Heading west; Tako, Unity, Vera, Winter, Yonker, Zumbro and then on to Artland and the start of a whole new list of place names, some lost and forgotten, on the ABC railroad.  From 1905 and 1914, and between Portage la Prairie Manitoba and Jasper Alberta, the Grand Trunk Pacific laid out communities in alphabetical order.  The complete list, or at least the best list I can find, can be seen at http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~canmaps/AlphabetRailway.html but I never did find why it was done this way.  Perhaps you know.

            Artland, (Photo 1) the first town site in the forth series, sat a slight hill. On the side of a road, now reduced to warn tracks in the grass, a tall steel sign spells out ARTLAND in welded lengths of chain and there is a large flat stone and a brass plaque.  All around it are the crumbled basements filled with rusting tin.  It’s all that’s left to remind us that a real place once flourished right here with all the shops, schools, houses, churches and industry that makes a small home town.  It was an odd feeling moving through the overgrown streets littered with bed springs, coffee pots and the gears and levers of lost farm equipment.  The quiet was overwhelming.

            But a long siding remains even if the station does not.  A white sign marks the spot in the center of a clearing surrounded by rows of non-native evergreens and lyrics gone wild.  Signs themselves that a proud agent and his wife worked hard to bring a little big town beauty to what must have seemed to them a desperately drab and lonely prairie outpost.   Over the years though, and after a few similar postings, the prairie would grow into them and they would never leave.  Their children would stay on - but their children’s children would move on.   This is a simple, poignant modelling opportunity.