A Train Surrounded by Fire
The video, posted by a CN Rail crew member from somewhere near Armstrong, Ontario, shows what apocalypse looks like from inside a locomotive cab. Orange flame licks at the edges of the frame. Smoke roils past in grey-black columns. The rail bed, visible for perhaps twenty metres ahead, then vanishes into a wall of haze. The crew had been evacuated , pulled from their train as the wildfire moved with a speed that left no room for calculated risk. It is an arresting image—a steel machine built to move through any weather, stopped cold by fire.