Day 2
Boredom Modulated by Ethanol
As the title implies, and as a warning, it gets a bit more boring from here. That's good, though, because I can never find much interesting to say about having a nice time, whereas any idiot can write an interesting story about everything going wrong.
If on the first day I learned that trains can start and stop extremely smoothly, on the second day I learned that they also spend a lot of time doing just that. In fact, I awoke to the non-sound of the train not doing anything, especially moving.
Huh. We'd been under way for less than eight hours, and already we were three and a half hours behind schedule. I guess this just goes to show that train people can do some things as well as airlines. On the other hand, three and a half hours delay out of a four day long trip doesn't sound so bad. After all, Northwest airlines once managed to double the length of a trip just by getting me to England five hours late. So, when you consider the total trip time, we weren't doing so badly.
If the timing (or lack thereof) didn't bother me, the frequency of stops at least surprised me a bit. If you've ever commuted via bus, you probably know what it's like to accidentally get on the "Circulator" instead of your usual "Express". Stops every couple of blocks. Not the bus -- the train. It found no end of obscure Canadian places with all sorts of stuff that said "CN" on it.
As for the train itself, being the second day, I got a chance to learn more about trains than I'd had the chance to on the first day. I came into this thing almost completely ignorant of trains. True, I know what they look like (or at least used to look like), and I understand in general that they're land based, long skinny transportation that generally goes where it's told to. "Where it's told to" is defined by the lay of the tracks (the things that hold down all those blocks of wood that you can find in the gardens behind most yuppie households), and the whims of whatever supernatural force controls those switch things we kept running over.
What else? Well, I also know that there's this thing in the front of the train that makes it go and stop, and in the case of passenger trains, there's also this thing in the back that serves alcohol to the people from all the things in the middle.
That's about it, which is what made the whole learning process all the more wondrous to me. For that matter, it also made the learning process all the more depressing at the same time.
I learned that in the modern age of diesel/electric locomotives, the train no longer belches big puffs of black smoke out the front. Instead, it saves up a whole bunch of white smoke or steam that it blasts all over the people standing next to the train stations at all those stops it makes. And, with enclosed passenger cars, it's no longer necessary for the ladyfolk to wear large hats and scarves to keep the cinders out of their hair.
As we rocked along down the track, I learned another neat feature of trains, which is that with the train rocking from side to side like that, I could walk down the hall as drunk as I could get, and no one would be the wiser because I'd be stumbling and falling all over myself like that, even if I was sober, which I usually wasn't.
Well, OK, maybe I didn't drink quite that much, but everyone expects me to say I did, so who am I to dash your expectations?
As I may have mentioned before, most everyone's reaction to our announcement that we were taking the VIA train was that they'd all heard that the whole shebang had been shut down by some fiat of the Mulroney government, which seems to be about as well loved in Canada as, say, Maggie Thatcher is in England, or Dan Quayle would be if Georgie kicked off.
Actually, Mulroney does appear to serve a very important function to most Canadians, and that is to provide someone to hate even more than all those pesky French speaking people.
Well, anyway, most of the people in Canada also thought that Mulroney had shut the thing down, which was a small point of distress for those of us who'd just sunk a couple grand on first class accommodations. It would seem that everyone on the continent has got the message, except for the people running the trains, who only now seem to be catching on.
I guess their first hint was that there have been fewer people showing up at the ticketing windows, and there have been fewer trains to put them on. I suppose if they're unionized like they are in the US, this wouldn't be the sort of thing that would alarm them, anyway.
For we the passengers, though, it could be very depressing. It would start with those grand, larger than life train stations, with virtually no one in them. Go on out to the platform, and there aren't many trains, if any (at least not the kind that have moved in the last year). Look at the monitors or signs for the arrivals and departures, and they've got three months worth of schedule there, just to fill up a single screen-full. Or, they just have a sign saying when THE train arrives or departs.
This is sad. Not sad like pitiful, but just sad like we were just
getting our first glimpses of something when it was already half dead.
When the train got under way, all delays aside, we could and did get a marvelous view of the Canadian countryside. I noticed a couple of themes about that countryside: First off, most of the man made structures say "CN" on them. Second, most of the man made structures which were intended to move at one time or another have a "Canada" logo on them.
I don't know what the former is all about, but I suspect the latter comes from the sort of national inferiority complex that you'd expect from a nation which is considered worldwide to be "Half American". The result is all of these Canada logos, which gives the place a very friendly, cheerful look. Made me sort of happy I came, as if I'd been invited to be a member of the Waltons for a week.
This wouldn't be the first time in my life that I started thinking wistfully of trading my eagles in for maple leaves.
The Maple leaves, by the way, seem to be one small part of a major national dispute (and one that I can't understand well enough to put my finger on), which is all part of everyone hating the Mulroney government, but that's not part of the eagles-for-leaves dream, so I tried to ignore it and hoped that if it does change, it'll just be to get rid of all those French parts.
Sitting on the train, I discovered that we have an implicit "Designated Driver", presumably sitting in that thing up front that made us go. Because of this, I found that I could sit in that thing in the back and get as blotto as I wanted to, and as long as I didn't heave on anything or anyone, no one would get MADD at me. This is a technological advance that I just can't get over. It's better than air travel because there isn't as much turbulence, I had a lot longer to work on getting blotto, and the seats are a lot more comfortable.
Oh yeah, and I could get up to go pee anytime I wanted to, and not have to worry about being blocked by the flight attendant with the dinner trolley in the middle of the aisle. The worst that I had to deal with was coming across someone else in the narrow hallways, rocking and tripping just like I was (whether or not he was also blotto).
Sitting up there in that dome car, we'd get to see a lot of countryside, except when we had to stop at those little bitty stations out in the middle of nowhere, with quaint, small-town names like "Indian Massacre", "Hudson's Bay Trading Company Owned This" or "Gawd it's Flat Here." Part of stopping at those small stations was seeing more of what's happening to Canada's Passenger Rail line.
VIA, the passenger rail service, has not been in existence under that name for very long. Sure, the routes and tracks are a hundred years old or more in some places, but VIA didn't appear as an entity until well after the Canadian government nationalized all the rail systems and started stenciling "CN" all over the entire country.
At a guess, I would say that VIA is about 50 years old, maybe less. The reason I guess that is that's about how old I figure their passenger cars are. However old they really are, it looks like all the ones used on the route we were on were bought in one large batch, and there haven't been any new ones since.
Sure, there are some newer routes, and maybe even newer cars, in the eastern end of the country (you know, the French parts). They seem to call the trains that go on those routes "LRC," which probably stands for something nicer, but sounds a lot to me like "Let's Ride Coach," because there doesn't appear to be a sleeper car on the whole mess. Or a restaurant car, or a dome car.
No dome car??? Where the heck do I get a drink?
Yeah, that whole LRC system looked a whole lot like one big commuter light rail system that didn't have the good sense to keep itself confined to a single metro area.
Anyway, after a lot of stops and seeing all those other trains and train cars on those side tracks (are those what are called "sidings"?), I got some sense for which cars and tracks have been used recently.
It seemed that cars that were moving, or had recently moved, had nice shiny wheels (or at least the parts that came in contact with the tracks were shiny). Same for the tracks: If they were nice and shiny and didn't have weeds and grass growing up the middle of them, they'd probably seen recent action.
We saw a lot of sidings that were bright orange, with all sorts of as-yet unclassified vegetation which had taken up homesteads in the cracks in the ties. Sitting on top of these bright orange tracks would often be train cars with bright orange wheels, and mostly decayed outsides.
Some of them would have antennas on top with wiring coming out of the side, connected to nearby phone poles. These had obviously been converted to office or living space. Not so depressing.
What was depressing was all the relics: Cars that were just returning to their base elements, sitting on top of track that perhaps was more base element than track, judging from the way you almost couldn't see it. These were large pieces of waste that were so unwanted that no one could even see clear to haul them to the landfill or sell them to a developer for the latest in Chic restaurant decor.
Something struck me as being inherently wrong if they could take that track, that was so laboriously laid with such great expense of money and human life, just to use it as a place to leave derelict cars that no one in the government had the time or money to find a proper disposition for.
Sure, if you're dealing with a hundred year old railroad, then you're going to generate a lot of garbage, some of which will be a hundred years old. The trouble was that a lot of these cars looked to be a lot more recent than that. Definitely of this century. Probably of this quarter century. Perhaps of the last decade.
What was still more depressing was seeing VIA cars discarded like this. I could have almost cried when I saw one VIA car being used as a huge, trackside garbage can.
All the recently torn up track we saw was just frosting on the cake. I felt sort of ashamed that we came so late. But, for this day, it was the most wonderful way of overland travel that I'd ever found.
