Trip Report: May 3 - 18, 2001
by Ted & Sylvia Blishak
Through the Pacific Northwest and Canada
by Amtrak, BC Rail and VIA Rail Canada
MAY 10, 2001 DAY 2 ON THE CANADIAN
A ray of sun bursts into our room at 6:15 AM. We arise and dress for 6:30 breakfast. The Skyline car has only last night's coffee. The dining car is closed. We are informed this morning that we had been misinformed last night, the time does not change until later in the day, so it is only 5:30 and breakfast will not start for another hour. How could we be so confused, we both heard the dining car waitress warn us to adjust our watches last night? We had checked the timetable, and Central Time began at Unity, Saskatchewan at 2314 last night. Finally we find the footnote on page 100 of the Via timetable:
Note: As the Province of Saskatchewan does not observe Daylight Saving Time, schedules are shown one hour later.
Now, what does this mean? Finally my foggy, caffeine free brain realizes that when you set your watch ahead one hour for Central Time, but then set it back one hour because there is no Daylight Savings Time, it is still the same time when you finish your adjustments as it was before. I am not surprised that some of the crew members are confused by this, I certainly am, and the other passengers showing up for breakfast certainly are. So we just go back to our room for another nap.
Breakfast, when it is finally served at 6:30 AM Saskatchewan Central Standard Time, is delicious. We have a fruit cup, a ham, cheese, and mushroom omelet, and coffee. We sit with a retired physician from Charlottesville, VA, who had taken Amtrak to Miami and a Panama Canal cruise to Vancouver. He planned this trip himself, and mentioned 40-foot swells along the California coast that delayed his ship's arrival in Vancouver. He then traveled on the Rocky Mountaineer to Calgary, then took a Greyhound bus to Edmonton where he boarded the Canadian. This is a routing that I never would have thought of, particularly since he could have detrained in Banff, taken a Brewster Tours bus connection through the Rockies, and then boarded Via in Jasper. The route he took through the plains and ranchlands was rather short on scenery.
Greyhound would not be our recommendation, but is sometimes unavoidable, as Greyhound operates the Amtrak Thruway service from his home town to Washington D.C., and when he checked in at the Charlottesville Amtrak Station, he was told to go to the Greyhound station as "the bus sometimes forgets to stop at Amtrak." Also, they will not accept checked baggage on Greyhound, so he had to schlep his baggage to the bus, then from the upper level bus stop in Washington Union Station, where the elevators were out of order, to the lower level Amtrak baggage room.
I have been writing in my room since breakfast and did not hear the 1st call to lunch. I do however, hear the arrival announcement for Winnipeg. We are running late, and while we are due at 11:10 AM, we actually get in about 11:30 AM. I have given up trying to figure out what time it is, but when I get inside the terminal, I set my watch by the station clock at 11:40 AM. Now that we are in Manitoba, we are on Central Daylight Savings Time. Is anyone confused other than me? I leave my laptop set to Pacific Daylight Savings Time, and that is two hours behind me now. Here in Winnipeg I receive and send e-mail at the office of Yves Coulombe, Regional Trainer in the Business Development and Corporate Affairs Department. He arranges for me to do the same on Sunday when we return to Winnipeg, then introduces me to our new Service Manager as we check in to reboard.
Travel Tip: There is a complete crew change here in Winnipeg, so if you want to give your car attendant a gratuity, do so before arrival. We recommend tipping in the dining car after each meal. While food prices are included in your Silver & Blue first-class ticket cost, gratuities are not.
After walking about at Winnipeg, I am really ready for lunch, and go to the diner only to be told that they cannot serve now because they are loading food. "We will make a call for lunch when we are ready," I am told, "Wait in the lounge car." I wait in the dome of the Skyline lounge car, along with several other passengers wanting lunch. We pull away from the platform at 1 PM, fifty minutes behind schedule, then stop again after a couple of hundred feet. Here the dome windows are washed and the trash tossed off the train. This takes about thirty minutes.
I am still waiting for the next call for lunch as we pull out of the station at 1:30 PM. At 1:45 one of the passengers, tiring of the wait, checks out the diner and comes back to report that there will be a one and a half hour wait. I go back to the diner myself to find it full. They suggest that if we are really so hungry that we cannot wait, to go back to our room and order room service. Either that or wait until 3 o'clock when they will make a last call. We have had an appetite since noon. If we did not hear the first call and the second call, I wonder if I would hear the last call?
