On frame 1there's also that spot on highway 15 that Google Earth calls Painsec junction. I couldn't find a picture from the bridge, but the woods caught fire about a decade or so before so there's those dead tree trunks that stick out of the underbush near the CNR railroad under your feet and about a mile ahead, there's the double overpass of the gigantic Trans-Canada highway right over your head.
To a history geek like me, that's interesting because the CN rails and the Trans-Canada are the spinal cord of Canada. They go all the way to Vancouver! In history, you find few tracks that imposing, that epic. There's the Trans-Siberian, the Orient-Express....and whatever train runned throught the old west! What would cowboy movies be without trains either being attacked by the Daltons or pushing Marty McFly and Doc Brown's DeLorean at 88 miles per hour?
I remembered from high school history that the Canadian confederation had something to do with trains. I did some research and found out that John A Macdonald, our first Prime Minister, had a very serious and very public drinking habit and was probably the butt of more drunk politician jokes than Boris Yeltsin in his glory days! Once, he was supposed to meet with the wife of the Governor General (who also happened to be the daughter of queen Victoria herself) but was too drunk to show up. In real life, that's sad but to cartoon humor, that's gold!
A little look at french history and I remembered that trains allowed to send trops more effictively to the slaughter fields of Verdun and the Somme, allowing for a neverending supply of canon foder to the battle fields of World War 1 but on the bright side, the armistice of 1918 was signed in a train (amusing detail, Hitler made sure to find that same, exact wagon for the french to sign their defeat to Germany in june 1940), and so was the abdication of the last Czar of Russia, Nicolas II so you can't really think of WW1 without thinking of trains (oh, yeah, an trenches, too)
And one final thought on high speed trains like the french TGV. How come Europe is the continent with bite-sized countries but the fast railroads while in Canada, you have to sit 12 hours in a train to go between Moncton and Montreal? We could use some of those here and according to my last toon, we have the electricity to power them. We just need the political will to do it.
