Nanaimo's Railway Station

[kickidee]

Trees from the old elementary science I knew absorb carbon dioxide and emitt.....Oxigen!! I think I spelled it wrong
The rape of the rainforests in South America has caused in part the hole in the ozone layer.
Please correct me if I am wrong but I have houseplannts in the belief that they improve the air in my home.
The besides of it all is that nature is calming and beautifull.

[Nostradama]

Trees from the old elementary science I knew absorb carbon dioxide and emitt.....Oxigen!! I think I spelled it wrong
The rape of the rainforests in South America has caused in part the hole in the ozone layer.
Please correct me if I am wrong but I have houseplannts in the belief that they improve the air in my home.
The besides of it all is that nature is calming and beautifull.

Absolutely correct. The rain forests of South America were once known as the "lungs of the world" because of the amount of oxygen they released. (OK, so lungs actually breathe out carbon dioxide, but you get my drift.)

Along came a guy named Daniel K. Ludwig, who put sawmills on huge floating barges and moved them up and down the Amazon, clear-cut logging the rain forests. Then some Asian interests began doing the same thing. "They tore down paradise and turned it into a parking lot."

(I'm not particularly a tree hugger, but the truth is the truth.)

It may be an urban legend, but I once read that six spider plants in a house will absorb most, if not all, of the tobacco smoke in a house where there's a smoker. I have eight, doesn't totally work, so I also have the mother of all air purifiers.

Another urban legend, which for sure was wrong, was that plants and flowers in a hospital room would consume oxygen, so one of the last things nurses did at night was to come into patients' rooms and move any gift plants or flowers into the hallway so that they didn't consume oxygen in the room. They did it in hospitals I was in as a kid, and they did it in NRGH in the very early eighties.

[Wyatt Earp]

FALSE. All plant based material absorbs Carbon Dioxide and emit Oxygen! The reason that nurses may do this is that plants also emit many allergens and dust mites making it difficult for some patients.

[mrraulduke]

but back to the train station if they can't make the buildling look beatufiful like the train station in toronto or montreal or new york or vancouver, don't try and disguise it with a few dollars worth of plants,

they can't make it look like the one in toronto, or new york
they have to make it look like the one built in 1921 in Nanaimo, so it cannot be a beautiful stone building.
Like it or not, it is what passes for Heritage in Nanaimo, so it gets to look the way it is.

[Wyatt Earp]

Correct, age is not the defining factor in this case - design is. Although NYC Grand Central was built many years before the little ol' station in Nanaimo, we are talking about 2 very different things - much different traffic flows and much more population.

[Nostradama]

FALSE. All plant based material absorbs Carbon Dioxide and emit Oxygen! The reason that nurses may do this is that plants also emit many allergens and dust mites making it difficult for some patients.

"All plant based material absorbs Carbon Dioxide and emit Oxygen!" I thought that's what I said. Do I need a cup of coffee? Probably. But at the time when nurses were removing plants and flowers from patients' rooms at night, they didn't seem to realize that, and I remember being told that the plants were going to give off something during the night that was harmful to me. Hospital hallways at night were lined with pots and vases put out there by nurses or other workers.

And this was last done that I'm aware of, in the early eighties, before there was as much attention paid to allergens and dust mites as there is now. I don't think they have the time now to remove flowers and plants at night. I'm glad there is more attention paid, because the huge increase in the numbers of kids and teens who are asthmatic is absolutely frightening. In fact, in the early eighties there were still large smoking rooms provided at each end of the building's wings. The last time I visited a friend in the hospital in a situation where flowers were appropriate, I discovered that the easiest way to bring flowers was to purchase them in the hospital itself because of the hospital's caution and regulations about allergens.

[Wyatt Earp]

Yeah, sorry I don't know what I was trying to say. I was tired.

[Flugel Horn]

they can't make it look like the one in toronto, or new york
they have to make it look like the one built in 1921 in Nanaimo, so it cannot be a beautiful stone building.
Like it or not, it is what passes for Heritage in Nanaimo, so it gets to look the way it is.

Here are some examples of the style of the train stations along the E&N line:
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Victoria's hut:
(It's always funny to type "Victoria Station" & "train" into Google; you get a result that's much more classic and big )




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Langford's shelter:
(located in a nice park area)



Chemainus shelter:
(over an embankment hill from the main street and Theatre district)


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(photos are from an August 09 trip by me on the Budd-car dayliner)

[Flugel Horn]

Continuing the topic of the typical E&N train station:

Duncan does it well:

The Cowichan Valley Museum is located in the Duncan Train Station on Canada Avenue between Station and Kenneth Streets. The Train Station is surrounded by parkland and totem poles and is located in the heart of downtown Duncan

Here are my pictures from a sunny August 09 day (the sun-in-the-west makes for poor photography, sorry )







Look at the left-side of this picture to see how the station is integrated into the downtown area (Duncan has a real downtown):


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Why such simple and folksy shelters & buildings? Well, the E&N is a country railroad.

This photo doesn't look like an urban passenger service:

[Flugel Horn]

And here's what Nanaimo train-station looks like in 2009:





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...And here are the plans for the new station, as presented at the Nov.1 2009 open-house:

- Neighbourhood:



- Close-up of the station grounds: