Trip Report: May 3 - 18, 2001
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
Through the Pacific Northwest and Canada
by Amtrak, BC Rail and VIA Rail Canada
TORONTO WESTBOUND ON THE CANADIAN
May 12, 2001: Toronto Union Station is crowded with passengers boarding the Canadian. This is the same consist, with the same crew, that we rode with yesterday. Today, however, we have a regular double bedroom instead of the coveted, more spacious drawing room.
Boarding the classic Canadian, one feels an immediate sense of tradition. The stainless-steel streamliner is solid, with hooks and locks that were made to last, and have for forty eight years! Our Bedroom E in car 136 is smaller than an Amtrak deluxe bedroom. It has a washbasin in the room and an enclosed toilet. Each sleeping car has its own shower room with a dressing room. The inconvenience of going down the hall is offset by the advantage that your toilet compartment doesn't have wet walls and floor after your shower, as it would in the Amtrak deluxe bedroom shower.
The upper and lower bunks are full twin-sized, with real, thick mattresses that put us to sleep the minute we hit the pillow. And, since we were up past 1 AM last night making bookings for some clients, we ask our porter, or "service attendant," Alan, to make up our beds so we can catch up on our sleep. After a three-hour nap, we are ready to enjoy the food, scenery, and camaraderie of the train.
Although we are traveling through the same Canadian Shield country that we saw yesterday, it looks entirely different today under sunny skies. The exposed bedrock is the earth's original crust. There are thin pockets of soil here, and a mixed forest of conifers and deciduous trees covers much of it. Where glaciers have scooped out depressions, there are lakes of all sizes and shapes. Most are completely untouched by human habitation; a few have cabins and boats. There are areas of muskeg, or boggy meadows, dotted with beaver dams.
At lunch today, we enjoy the smoked salmon Caesar salad again, we are still not tired of it. As we are in the third sitting again, and meet a young couple from Moncton, New Brunswick, who are taking the train all the way across and back to visit Victoria. Although he is a young man, he has taken an early enforced retirement from the Canadian National Railroad Communications Department. He tells us that in a ten year period, the number of employees on the CN was reduced from 80,000 to 20,000. He is traveling on a pass, but must pay for his sleeping car accomodations.
There are 27 cars in our consist today, not counting the three engines at the point. Since each car is 85 feet in length, our train is about 2,500 feet in length, including he locomotives, or nearly a half a mile. There is a passenger reading his book in the front seat of Strathcona Park (isn't this always the case?), but when he leaves for a few minutes, we move up and enjoy gazing at our silvery train winding around the endless S-curves of Shield Country. Due to the length of the train we can rarely see the engines, even with all the curves, as they are obscured by the forests or the rocky cuts.
Once, on a long sweeping curve on the shore of a vast lake, we can see the entire length of the train, including the three General Motors FP-40's. This route is not only curvy, but undulating, and we can follow the undulations along the roof line of the cars ahead as we go into and out of dips and rises in the track ahead. We can only wonder at the ingenuity of the original surveyors and builders as they forced their way through this inhospitable country.
Unlike the Canadian National through the Rockies, which has been recently double tracked, this line is single track with many passing sidings, and freight train meets are frequent, mostly long lines of double stacked containers.
We answer the call to dinner and sit with a couple from Halifax who are also traveling across and back to visit Victoria. He doesn't fly at all. Tonight I enjoy an excellent corn meal breaded pan fried fish entrée, with home made pea soup, followed by a macadamia cheese cake and herbal tea. Just sitting in this diner is a pleasure with its spanking new blue table linen
and its 1954 etched glass partitions.
A hot shower and back to bed, setting our clocks back one hour, so we can have our first 25 hour day.
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