several miles further east of Rockney’s]. No idea where my parents have gone. [After being evacuated a second time, they’d ended up at the International Centre with the family cat and stayed there until later in the week, as I found out later. My sister hadn’t been at home so she was evacuated elsewhere with her boyfriend’s family. I have no idea where she spent the week.]
Monday night wasn’t too bad, except for [media reports] that there were 3 escaped cons in the area so i couldn’t send girls out alone on security sweeps [outside the school building]. Me, Chris P., Jordan L., and John D. were the only [ones available to do exterior security] now, getting VERY tired. Got an hour’s sleep.
On Tuesday a bunch of students from Humber College showed up. They were all taking the Law Enforcement course and wanted to help me with security. [The] only problem was that the course was 9/10ths female [so] I couldn’t use them [for exterior patrols, which is where we needed help the most].
Also showing up [later on Tuesday] was a local CB radio group who tried to take over from me and my team. It took two hours [of argument] before they gave up and went off to try to take over some other evacuation centre. [Around this time,] vandalism started on the back side of the school and in the portable classrooms. No one was caught at it, unfortunately. [I didn’t note it here, but I strongly suspected that one or more of my volunteers had done some of the damage out of boredom, but I had no proof.]
The biggest problem, however, was racial. A large group of black teenagers had taken over one of the Home Economics classrooms and had 2 competing ghetto blasters to make mucho noise. 2 fights had to be broken up in there and we had to call the police in to cope with the second fight.
[Tuesday] night was uneventful for a change. Wednesday wasn’t, as rumours of being able to go home kept hitting the people in the evacuation centre and nearly overwhelming the security teams at the doors. One asshole, a guy about 20-25 years old, kept buttonholing me and other members of my team and demanding shampoo, of all things. Eventually, someone got him some and he “went to the showers”. [In hindsight, he probably had just come down from whatever drugs he’d been on for the previous few days.]
On Wednesday night, the evacuation centre in Streetsville was shut down and everyone was moved to other facilities on Mississauga Transit buses. Most were taken to the Royal York Hotel in downtown Toronto, but my remaining team members were sent to a Holiday Inn in Scarborough. [I was in rough shape by then and someone got me to hospital to get checked out. I was there for about 10 hours before they discharged me with advice to “get plenty of rest”.]
Thursday we spent in the hotel, charging everything to CP Rail. They must have hit the roof when the bill arrived — especially the bar bill! We threw an “exhaustion party” in our room on Thursday night and on Friday we were finally allowed to go home (most of us, anyway).
When I went back to school the following week, I was given the third degree by the vice principal because the Red Cross didn’t have me listed as an evacuee. I had to get the hospital records to show that I had actually taken part before I was allowed back into class. [A similar thing happened the next unit parade night, as I’d been on TV several times in my uniform during the event and my commanding officer was quite upset about it, thinking I’d been pretending to act in some sort of official capacity, which I hadn’t been.]
Comments Off on QotD: Diary entry, 11 November, 1979
