RIP the Golden Age of SPR

Yesterday I was involved in a meeting, and at this meeting I watched the credibility of my program fail and tumble into oblivion in the name of the almighty dollar. Never mind the fact that during or reviews we are finding very serious problems that a poorly trained monkey would have spotted with a short pointy stick. They are not all bad, but some of those errors we have dug up, would have given my old college professor a bad case of the shakes and if I was the one responsible for the before mention mistakes, my butt would have been sore for weeks. Anyway, it was decided that in order to save money we will no longer check as many plans, do as much work on the plans, and most importantly we will no longer be field inspecting our jobs. This bugs me on 2 levels, number one, the field inspection is the most important part of our review, it is when we see that what our man said he found and placed on the plan, he actually did find and place. You would be scared at how often what the plan says isn't what exists in the real world. The second thing that disturbs me on a personal level, is that this means that the favorite part of my job, the part where I leave this dismal concrete tower of civilization and see some of the most interesting parts of the province. The time where I go and learn how to evaluate the evidence, or in some cases find the evidence that is not supposed to exist according to the plan, it is the only real part of my job that I truly enjoy, and that has now been pulled from my job description. If I wasn't under contract I would have given my resignation and leave from this place, but I have 3 months left. I fought for the lats 2 years to give this program some credibility, only to watch my administrative boss destroy it 6 months into my 2 year contract. Right now the ship is sinking, and I am the band who played until the very end.

Roundhouse

In Hanna right now (Home of Nickelback), at the tail of a good week of field inspection, but that isn’t what I want to tell you about. While here I went wandering around this tiny little place upon the prairie, and I stumbled upon an old abandoned roundhouse. For those people who don’t know what a roundhouse is let me give you a quick history lesson on the subject. A roundhouse was used to store and repair steam locomotives that traveled up and down the railroad. They were built in a circular formation with several doors so to accommodate several engines at the same time, thus gaining their name. If you want to find out more may I suggest Wikipedia or Google. As a kid I loved model trains, I loved having a world where I could set up my own world with mountains, farms, and towns. Now I see them differently, to me they represented how Western Canada was built, settled and prospered. Western Canada only exists because of the railroad, and maybe that is why I loved them so much. Here they are our history, my grandparent’s rode the rails all the way from the St. Lawrence to get out here, to get to the place they would call home, the place I still call home. I never really thought about it before really, the foundations they laid 100 years ago, are my foundations today. The end of their journey is the beginning of mine. Getting back to the roundhouse, I was saddened to see the crumbling roundhouse with it’s turntable immobile as it is one of the last ones that I know of that still exists in Alberta. Maybe the most depressing part is seeing the stakes that mark the new subdivision that will soon pave over this monument to my western heritage, to the journey my grandparents made, to all those who traveled the railway, to those who built the railway. It seems that that is the way of Alberta bulldoze now, and regret later. That seems to be the motto of my home province, where everything is a short term gain, and know one looks into the future, just look at the oil sands. Maybe I have too much of a love for model railroads, maybe I love historical buildings, maybe I am still trying to rebuild my grandparents journey, or maybe, just maybe I am one of the few people in this province who understand history and how important it is in order to understand our potential success, and our potential to fail. Maybe I am just using that impossible ability that is foresight.