Craig MacBride

Dave Penn is sitting in the well-worn seat of Eddy the Engine, the red and blue diesel-powered, miniature locomotive that pulls four small train cars around the track at Bear Creek Park.

Penn is wearing his white-and-blue striped conductor’s cap, and as the train rolls up to the platform, he tugs on the cord that makes the engine whistle.

Two people, a father and a son, get off the train. They’re the only two on this ride, which can seat up to 42 adults. There’s still a chill in the air, so only a few hardy people are interested in the nine-minute journey through the forest, over Bear Creek, and through the tunnel.

The temperature doesn’t matter to Penn. Provided there’s no rain, he’s ready to take the train out every day of the year except Christmas. That’s his day off.

Penn says goodbye to his two riders and then unlocks the back door of the train station. Inside, he walks to the front and unlocks that door, then pulls open the garage door that keeps people from smashing the windows and raiding the station during off hours, or while he’s in the forest on his train.

He leans against the wall, waiting to see if anyone will come in for a ride. He has sharp blue eyes that make him look younger than his 63 years.

He figures he’s been around the half-mile track 38,000 times in the 12 years he’s run the Bear Creek Park Train with his wife, Linda.

One might think it would be a boring ride after all that time, but Penn still enjoys it.

“Every ride is different,” he says, leaning by the till. In the background, there are lollipops for the kids, reproduced paintings of old trains on scenic routes, and a giant, mechanical cup spinning on top of the Slurpie machine.

He says he can’t get tired of the ride because things are always changing. There’s a tree that’s torn apart more and more each day by woodpeckers; in the morning, alone at the station, he can hear the birds at work, tearing apart the tree in search of food.

He’s also fascinated by how the moisture in twigs expands and rises up as ice crystals on cold mornings, covering the twigs like “icing sugar.”

Then there’s the eagle’s nest.

“Last year, on a Saturday, I got here in the morning and the tracks were covered in snow. The eagles came out of their nest screeching and swooping in and out from the dark trees and that whiteness, chasing each other and screeching. Then they went back to their nest, and I’m looking around, thinking, ‘did anyone else see that?’ It was like a Robert Bateman painting.”

*****

The tunnel is the centrepiece of the slow ride on the small train. On July 1, it’s decorated to celebrate Canada Day. In the summer, it’s populated by dinosaurs, at Halloween it’s a haunted house, and for Christmas it turns into Santa’s workshop.

On three separate occasions Penn has been asked to stop the train in that tunnel so young men could propose to their girlfriends. All three women said yes.

A couple stopped by to get their wedding photos taken with the small train. One of those shots has pride of place in the station, at eye level near the door to the platform.

But there is a sad story, too.

In July 2000, Tina Burbank, 11, was at Bear Creek Park with her mother, grandparents and younger brother. On their way home, the family SUV was smashed by a Toyota driven by a 15-year-old heroin addict and car thief who was being chased by Surrey RCMP.

Tina died, only a short time after riding the train.

Penn doesn’t remember Tina. He didn’t take any special notice of the young chestnut-haired girl, not knowing what would happen to her after she rode the train.

She should have been like the thousands of other youngsters who have ridden the train. She should have gone on to do what young people do. She should have left the train station with a nice family memory, and she should have gone forth and grown up, chasing dreams and trying to make sense of the world.

Instead, her death made the world make a lot less sense to a lot of people.

While Penn doesn’t recall Tina, he tells the story with sadness, briefly aiming his blue eyes at the floor as the giant Slurpie cup goes on with its business of lazily spinning.

Then his eyes rise and lighten as he remembers Sarah Verghis, her son Joshua, and their improbable story.

They first came to Surrey from Malaysia in 2003 to visit friends and scope out the neighbourhood for a future move to Canada. On their first full day here, they went to Bear Creek Park, and Joshua, three years old at the time, visited the station. He was so excited by the slow train journey through the forest, even after continent-hopping by plane, that he begged for a second ride. Sarah said it was too expensive, and that one ride was enough.

After a week in Canada, the family went to India. Joshua was visibly ill by the time they arrived there, and Sarah, a trained doctor, knew the symptoms pointed to pneumonia. Joshua was admitted to the hospital at 6:45 a.m. By the time night fell, his right lung had collapsed. The next morning, the doctors told Sarah her son wouldn’t survive.

