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If you’re lucky enough to live in Vancouver or a place with a similar climate, you’re starting to see the cherry blossoms bloom. Vancouverites look forward to this time of year as our city is home to many cherry trees. According to the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival, the trend for planting cherry trees started in Vancouver in the early 1930’s when the mayors of Kobe and Yokohama donated 500 cherry trees to be planted in Vancouver, to honour Japanese Canadians who fought in WWI.

To honour this time of year, our featured photograph for the month of April shows cherry blossoms in Tokyo:

This photograph, like many from the Chung Collection depicting international scenes, is part of a scrapbook kept by world travelers on the Canadian Pacific Railway lines. These particular travelers took both the Empress of India steamship throughout Asia, and a train tour in North America. You can see in the bottom right corner that the photograph was distributed commercially and sold to travelers for their photograph album- this was common practice before owning a camera for your personal use became common. This album was assembled in 1910.

To check out good cherry blossom viewing and related events in Vancouver, be sure to check the Vancouver Cherry Blossom Festival website!

Have you come to visit us at the Chung Collection lately? If you have, you will have noticed one of our new additions- a model locomotive, built by a former CPR Engineer as a retirement hobby project and given to Dr. Chung several years ago:

We think it’s pretty neat! We have had great feedback from visitors already. It’s a very nice companion to the model Empress of Asia steamship, which has long been the “centrepiece” of the exhibition.

This new addition to the collection got me to thinking about CPR locomotives, and how photographs from the Chung Collection can really be used to show the evolution of train locomotives over time. Take our new model in contrast, for example, to this photograph from ca. 1890:

What a difference! The model is of a K1a-class locomotive, which were in use from around 1930-1950’s. If you know what kind of locomotive is depicted in this photograph we’d love to hear from you- leave a comment, or email us at chung.collection@ubc.ca

To search for more images of locomotives, search for “locomotive” under Photographic Material, or more broadly for “train.”