It’s Vancouver Island’s disused backbone: nearly 300 km of steel snaking through the trees. The weight of a train hasn’t pressed over its trestles in a decade and a half. Instead, it lies neglected.

Portions of the railway are halfway reclaimed by the wild. New growth creeps over its ties. Near my parents’ house, there is a place where the gravel ballast crumbles away and a few inches of track hang suspended in empty air.

First it was the Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway—the E&N—named for the two settlements it ran between. The original route stretched 115 km. Then, it sprawled further over the years, unfurling all the way from Victoria to Courtenay, with an offshoot from Parksville towards Port Alberni.

By the time all this was in place, it had become the Island Rail Corridor—and by now it has almost been left for dead.

You can feel the bump of the rails under your car tires when you drive past the defunct train crossing signs.

The smell of old tar rises from the trestles in the summer months.

When the railway first ran, a passenger could pay $1.25 for a ride from Victoria to Ladysmith. It took two hours.

Trains don’t venture up and down the island anymore—the old routes lie dormant.

Trying to resuscitate these tracks and their routes, though, is the Island Corridor Foundation. It is, according to their CEO, Thomas Bevan, “a nonprofit charity owned and controlled by the 14 First Nations in the five regional districts it runs through.”

Speaking in long, breathless sentences, peppered with acronyms and proper nouns, Bevan unspools the details of the Island Corridor Foundation, which he currently heads.

He keeps his camera off during our call. All I see are the letters TB, suspended in the middle of the screen.

“It’s a 280-kilometer railway established as part of the Confederacy of Canada, back in the late 1800s,” Bevan explains.

“It was a private railroad until about 2003, when Canadian Pacific Railway decided that they didn’t want to keep it anymore, and so it was provided to the ICF.”

He continues: “There are still some train operations in Nanaimo, and then the heritage train in Port Alberni.” But apart from those, the tracks are currently disused.

Nature takes advantage of the disuse.

Bevan explains that “even though Scotch broom and blackberries are actually great for birds, they’re eating our corridor … nature always wins, and if you leave nature long enough, it’s going to grow back.”

But back in 1886, nature had been temporarily beaten into submission. The tracks were new—their steel, bright.

Prime Minister John A. Macdonald took his first and only steps onto Vancouver Island for the railroad’s inauguration. It wasn’t his first time at such an activity—the immense Canadian Pacific Railway had been brutally pushed to completion on the mainland less than a year earlier, leaving 600 dead workers in its wake. Most were recent Chinese migrants, paid grim wages for deadly work.

Macdonald himself hammered down the IRC’s last spike in August of 1886. The hand that swung the hammer was not the hand of a railway worker; it belonged to the man who permitted the residential school system and the Chinese head tax.

Embedded near Shawnigan Lake, the last spike is a hard little point where the weight of history rests. One chunk of metal.

It is the tangible mark tying Vancouver Island to the rest of Macdonald’s legacy.

The prime minister’s interaction with the railway was just a brief ceremony—a contrast to the many lives that were made or broken by the railway.

Others were living on the land long before the railroad was pushed through. Like any piece of infrastructure in Canada, the Island Rail Corridor sits atop Indigenous land. The communities already in place on Vancouver Island were forced to accept a construction project that would surely bring further settlement of the area.

As described by The Discourse, “British Columbia granted the land to what was then called the Dominion of Canada … with little input and no consent from many of its original Indigenous owners.” The tracks were forced straight through 14 different Indigenous territories.

“The biggest problem with the corridor in the past,” Bevan says, “was that the Indigenous nations paid the price.”

Nanaimo MLA Robert Dunsmuir helmed the construction process during the final stages. He only had three years to admire the finished railroad; by 1889, he was dead.

He oversaw a different building project in his last few months—Craigdarroch Castle, a mansion in Victoria funded with the huge sums he made in the coal industry. Today people say it’s haunted.

My research has turned the railroad into something abstract for me—a faceless set of facts, difficult to fully picture. To remedy this, I drag a travelling companion, L, on a long hike up the tracks from Qualicum to Bowser.

Together, we will trace the great skeleton of Macdonald and Dunsmuir’s dreams.

We start by the preserved old Qualicum station. There’s a Norman Rockwell vibe to it. It’s bright and fresh enough that I have to keep reminding myself it’s part of something so old; everything we see on the tracks from this point on will be worn and dusty.

The railway rarely intersects with urban streets.

“In Nanaimo,” Bevan tells me, “the railway actually goes through the third Chinatown, and there’s not much left because it all burned down in the ’60, but there’s a community group organizing to make sure those stories aren’t forgotten … they’ve put public art along the corridor, talking about the story of the old Chinatown.”

The Qualicum station is a community landmark as well, but it has a quiet uncanniness—a sense of being frozen in time, constantly cleaned and repainted to erase the years’ passage.

Only when the railway is under your feet does its scale become clear. L and I keep a brisk pace, but the scenery takes forever to change, shifting into new landscapes and atmospheres in 40 to 50 minute increments.