In that moment of terror, she thought back to the Bear Creek train, about denying her son that one extra ride, and she felt the heaviest kind of guilt, the kind only a parent can feel.
“If anything happened to him, I would never have forgiven myself for not letting him go on the second ride,” she said.

At his bedside in the hospital, she promised Joshua that if his condition improved, if he fought to get well, she would take him back to the train and he would get another ride.

Joshua spent the next 21 days in the hospital in India. The bill was $75,000. Sarah and her husband had to declare bankruptcy. But Joshua was alive and improving, and that was all that mattered. A year later, they arrived back in Surrey, this time for good, and settled into a house near the park. After dropping off their suitcases, the first thing Sarah did was take Joshua to the train.

He was ecstatic. Sarah was numb.

“I couldn’t feel anything,” she said. “I thought I’d be more excited, but I couldn’t feel anything. I had my son back, but when I went on the ride again, I couldn’t feel anything, I was too stunned that I got my son back.”

Since returning, she has never denied her son a ride on the train. They have been around that track, through the tunnel and the forest and over the river, 30 times in three years. She sounds exasperated when trying to figure out what her son, who has travelled extensively on all types of modern transport, sees in that modest train.

It’s much easier to figure out what she sees in it: the importance of small wonders, the baffling indifference of the cosmos that would allow Joshua to move so close to the precipice of death, and the grand mercy that allowed him to return from it.

“That train gave me hope, it gave me courage,” she said. “I could hold onto that hope that he could get better and go back on that train.”

*****

Three women with a young girl and a dog come in the station’s front door.

“Dogs are free,” Penn tells them. “Kids under two are free, too. Have another baby.”

The women look at him like they’d rather set their hair on fire.

Penn didn’t plan to be a conductor. He had a miniature train when he was kid, but he didn’t have any particular interest in locomotives.

It was really a business deal gone wrong at the right time that put him and Linda in charge of the small station in the park.

It was a man from Newcastle, England, charmed by the area’s August sunshine, who originally laid the track in the park 12 years ago. Penn invested, just in time for the worst winter in 75 years. The man from England, surprised that weather could change so dramatically, decided he wanted to go home, leaving Penn to either lose his investment or try to make the station work.

After 23 years in the real estate business, and with the housing market slipping into its fifth recession in that time, he thought it was a good moment to start something new. His wife retired from her job as a flight attendant and supervisor at Air Canada.

Penn figures the pair has since taken more than 800,000 people around the track.

Another three walk in the front door.

“How are you?” the lady asks.

“I can’t complain; nobody’s listening,” Penn says.

The father decides he’s not going to go on the train. He’ll stand on the platform and wait. Penn tries to convince him to join his wife and their son, but the man’s not interested.

Penn doesn’t like seeing parents not go on the train with their kids. He has seven children of his own, and 36 grandchildren. He’s learned a thing or two.

“They grow up fast, but let me tell you, they remember the times you spend with them, not the junk you buy. Christmas and birthday presents come and go, but they remember that.”

It’s Penn’s modus operandi to make people happy. He makes the kids happy, and, in turn, the parents are happy.

“They all have tensions, but they come to the park to relax,” he says. “We slow them down a bit.”

He hopes to entice more people to his corner of the park by building a $100,000 mini-golf course this summer. The drawings are done, and he has approval from the city; now he just needs to build it, and see if they come.

With six people on the 42-seater train, Penn is ready to go around again.

He pulls down the garage door that covers the windows. He locks the front door, then, on his way out to the platform, he locks the back door behind himself. He jokes with the passengers as he passes them on the way to the engine. “The drinks menu is under the seat.” The children are squirming.

Even after 38,000 trips, and after 800,000 people and 12 years, Penn’s not ready to retire. He says it’s too much fun. There are challenges, as there are in any job, but beneath those challenges, it really is a good time for him.

He takes his seat in Eddy the Engine, turns the key and puts the rig in gear. He pulls the cord that lets out the whistle, and the train starts moving. The children immediately quiet down and are taken in by the experience, the train chugging towards the tunnel that has been tattooed in thousands of memories.