By Nancy Dorrance
with photography by Bernard Clark
James Parker’s retirement plans sound suspiciously like a “busman’s holiday.” An expert in driverless, computer-controlled rail systems, he and his wife, Julie, look forward now to “doing a lot of train travel in Canada and abroad,” he says.
“It’s actually my wife who’s the keen one,” laughs Jim. “But I’m fine with it too.” The Kingston couple recently travelled from Vancouver to Toronto by train and thoroughly enjoyed it, he says. “That’s what really triggered Julie.”
Growing up in the back streets of Belfast, Jim had little opportunity for such holiday getaways. “It was a small Protestant enclave, totally surrounded by Catholics, so there was continual tension,” he recalls. That tension became “particularly bad” when the Troubles started in 1969, and it was only a year later that he and Julie immigrated to Canada.
As a boy, Jim played a lot of street hockey with three friends from elementary school. All four boys were good students as well and got “bumped up” a year, then passed an exam enabling them to attend grammar school, in preparation for university. Jim did well at maths and sciences, but his best subject was Latin. “I aced it,” he recalls happily. “It just seemed to come naturally to me.” His good grades flew under the radar of Jim’s parents, however — even when he won the final year math prize in grammar school. . . .
