Final report of the great Canadian train trip

Saturday May 30, 2009

On the last morning of our train trip we woke up in Hope, BC. Before arriving in Vancouver we had breakfast on the train. Two women came to the dining room wearing matching pajamas with snow-globe designs. It must have been a dare.

This was our first view of the morning, in Hope.

Before long we were into the flat farmland of the Fraser Valley.

Glenn says this is the Pattullo Bridge. Below it then would be the Fraser River Bridge, which I believe we crossed on that first moonlit evening of our trip. By the way, when Glenn was 16, Pat Carey (Canadian Airways pilot) and he flew under the Pattullo Bridge in a Waco biplane on floats. Crazy.

One day I came home from work to find this nice surprise from Glenn. :-)

All in all it was wonderful trip with lots of variety. If we had just taken the train trip east, I would have said it was a great experience but it wasn't as good coming back. They never did get our sink and tap fixed. So, expect to have plumbing problems on Via Rail, but also expect good food. The food was the star of the show on the train.

The only real disappointment of the trip for me was that I didn't get to see a cardinal, but that's pretty minor as compared to all the wonderful memories. We were quite lucky with the weather.

The End!

Trip report continues - West through Jasper

Friday May 29, 2009

Since some people are leaving the train in Jasper, which we should reach about noon, breakfast is being handled differently today. Instead of breakfast beginning at 6:30, there will be a continental breakfast in the dome car and a brunch beginning at 7:30. No lunch. So at 6:30 we trekked down to the dome car for coffee but the pot was empty. Good news was that there were packets of Honey Nut Cheerios for Glenn and there was one banana left. Before long others came looking for coffee and once the attendant reappeared he brought another pot. We heard a lot of complaints from passengers mainly about the lack of water and the cold. I don't know if I mentioned before that normally you each get a bottle of water in your cabin every night but they ran out after the first night. What - they couldn't send somebody out for water during their four hour stop in Winnipeg, or any of their other stops?

Anyway, at brunch Glenn had bacon, eggs and toast and I had waffles with berries. Sat with the man from Squamish again and a humourous Chinese fellow from Vancouver.

We passed a pond with a large beaver house which would have been easy to photograph if I'd been ready with the camera. In fact, we passed many beaver houses and I never got a picture of one. It became sort of a joke with the people around us in the dome car when I'd miss house after house. Even with the camera on and ready to go, by the time you see something and get the camera focused it's too late.

For over an hour we sat by a lake west of Edmonton, blue in the sunshine, waiting for a freight train to pass. Freight trains take precedence. I'm not sure if the one we sat by for so long was Lake Wabamun - once used for float plane landing practice by the Royal Canadian Air Force, or Mink Lake. Some docks and boats line the shores of the lake. Mostly blue sky, high cloud. Red-winged blackbirds periodically visit the small fir tree out our window. I can't hear them calling but can tell they are when their wings and tail feathers fluff out.

An announcement came on asking people to limit their time in the dome cars to half an hour. Reading, dozing, viewing, it can be easy to sit in there for hours. No doubt those cars will be packed once we get into the mountains.

Apparently the tracks were being cut ahead, whatever that means, and we had to stop for more freight trains. We are now two hours behind schedule for getting into Jasper.

Mountain sheep

We saw three black bears, one quite small, elk and mountain sheep.

There seemed to be not much snow around Jasper, but then the mountains seem flatter and less spectacular than down around Banff, I think. It is interesting though to see the rock formations.

There was some snow

Views in & around Jasper

Hooray they're finally cleaning the windows and we'll be able to see better for the rest of the journey through BC.

And we're on our way although we were delayed so long that there isn't much daylight left.

Above left: These are the new concrete ties that are replacing the old wooden ties.
Right: According to Glenn, the silver structure contains equipment which monitors the condition of the freight car wheels and detects "hot boxes" when axles are overheating and transmits warnings to the trains engineer.