Sometime just before lunch, we eventually got to a stop at Capreol, which we should have been to and left before I even woke up. Since I forgot to get film before we left home, I decided it would be nice to get off the train and see if I could scare up some film at a general store or something. We were supposed to have a half hour stop-over at the station, so I figured that I could just pop into the station and see if there was some film on sale somewhere around town.
Unfortunately, this town was so small, it was lucky to have a train station that had an inside, much less an information booth or gift/film shop. Still, I asked about a nearby general store at the ticketing window, and was directed to someplace about five minutes walk up the road from the station. What they didn't mention to me was that since it was Sunday, the store wouldn't be open. We just didn't realize that until we'd been there and back.
When we got back to the train, we got a rather stern lecture from one of the porters that the train was behind schedule, and that they weren't going to have the full (scheduled) 45 minute layover, and that by going into town, we could have very well been stranded in that town when the train rushed out of the station in its attempt to catch make up for some of the lost time.
We meekly skulked back to the room and fell asleep for about 40 minutes before we woke up and found that we hadn't left the station yet. Yeah, we were really back on schedule now...
Shortly after we woke, they called the first seating for lunch, which sounded just fine to us. I had a not-too-bad shrimp salad sandwich and Robert had a pretty good omelet. We shared the table with two other unrelated people, and compared notes on how screwed up our ticketing was. I guess we were the only ones who got that sort of treatment.
One of our lunchmates was a Canadian resident who, like the Canadian in my office, tried to convince me that Edmonton (the first major stop on our vacation) is about the most horrible place on the continent.
After lunch, I did what was to become a pattern of behavior for the whole trip: I'd fidget around in the room for a while until I went stir crazy, then go up to the dome car and get a seat in the upstairs lounge. I'd stay there for as long as I could stay awake, say 15 minutes, then when I re-awoke, I'd go back to the room where I could sleep without poaching valuable dome car seats. Of course, by the time I got back to the room, I wouldn't be tired anymore.
I also drank a lot while I was up there in the dome car, which is probably why I kept falling asleep. I'd had some romantic idea that I'd spend the whole trip in the dome car, sucking down sissy frozen drinks from the bar below. Unfortunately, this idea was a bit out of line since there really weren't any chances for a well stocked bar on a train. What they had was about what you'd get on a plane. That left scotch and water or a diet pop.
Sometime after lunch, when I'd fallen asleep up in the dome car for the second or third time, I was awakened by the porter (the one I complained to about the still wet floor in our room), who was handing me a note which contained the room number that he'd moved all our stuff to, and which thankfully had a dry floor.
Well, you know, that's pretty much the whole day right there. I went up to the dome car, maybe had a drink, and fell asleep a lot. I was pretty stressed out before we went on this vacation, and the first day wasn't any vacation either, so this was me starting to catch up on all my lost sleep, and cooling out for a change.
There was a little more than that to it, though. For starters, I gave myself a pretty good cramp in my right hand trying to write my first day's exploits in longhand, because I was too dumb to locate a laptop computer to take notes with. Messed my hand up so bad that after a while, I couldn't even operate a bottle of scotch anymore, which as you know, was a very important part of this vacation.
We also had dinner (delicious Rainbow Trout) with a couple from England who were ex-computer professionals moving to Vancouver to become freelance artists and/or journalists. Sort of interesting people.
For the few short minutes that I happened to be simultaneously
awake and in the dome car, I did get to see a bit of scenery as well. I can
probably hear the sighs of relief, because this is probably the part that
everyone's been waiting for. Well, I don't know what I can say to help you
visualize the scenery, or even do any justice to it, because I'm only good at
describing things that piss me off, and the scenery didn't. Anyway, this was the
part of Canada (really Ontario) between Toronto and That Big Flat Part. The
terrain was still sort of part of the Appalachians and looked an awful lot like
New England.
Well, not entirely, because unlike Massachusetts, Ontario doesn't seem to have gotten around to taxing the crap out of the wildlife yet. There were millions of dollars worth of loons all over the place, lots of ducks bobbing around in the swamps, and lots of swamps that looked like they were created by the beavers, who probably all lived in those beaver lodges in all those swamps.
Either we caught this just as all the spring runoff had melted, or things were a bit deeper than usual, because we saw a lot of things that were semi- submerged that didn't look like they were used to being submerged. Fortunately, the train tracks were not included in this collection, so I at least slept easy about that.
On to day 3, and not surprisingly, more boredom.
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