The first sections we encounter are comforting and woodsy; everything is green. As we go, we enter areas that have been thinned and yellowed by the summer heat, where the plants are low and hardy.

Things get stranger as we head further out. The backyards of foreboding mansions open up behind thin veils of trees. Some feature outbuildings or custom playgrounds.

In one backyard, electronic music pulses through the trees; a rooster crows through the fence at intervals.

It’s easy to see that the 2020 Summary Report wasn’t lying—this is a degraded track. The ties are hollowed out by rot, split wide open with age, or buried under dirt and moss.

Some sections are almost hidden by bushy tufts of grass. Odd shards of metal stick out from the weeds.

At one point, when L and I are deep in the trees, we see a dark pile of bear dung in the middle of the track. It’s recent.

At another moment, when L has wandered ahead, he suddenly looks down and yelps, “ground wasps! Ground wasps!” as he beckons me to sprint behind him until we’re out of their area.

New life rises from the deterioration—most of it isn’t this aggressive.

But this decay is accompanied by signs of community.

At a point where the ballast below the tracks has caved in and left a two-foot-deep hole under the ties, somebody has spray-painted the gap’s edges bright pink to warn anyone travelling in twilight.

As we make our way further out, we find the charred remains of little campfires where people spent the night.

Crossing a trestle high above a waterway, we hear a distant echo of Fleetwood Mac and see teenagers with a Bluetooth speaker swimming 100 feet below us.

Long stretches of sameness get tiresome. At points, we walk straight ahead for close to an hour without encountering the slightest landmark or any bend in the track.

It becomes agonizing to focus on the growing ache in my feet and then look to see identical kilometers stretching ahead. I find myself checking the time more and more because I’m getting worse at measuring it out here.

This only adds to the grandeur when a landmark does come, though. They loom at you out of nowhere. We turn a bend and see a high trestle that curves as it bridges the gap over the Qualicum River.

To account for the curve, it’s also angled, with the tracks leaning to one side to ensure a train wouldn’t go careening off the edge of the bend.

Near the end, we pass under a stretch of power lines—the massive ones held up by giant V-shaped structures. They buzz high above us.

But by the time we stumble into Bowser with aching ankles, I don’t feel much closer to the big picture.

The tracks extend further and further ahead; the sight of their expanse haunts me for the whole ride back home.

I’ve walked for six hours and I’ve only seen a glimpse.

“When I was getting around more,” Reggie Boyd says, “I walked up along them tracks. They’re just a mess. We should be ashamed of ourselves. That’s a monument—that railroad, and whoever built it. And it’s gone to waste.”

He leans back in an armchair and spreads a blanket over his legs. Bespactacled, goateed, and silver-haired, he shifts his vape back and forth between his wiry hands as he talks.

I spend our interview sitting below the silvery haze cast by his silent TV screen.

My quest for the railroad has finally brought me here—to the house of a man who saw the trains pass and felt the tracks rumbling. And then he saw them fade away. He heard the rails go quiet.

“My uncles were managers at train stations,” he says. “CN and CP. I used to hoop telegraphs to the engineers on the trains. We had this guy at CN … he used to give us lots of beer and stuff.”

He bounces his bare feet as he talks; furls of vapour seep through his lips during his long pauses. 

The motion of the silent screen behind me casts jittery light over his features. “Our job was to unload the baggage. I’d say I was about eight years old. Maybe ten. We’d bang spikes into the tracks. All sorts of different things we farted around on.”

“Why I’m so adamant about railroads: they’re more efficient than trucking. Less emissions, you don’t have to build as many roads. I don’t understand what they’re thinking when they say [fixing the railroad will] cost millions—well, how much is it going to cost to build a f—king road to wherever?”

He fixes his eyes on a point halfway up the dark wall. “Us guys could take a train from the station that used to be in Parksville. We could go down to Victoria and come right back. I don’t get what they’re thinking when they let the railroad go to ruin. They wouldn’t let roads go to ruin, would they?”

“You’ve got to get people thinking about it. At least thinking. You go to Qualicum and it’s a neat old station up there. What a waste. It’s a shame.”

Then a memory comes to me: I used to unearth the railroad spikes. I pried them from the rocks and dirt as a child, and I carried them home to dump in a pile in the yard. Rust flaked off them and stained my hands red and brown. My mother did not like this.

I haven’t thought of this in a long time. The trains were gone before I had much of a chance to see them, but I grew up in the shadow of their monument. Running all down the coastline, through cities and wilderness, is the shell of a vanished time. 

Maybe someday it will be hauled back into motion. Bevan sees this future and he pushes towards it. But what comes to me with more force is the past, and the weight of those rusted spikes I carried home. Eventually my father buried them under the garden mulch.

As Boyd leans back in his chair across from me, half lost in his train dreams, I remember: I played in the wreckage of the Island’s spine.