We had supper with a lady from a small town in BC and a man from a different small town. They weren't together. She was a crusty older lady who had done a fair amount of cross-country horseback riding in the interior BC. She left the table before dessert and then the man, who had barely said a word up to that point, slowly began to open up. We found out that he had retired from the railway and had lost his wife a year and a half ago. So he seemed a bit sad and at loose ends, but was such a sweet soul that I wish we'd met him earlier in the trip. He was departing well before Vancouver to visit his son at a place on a lake.

Glenn and I had chicken with scalloped potatoes and we shared a cheesecake dessert.

Winnipeg & heading west

Thursday May 28, 2009

Back on the train, we were dismayed but not entirely surprised that our tap and drain had not been fixed. During the 4 hour stop in Winnipeg there was a change of crews. Thank goodness. This group seems a little more on the ball than the last one. I felt sorry for them having to pick up the pieces from the last bunch. The new service manager already showed promise when he knocked on our door, checked out the situation and apologized. They would try again tomorrow in Jasper. He offered us a bottle of wine but since we don't drink, he suggested a vest, which we picked up for Glenn later. It's quite nice.

And so, at around noon, we say goodbye to "The Peg".

* * * * *

Somewhere in Manitoba

A trestle in Uno, in Manitoba's Assiniboine Valley

We should be into Saskatchewan around dinnertime. An interesting tidbit about Melville, Saskatchewan: It was named for the president of the Grand Trunk Pacific, Charles Melville Hays, which makes you wonder why they didn't name the town Hays. The railway tended to name its stations in alphabetical order between division points. But I think Melville is a division point so presumably it could have had any name. Anyway, he had been in England to promote the railway but died on the Titanic.

At our dinner table was a German man who didn't speak much English and a fellow from Squamish who was retired after working for a railway. We passed by many boxes in fields and were told they were for bees for the canola they grow here. Not much growing yet but the fields now had a slightly green tinge that was not there a couple of weeks ago.

Another time change on this night, going back one hour.

The train trip home

Tuesday May 26, 2009

Now we're in the Toronto train station waiting to board our train. Same train company (Via Rail), mostly the same route, so you might think one train trip is the same as any other. But here things were different.

Unlike in Vancouver, we had to load our own bags. Retrieved them and checked in at one counter, then had to proceed to another counter to book lunch and dinner seatings. Out of Vancouver we just did this in the dining car at breakfast. We chose first seatings at 11:00 and 5:00. Waited in lounge which was packed. Boarding was done at two gates depending on car number. Everyone had to pile onto an escalator. It was a madhouse.

Train left at 10:07 pm. It went for a while, then stopped and backed up quite a distance. We don't know why.We were in the larger cabin F again, this time in the Draper car, just in front of the Park Car again.

There were a few problems with this cabin. It was freezing cold with cold air blasting out the vent. Glenn mentioned this a couple of times to our room attendant who got us blankets and claimed he turned the heat up. I was so cold that I sat in my chair with the blanket right over my head. After complaining a few times, Glenn went in search of the person in charge but they managed to remain invisible. He eventually became quite angry and threatened to leave the train. On our way outside during a stop in Hornpayne he mentioned the problem to another employee and she said she would cover the vent with cardboard and tape if need be. When we came back, no cardboard was to be seen but the room was warmer so something had been done. The temperature control was an issue in the dome car too as people couldn't sit comfortably for long. Either it was too warm and stuffy or it was like a meat locker. There were a lot of complaints on this trip and this crew in general was a dud.

The other problem in our cabin was that our sink barely drained and the hot water tap spewed water out the back, leaving pools of water around the rim of the sink. It was that way from the moment we arrived. So much for doing a little clothes washing in the sink. You can imagine how charming it was to brush your teeth and then have the water sit there in the basin. We were told that this would be fixed during the long stop in Winnipeg on Thursday morning. We couldn't switch cabins because the train was full.

The problem sink

Canada by train

This shows the route we'll be taking by train between Vancouver and Quebec City. (Click on map to enlarge.) It's too bad we can't make that extra 'hop' over to Halifax on the east coast, but that is another 18 hour train trip from Quebec City, one way.