Childhood Trains
What is it about train travel that inspires music and memory? And why do people tend to confess their innermost thoughts once they get on board?
2006 / Sandy Thacker / Steve Wadhams / In Your Ear / Ideas, CBC, Canada

What is it about train travel that inspires music and memory? And why do people tend to confess their innermost thoughts once they get on board?
These mysteries are deftly explored in "Childhood Trains" through sound and a cast of "riders" including an 85-year-old ex-railway man, a 10-year-old train fanatic, and a writer searching for reconciliation with the father she never knew.
Credits: Sally Crooks, Bill Barr, Kinsey Posen, David Siemens, and the late Lou Greenburg. John Buchanan played the part of Tom Anderson. Music was from the CD Machine Works by Ian Tamblyn. Train sounds came from Edmund Eagan's CD The Sonic Ambiences of Eastern Ontario Trains.
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Sandy Thacker is a CBC music producer based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Her instruments are piano, oboe, english horn, and bagpipes of various kinds. When she's not recording chamber music, orchestras, and soloists, Sandy likes to make radio features for programs such as Shaken Not Stirred, Tapestry and In Performance. In 2006 Thacker was chosen to take part in In Your Ear, a documentary making/mentoring bootcamp led by Steve Wadhams of CBC's Outfront.

Born in England, Steve Wadhams was a producer at the BBC before moving to Canada in 1974 to join the CBC program As it Happens.