Last summer, I noticed that I would occasionally hear the sounds of a motor running well after 2am in the morning. It sounded like a two-stroke engine, something you’d hear from a minibike or something similar. It sounded like something that shouldn’t be regularly on the road because no car or motorcycle made a noise like that. I’d go on my balcony and then look at the surrounding streets but couldn’t see anything that might be the source of the motor. I thought that some dude was ripping around the street on a little minibike. That summer, I heard the weird noise a few more times and each time, I never saw where it was coming from.
Last week, I heard the motor again, for the first time this year. Once again, I went on my balcony to take a look. This time around, I didn’t look at streets but at the Skytrain tracks near my building. It turns out that the motor noise was coming from the diesel-powered maintenance vehicle that runs along the track when Skytrain service ends for the night and portions of the track are de-energized. I was hearing the maintenance vehicle as it passed my location as it did work on the tracks.
Solving life’s other mysteries can’t be far behind now!