So why does New Westminster need train whistles, anyway?
What with all the recent discussion around train whistles and the desire for whistle cessation in Sapperton, we thought we'd take a search back through the archives to see what we could find about train whistles in the history of New West — given that the railroads have been such a part of this city's past.
Well, we didn't exactly find public furor over the noise of train horns, but we did find a newspaper editor who took it upon himself to lay out an explanation of why train whistles were so essential.
"If a horse and carriage should approach and cross a track at the rate of six miles an hour, an express train approaching at the moment would move toward it two hundred and fifty-seven feet while it was in the act of crossing; if the horse moved no faster than a walk, the train would move toward it more than five hundred feet, which fact accounts for the many accidents at such points," the editor explained.
"When the locomotive whistle is opened at the post eighty rods from the crossing, the train advances near one hundred feet before the sound of the whistle traverses the distance to, and is heard at the crossing."
Troubling flashbacks to middle school math problems aside, the whole explanation at least served to remind us that while the city may have changed a great deal in the past 159 years, some things haven't changed that much at all.
New Westminster is a city full of history — and that history includes a variety of community newspapers over its many decades.
In this new weekly series, we're taking a look back at the headlines from some of those newspapers, shining a spotlight each week on a notable news story, person or moment from this week in New West history.
Watch for it online every Thursday.
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Follow Julie MacLellan on Twitter @juliemaclellan.
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