Rail: a gift to the future

Dear Minister of Transportation and Infrastructure

The Free Press reports that extra lanes will be added to Hwy 8 to address the dangerous highway.

https://www.winnipegfreepress.com/breakingnews/2025/01/22/incredibly-dangerous-highway-8-to-gimli-to-get-passing-lanes

The thing is, if you have cars, you have danger. Especially on the open prairie where folks can't help but speed through the windswept openness.

Here's a better idea -- both given the climate crisis and growing income inequality: Instead of widening the highway, bring back the train. Give folks an alternative to driving. The road will remain of course and will serve the folks travelling from points in between But a significant amount of Winnipeg to Gimli traffic is doing exactly that. The train would take a huge traffic burden off the road and would provide a way to the beach for those who for whatever reason -- whether affordability or climate principle or medical restriction on driving or even age (i.e. under 16) -- don't have a car.

Any time I have ever heard the train to Gimli mentioned, everyone sighs collectively and says they wish it were still running.

Only political will stands in the way of reviving the train.

Expanded highways are just a millstone around the necks for future generations who have to pay for it but trains are a gift to both the citizens of today and the future.

Comments

My favourite nativity scene

“There’s no accounting for taste.” That’s my dad’s favourite way of explaining personal tastes that are incomprehensible to him, like living downtown, and riding bike in winter. The inexplicable factors which determine an individual’s likes or dislikes are probably the only way I can explain why my favourite nativity scene contains a horribly caricatured black magus, a random adoring child attired – to my fancy – like a Roma person, an old shepherd carrying some sort of blunderbuss. And a haloed holy family with an 18-month-old baby Jesus. This is the "Christmas Manger Set – the Christmas story in beautiful cut-out scenes and life-like figures." See how the 1940s-era family admires the realistic flourishes, like raw wood beams and straw protruding from the edge of the roofline; the rough, broken wood of the stalls; the tasselled camels; the richly dressed magi; the woolly sheep; the Bethlehemites on the path in the background, ostensibly out to get water, judging...

Upside down economics of Jesus: household action and global change

--Presented at a CAWG event in Altona -- In Living More with Less , Doris Janzen Longacre shares a story about envelopes from Marie Moyer, a missionary in India, who was studying Hindi with Panditji. Marie writes: “From his philosophic mind, which probed the meaning of events and circumstances, I learned more than Hindi.” Just before her teacher’s arrival one day before Christmas, she’d received and opened a pile of Christmas cards and discarded the envelopes as he walked in the room. She writes: “He sat down soberly and studied the situation, then he solemnly scolded me: ‘the reverberation of this wasteful act will be felt around the world’.” Marie was stunned. “What do you mean?” she asked him. “Those envelopes,” he said, pointing to the wastebasket. “You could write on the inside of them.” “Chagrined”, Marie apologized and rescued the envelopes with the help of Panditji, who “caressed each one” as he pulled it out of the garbage. This forever changed Marie’s relationship to p...

Broken people...

After reflecting with one coworker on how often churches in all their forms really mess up and hurt a whole bunch of people in the process -- and how "we gotta do better" -- I stumbled into another conversation with a coworker which highlighted our brokenness, and I suddenly realized what was wrong with my take in the first. I wanted the church to be better at fixing our mistakes, or better yet, at not making them in the first place. But maybe this "fix-it" attitude is partly the reason we keep blowing it again and again! My friend recollected an experience when a church community was in a terrible place: compounded mistakes, hurts, and frustrations had blown up, spewing pain all over all parties. (I'm sure anyone with a long history in the church can think of one, if not several, such occasions in their past.) A new Christian who observed all these goings on responded in an unexpected way. Instead of "you people are a bunch of screw-ups! How could this pos...

kar0ling

Search This Blog