Feb. 8, 1986 is a day Wendy Shevalier and her family will never forget.
Fast asleep in her bed, the 19-year-old was woken by her younger brother shortly before 9 a.m. with news that changed their lives forever.
Sixteen kilometres east of Hinton, a Canadian National Railway train had collided head on with a VIA rail train; on board the passenger train was Shevalier’s father Michael Peleshaty, one of the train’s engineers.
“It was devastating,” recalled Shevalier.
“You didn’t know what was going on, but there’s always hope that it wasn’t as bad as you thought and everybody would survive, but...” she said trailing off.
“He went to work and never came home.”
Peleshaty was one of 23 people who lost their lives that day in an accident that remains one of Canada’s worst rail disasters in history. He left behind four children and his wife.
To commemorate the tragic event and remember those who lost their lives, a plaque was unveiled outside the Hinton Museum Monday, exactly 30 years from the day of the accident.
Shevalier’s daughter, who is 14 years old, laid a red rose in honour of the grandfather she never met.
“Our dad was a wonderful father. He was very involved in the community,” said Shevalier.
“Not only did we lose our dad, but the community lost their hockey coach and a lot of railroaders lost their mentor.”
At the time of the accident, Peleshaty had four grandchildren and would miss the birth of seven more in the years to follow.
“We try to instill his legacy into these kids and remember what he was about,” Shevalier explained.
“The train crash, even though that’s how he died, it’s not how we choose to remember him.”
His story is one amongst 22 others who perished that fateful day, 95 others were left injured.
“The whole community was affected,” said Shevalier. “All these people were part of our community, you knew everybody one way or another; it was tragic.”
Of the 23 people who died, six were from Jasper, including Mary Burdeyney, John “Jack” Hudson, Mark Edwards, Emil Miller, Byron Moore and Peleshaty.
To commemorate the event in Jasper, the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives held a special coffee hour to talk about the accident and share personal stories. Laid out on the table were dozens of newspaper clippings about the accident and pictures of those who lost their lives.
“It touched so many people in this town,” said Karen Byers, of the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives.
“Jasper is a railroad town first and foremost. I bet if you ask anyone who was here at that time they can tell you exactly what they were doing that day when they heard the news.”
Following the accident, a commission of inquiry, lead by Justice René P. Foisy, was set up to investigate the cause of the crash.
In a bid to get answers and help the inquiry, Shevalier and her siblings put together an open letter urging CN employees to come forward with any information they might have.
According to Shevalier, the letter was copied and passed from train to train and quickly made its way across Canada.
“Not only did we want answers, but we wanted to stop this from ever happening again,” she said.
The inquiry eventually concluded that the CN employees ignored signals to stop and failed to “follow established railway operating rules.” It also condemned CN’s “railroader” culture that ignored safety regulations, which were beefed up in the aftermath of the crash.
Despite implementing several new safety measures, Shevalier still questions whether enough has been done in the last 30 years, pointing to the Lac-Mégantic rail disaster, which killed 47 people and destroyed a large portion of the town’s downtown core in 2013.
“Things are much better, however, there are still people dying out there,” she said.
“Why are these people still dying? What did they learn from the train accident? We hoped something could be learned.”
Paul Clarke
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