Joshua could feel his hands turning clammy. It wasn’t hard to ignore the fat guy. Ever since he’d confided in some brakemen from Toronto what had happened to him that day in the tunnel, he’d taken a ribbing that was now so obligatory it had practically entered the Canadian Railway Operating Rules Book.

What was hard, and getting harder every time they came through, was trying to resist jamming the dynamic brake handle on and jumping out of the train cab into the snow, before the three men and those hundred cars of grade one coal were launched into the gaping black mouth.

Funny to think that right now, on the wooden viewing platform up on the highway, tourists would be yelping to each other like excited coyotes, at spotting a freight train about to go through the famous tunnels. It was a Kodak-moment, all right: with a train as long as this one, the onlookers would see the engine disappear into the first tunnel, then double back on itself, only to appear to be travelling in the opposite direction to its freight before entering the second tunnel. There was a big painted illustration up on that platform for the real dumb tourists, the ones who stumbled out of a Winnebago and couldn’t figure out where they were, never mind what they were seeing.

Joshua had stopped on the highway once to look at the sign. It told him in kiddie-speak letters that they had blasted into the mountain ninety years ago, using the spiral design to avoid a wicked gradient through Wolf Pass. There were shitty pencil drawings of pioneers with big hats and moustaches, and a lot of bull about the early days of railway, but at least there was a diagram of how the tunnels worked inside the mountain. That was neat. You could see exactly how the Corkscrew worked, how it quartered the gradient with those two curly holes in the hill. Joshua had never thought about it much before then, and he didn’t think about it much after either. That is, until he had his fright.

It didn’t matter how many times he went over it in his head. He’d lain awake at nights in the CP bunkhouses and at home in Stoke, trying to figure out why he’d gotten scared. Worst thing was, it was a whole year ago, almost exactly this time last winter, and the scare hadn’t worn off.

Martell could go shaft himself. Joshua would tolerate all the fat fingers in the world poking him in the ribs, if he could just shake free of this paralysing, childish fear. He began to run through it again, the way he did every time they passed this way, trying to flush the memory away, make it safe.