To Hear the Whistle Blow: Technology and Politics on the Battle River Branch Line

Abstract

This article studies an attempt to establish a cooperative short-line railroad in central Alberta farm country, and examines the manner in which struggles over technological change establish key sites for political judgment and action, the formation of political subjectivity and the re-imagination of citizenship and community in the Canadian countryside. Drawing on extensive interviews with farmers, the case is situated in the context of the history of grain-handling on the Prairies, the recent closure of country elevators and railway branch lines, and the struggle to maintain community-based alternatives to centralized grain-handling. The technologies of grain-handling are treated as unconventional media that structure temporal and spatial experience—and political possibility—on the Prairies.