Skip to main content
passion projects

Les Kozma, at the CN train trestle which was first built in 1906 in St. Albert, Alta., is a senior project manager with Ledcor and a railway enthusiast.Codie McLachlan for The Globe and Mail

The train whistle is a siren call, a haunting note reaching out to the romantic, the traveller, the poet. There is no feeling on Earth like that of standing beside a train as it rumbles its massive weight down a railway line, feeling the movement of goods, people and history. These sensations are transporting in every sense of the word.

Les Kozma, a project director with international construction firm Ledcor, remembers that feeling from his earliest days. His father moved the family out of Budapest during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution in which the Soviet empire crushed Hungarian democracy. The family, with three-year-old Les in tow, ended up on the north side of Edmonton (which, back then, in the early winter, probably didn't look much different than parts of Soviet-controlled Budapest).

The family landed in the Calder/Lauderdale area of north Edmonton, which sits hard against the rail yards that even today act as the city's main hub for rail freight moving east and west. It's a busy area and Mr. Kozma remembers well the excitement of being around the trains.

"I would watch them for hours every day," says Mr. Kozma. "Then I'd draw pictures of them back at home. I was fascinated! My dad was a goldsmith, but he came from a railway town and loved trains and he was always telling me things about them. By the time I was in school, I was collecting information, watching the trains, identifying them, learning things about them. I guess you could say I was obsessed."

After high school, Mr. Kozma graduated from architecture at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology, then worked as an independent construction project director for many years. In 2000, he joined Ledcor, one of the largest companies in Western Canada, a construction firm with dozens of offices around the world (though founded just outside Edmonton, its head office is now in Vancouver).

Today, Mr. Kozma oversees a huge variety of projects and teams of managers and surveyors, and he liaises with architects and owners. He is the guy who, pardon the pun, makes the trains run on time.

But he recalls that it was during his years at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology that things got serious with trains, even though he was studying architecture. He took a summer English course in 1974 and for his main essay decided to write about the world of trains. He got a good grade on the paper, A Brief History of Railway Stations in Alberta, and somehow Alberta Historical Sites heard about the paper. They asked him to put out a full report on the subject, which he completed a few years later.

"Oh, it was awful," he laughs. "But that's really where it all started. Then in 1979, the railway historian Charles Bohi put out his book Canadian National Western Depots. I reviewed it for the Alberta Pioneer Railway Association."

That was a turning point for Mr. Kozma. In that review, he pulled no punches.

"It was a very good book," he says, "but I felt that I had to point out a few things that I thought were not exactly mistakes but that could have made the book better. Well, a while after that review came out, I got a call one day, and it was Chuck Bohi! He said to me, 'Are you the guy who reviewed my book?' I told him I was. And he said, 'Okay, it was a good review and you made some good points, so here's my idea … how would you like to collaborate with me on my next book?'"

Mr. Kozma accepted the offer. Skip a few decades ahead and he and Mr. Bohi are best of friends and often travel together to various parts of rural Western Canada to document rail history. "But what we do that's different," says Mr. Kozma, "is that Chuck and I go to these places. We see them, touch them, smell them. I love to be near one of those old stations like the Meeting Creek station south of Camrose, [Alta.,] and just imagine the work that went into building the structure, the busyness of the place during its peak, the people that must have passed through there."

This fascination with the tangible elements of our rail history has led Mr. Kozma to publish more than 100 articles and write four books (co-authored with Mr. Bohi). He's also been instrumental in the operations of the Canadian Northern Society, a non-profit volunteer-run organization that has preserved various depots and stations in rural and small-town Alberta, such as the Meeting Creek station, in Meeting Creek, Alta., about 50 kilometres south of Camrose. (Mr. Kozma is also a director of the Canadian Railway Hall of Fame.)

"Meeting Creek is a gorgeous little station," says Mr. Kozma, his grin evidence of his love for it. "It's just spectacular, with the building and the grain elevator we preserved, too. It's who we are. I can't remember who said it, but I once heard someone say of Canada that other countries built railroads, but railroads built Canada. We can't lose the tangible evidence of that."

I asked Mr. Kozma if he considers himself a historian, and if so, what genre. Social historian? "I like that," he says. "Yes, because we think about the time and the people and the community and the work that went into building every structure. For sure, we're not foamers or rivet-counters."

My expression must have indicated my confusion. Mr. Kozma laughed. "A foamer is someone who gets so excited they can't see clearly; they foam at the mouth. A rivet-counter is someone who just considers numbers and nothing else."

Mr. Kozma's current project might just be his most ambitious yet. He's writing about the historic railroads that went west of Edmonton toward the Rockies, specifically the Grand Trunk line built in 1914 and the Canadian Northern in 1915. "What's fascinating," says Mr. Kozma, "is the war effort was on and they needed railstock for the front line at the Somme. The U.K. asked the Dominion to provide it, so they consolidated huge chunks of those two lines and sent the rest of it overseas."

This project, entitled Parallel Lines, will, says Mr. Kozma, "hopefully" be completed by next year. His ready grin surfaces again. "My basement is already a repository. I can hardly move down there. I'd better finish by next year."

So where do all these tracks lead for Mr. Kozma? He shrugs. "To me, it's really just about appreciating and documenting the effort that went into building our country. Especially now with so many things being digitized, the actual record of how we made things is starting to disappear. But I like to see things, feel things, smell things. Our culture is too disposable, but I want to help people appreciate how things came to be what they are."

A huge job, to be sure. Luckily Les Kozma the project manager has some experience at keeping things on track.

Interact with The Globe