Highway #35 South

FTLComm - Tisdale - January 31, 2001

Time to get out of town for a while, I had a package I was going to ship but as I got to the South side of town this morning I decided I should just go for a drive and deliver it in person. Last night there was a light cover of snow, perhaps an inch and a half or so but this morning a -22ºC North wind was moving that snow South and though it looks a bit like a blizzard in these pictures it was just fine normal winter driving.

The sun makes an earlier appearance now each day just a little quicker and this morning the conditions were just right to produce the phenomena known as sundogs seen as a lighter arch on the left side of the image. Sundogs are actually a halo like rainbow affect created with cold upper atmosphere and some ice crystals suspended above us. They are spectacular from the ground but when you are flying and look down they are a perfect circle following the sun's reflection below you.

Today is a normal day and as you can see the road was almost devoid of traffic with the exception of a steady flow of various heavy trucks. When the process began, actually in the fifties, as freight shifted from LCL (Less than carload lots) on the railway when once a week almost every rail line had a train that brought groceries, products of all kinds called the "Way Freight". In our village it

usually showed up around noon on Wednesday and my dad and his crew often were on hand to help the train crew and the station agent unload the cars. That was how things were moved and every town had a dray man, a fellow with a medium sized truck that picked up the goods from the station and delivered them around town. That system was efficient and inexpensive, with its disappearance went the station agent and his family, the railway section crew, the dray man and in its place giant trucks running on our roads, roads we had to pay through taxes to maintain. I keep wondering, who's idea was this anyway? Timothy W. Shire