HINTON - Colin Hanington followed a plume of smoke to reach one of the deadliest railway crashes in Canadian history, and almost 40 years later remembers the silence when he got there.

Railway fossil fuels once helped to turn King's Cross and St Pancras into a seamy, smoke-choked area of London. Now, in the two grandly redeveloped stations with their swanky plazas, even a dropped paper ticket would look out of place.