We walk back to our room. Our Service Attendant is not in her room and we ring the call button without result. Walking through the next car I meet another porter who offers to find ours. After a few minutes our porter arrives at our room with the Service Manager. I am interested in how to advise our clients as to the best way to obtain lunch in the dining car, as we had been unable to do so. He said lunch is not easy when he has to feed 100 passengers in a 48 seat diner, announcements are made throughout the train, and he did not know why we could not hear them. He suggested also that we might wait in the Skyline lounge next to the diner and wait for the call there. He further suggested that if we were unhappy with the service in the diner we could get lunch delivered to our room, and he would even include a bottle of wine.
Actually I was only hungry and curious, but now I was getting a little annoyed with myself for feeling guilty that I was so incompetent that I had missed lunch in the diner. I decided that there was nothing to be gained by continuing this conversation with the Service Manager, and asked our Attendant to deliver lunch to our room, which she did, and very graciously too. We might do it again tomorrow.
A drawing room is the premium accommodation on Via Rail. Normally there is only one drawing room on the Canadian, in the Park series observation cars, but demand for accommodations on this train is so high that Via Rail is moving Chateau series cars from their Atlantic service to fulfill the needs. On our consist we have three Chateau series sleepers on as well as the usual Manor series. The Manor series has three sections, six bedrooms, and four roomettes. The Chateau series has three sections, three bedrooms, one drawing room, and eight roomettes. (Thus the total number of drawing rooms on today's train is four.) The drawing room has a full width sofa and two folding chairs, plus a washbasin and an enclosed lavatory. At night there are two lower berths, and a third upper berth is available if there are three passengers in your party. We have the attendant arrange the day room with a very good size table, one chair, and the sofa. This makes a very good work station, and when lunch is delivered, a very civilized private dining room.
Via's most popular accommodation, the double bedrooms, have two folding chairs set up during the day, and a lower berth and upper berth at night. The Amtrak deluxe bedroom is in space about halfway between that of a Via bedroom and a Via drawing room. The Via roomette is similar in size to an Amtrak standard bedroom, but the roomette has its own plumbing and only one berth, whereas the Amtrak bedroom has an upper and a lower and no plumbing. Amtrak has nothing to compare with the sections on Via, which have two facing seats during the day, and an upper and lower berth at night, with only curtains for privacy. Most Americans have only seen sections in old movies ("Some Like it Hot" with Marilyn Monroe is one example) but they are still popular in Canada, and are quite inexpensive. Via would like to rebuild these cars with more double bedrooms and eliminate most roomettes, which are very poorly utilized. Most passengers are traveling as couples, and often, due to the shortage of double bedrooms, couples are split up into two roomettes.
As we cross the border from Manitoba to Ontario this afternoon, we leave the great plains, which we have been traversing since before Edmonton, behind us, and enter the Great Canadian Shield. I have heard writers claim that the Shield scenery is without interest, yet find it fascinating myself. This is the area in Canada north of the Great Lakes, that was swept clear of soil by the glaciers of the Ice Age. The land is rugged, with vast areas of bare bedrock, stunted pine trees, and dark lakes. Most of the lakes have no trace of human population, although occasionally one will have a cabin or two on its shores. The temperature drops as we climb out of the prairies onto the Shield, and traces of snow appear in many areas. I turn up the heat in our room and put on a warmer shirt. There are few signs of civilization here as we roll through numerous cuts dynamited into bare rock and cant into and out of curves as the line seeks a route through the rocky outcroppings and numerous lakes. It is difficult to imagine how the original surveyors ever found a route through this difficult terrain which has a lonely and somber beauty that I have seen nowhere else in North America.
We enjoy cocktails in the Skyline car, now called the Activities car. This car has a short dome, a bar and food preparation area below, a cocktail lounge at one end, and game tables at the other end. Two of these cars are available for sleeping car passengers, and both cars are located adjacent to the two diners. A third Skyline car is up front behind the three coaches, where it is used as a lounge and coffee shop car for coach passengers. The sleeping car passengers also have access to the domed Park observation car. These cars are named after the national parks of Canada.
Each of the two dining cars has seating for 48, limiting the number of sleeping car passengers to 96 per diner. So the Canadian can carry ten sleepers plus the Park car with two dining cars. Our train today has a total of twenty cars, including the baggage car, and is pulled by three General Motors FP-40 locomotives. In peak summer season, the Canadian can be as long as thirty three cars and four locomotives.
We have third sitting dinner tonight, which is called at 9:30 PM, although now we have entered the Eastern Time Zone and local time is 10:30 PM. We will be returning to Vancouver on this train, and begin to realize that Eastbound, our days are only 23 hours long, while Westbound they will be 25 hours long. It should prove to be an even more relaxing trip West with those two extra hours per day. The steak tonight is excellently prepared to order and served with a glass of Okanagan Valley Merlot. By the time we finish dinner it is nearly midnight and time to turn in. We have another full day to look forward to tomorrow.
Continue to Next Page
