Like the little conundrums in Christmas crackers... it goes like this: Where would you find a man at work surrounded by wicker baskets containing magazines, nut bars, and soft drinks, two barking dogs, several cylinders of oxygen, rolling about on the floor, suitcases, trunks, parcels, a chimpanzee, a corpse, and maybe 20 huge milk cans fresh off the farm?

Well, if you're an old railroader, you'd guess rightly enough, the baggage car, of course. This was the workhorse of the passenger trains of yesteryear and still is to a certain degree.

You just name it, sooner or later you'd find it there up front next the engine, regardless of rules and regulations which might state clearly that it shouldn't be there at all. This writer recalls vividly the day they shipped the remains of a well known Canadian Pacific official, Montreal to Lethbridge, in an urn and under a supplies label! The baggageman, in his coveralls, standing in the doorway of the car as a local passenger train rolled into a small town, was a familiar sight to everyone. He'd be holding the hand rail in one fist and a batch of OCS mail (On Company Service) in the other and on the floor beside him would be a variety of bags, a perambulator and, if he was unlucky enough, three monstrous trunks containing the "lines" of a travelling salesman who was back in the smoker playing one last hand before reaching for his coat to get off.

The baggageman didn't rate as highly as the engineer with small boys, but there was envy in their eyes just the same. The train baggageman was also a bit of a reporter, gathering bits of local news from agents or operators who would come up beside his car with their trucks to exchange loads. So, in a sense, he became a balladier without a guitar and these are some of the stories he's told.

To some extent sharing the confusion of life in the baggage car was the news agent, "news butcher" as he was sometimes known. For it was he who kept his wares in the wicker baskets which he locked dutifully each time he replenished the basket hung around his neck.

To make a living on this job one mustered every possible talent and there was just no place for trust nohow. The newsie knew full well that it was an unfortunate train crew that went without fresh cream in their coffee (if you will remember all those milk cans mentioned earlier in this story). These were rarely locked for the (shall we use the word?) "loan" was never sufficiently high enough to affect the dairyman's monthly earnings.

The news agent was undoubtedly the originator of re-cycling, so popular with the younger generation today. He could sell and resell a single copy of "Elsie's Adventures in the Belfrey" any number of times on a round trip. What farmer who had slyly bought such trash was going to bring it home? So it would be surreptitiously hidden under the seat of the daycoach in which he was riding or among some paper towels. But the nose of the newsie would search it out inexorably and back it would go on sale.

The business training afforded a good student of human nature, the knowledge gained in book-keeping set out by the railway, plus a little business initiative made several newsies known to this writer near millionaires. They played the markets with the same acumen they played their customers!

An instance of business initiative would be a popular custom of loading several crates of eggs on the pilot of the locomotive at the country turn-around point. These would be retrieved quickly at the terminal before the engine left for the roundhouse and sold later in the city at "country prices".

The baggage car was a meeting place for train crews, wandering roadmasters, and assistant superintendents. Here you got to read the train orders and it was where you heard wonderful stories, too!

Like the one about the little man who turned up at the Calgary baggage room and shyly checked a chimpanzee. The animal, a performer in a sideshow at the Stampede, was moving on to another job in Winnipeg. It was in a cage but the owner was concerned because, as he put it, "She gets lonely and raises hell sometimes."

Turned out he was right. Shortly after the train moved out, she reached through the bars and started tearing off every baggage check within reach. Some of these she ate, others she simply distributed generally within the area but leaving the baggageman in a bit of a quandary as to where certain pieces of baggage were destined.

Then the little chimp started to howl and so they called in the trainer who said something along the lines of "I-told-you-so", and resolutely produced an old garden hammock from a battered suitcase. This he hung across the bars in the upper part of the baggage car. He then climbed into the hammock, was joyfully joined by the chimp who put her arms round him and slept peacefully all the way to their destination.

Remains of those who have departed this world are still carried to their resting places in baggage cars and are respectfully handled by everybody. Absolutely nothing is ever placed atop a coffin by baggagemen.

Going the rounds for many years was a story about a trainman. He was always nameless, like so many legends, but he was said to have a better than average ability to throw his voice.

He would be seated beside his conductor at the forward end of the daycoach. Immediately at his back a small room upon whose door was emblazoned the word "Women". Staring innocently straight ahead, he would rap on the back wall with his fist and startled passengers would hear the voice of a man, of all things, crying out for help.

The conductor, in on the gag, of course, would ignore this. Finally, a passenger would come forward to report that there seemed to be someone locked in the room.

The trainman would go through a long, drawn out routine of knocking timidly at the door, unlocking it with his key, slowly opening just a crack, ending with a dramatic swing to reveal nobody there. The unfortunate passenger, none the wiser, would return to his seat with a badly wounded ego.

This same ventriloquist was reputed to have pulled a similar trick when some undertaker's assistants were unloading a coffin from the baggage car in a small Saskatchewan village one evening. As they carried their load to a nearby truck they heard sepulchral groans and cries of "Let me down easy, boys".

What happened is lost in antiquity but there is something real and lasting about the prankster. He has passed this scene now but his name was Trainman Joe Cunningham and there are three living people who bear witness to the truth of these stories.

One is a retired conductor, H.J. Arthur, presently living at Outlook, Saskatchewan, who knew Joe very well and describes him as "one of those people whose personality allowed him to get away with things we would never have dared to try."

A.F. Fryers, superintendent, CP Rail at Moose Jaw, recalls Joe worked the Regina-Colonsay branch for some years prior to his passing on in 1967.

"When trunks or large cases were being unloaded from the baggage car," recalls Mr. Fryers, "it was his favorite pastime to throw his voice and make it appear someone was inside shouting Let me out!"

Retired baggageman A.W. Knisley, now living in Calgary, remembers how Joe would keep young passengers in fits of laughter with his trickery and stories up in the day coach.

Fear of the supernatural lies within all of us. Picture a group of sturdy Calgary baggagemen about to open the door of a baggage car which they know carries no train baggageman, is "loaded with mail and a coffin with remains", according to word they've had in advance from Vancouver. Just as they are about to throw back the door they hear a scratching noise, then a number of regularly spaced thumps.

"Nobody wanted to open the door", recalls baggageman Cyril Stenson, now a member of CP Rail baggage room staff. "Finally someone said, gee whiz, the guy's dead, open the bloody door."

When it was thrown back, there was this little dog, wagging his tail, complete with excess baggage check on his collar, grinning (so it seemed) at the trick he'd played on those great big, gullible, baggage smashers who'd not been notified of the extra occupant of the baggage car out of Vancouver the previous evening.