VIA Rail is Canada’s (only) nation-wide
passenger rail company. This past week I traveled by rail between Québec
City and Toronto to visit some friends in the latter city and in my old
stomping grounds—Waterloo (about an hour’s drive west of Toronto).
Traveling by rail has some advantages: it’s not quite as cheap as the cheapest
discount airfare but the schedules are more flexible when more obscure Canadian
cities (i.e. not Vancouver, Toronto or Montréal) are involved. And when
booking tickets at the last minute the train remains affordable whereas airfare
goes through the stratosphere. Taking the Greyhound bus is cheaper but is not
nearly as comfortable, and from my many bus travels as a student it seems as
if you run into many more nuts, flakes and weirdos on the bus, while the same
“interesting” elements don’t usually travel by rail.
All that being said, there is one problem with VIA Rail: the trains are
always late.
On every single train I’ve experienced delays of around 25% of the trip time.
The causes
vary and are often multiple: track problems, locomotive troubles, rail traffic,
waiting for connecting trains… It seems as if the schedule they set assume
“miraculous” conditions: that absolutely nothing goes wrong and everything
works perfectly. Unfortunately for VIA (and for me) what actually happens is
a textbook case of Murphy’s Law: anything that can go wrong, does.
As a result, any trip involving transferring to a connecting train is something
of a crapshoot. On the way to Toronto the Québec-to-Montréal
train arrived 45 minutes late, forcing the Toronto train to wait for
it—thereby incurring a 25-minute departure delay that added to additional
delays incurred later (witness the multiple causes) for an arrival late by
a full hour. On the way back, the train into Montréal was over two hours
late and the transfer was completely missed, resulting in my arriving on the
next train to Québec City—some three hours late.
My only consolation is that I got a free first-class upgrade and the VIA Rail
“Panorama Lounge” had a free trial of a public wireless (WiFi) Internet
access… so I was able to catch up on the several hundred unread work
E-mails in my mailbox.
Still, I’m told that VIA is much, much better than the US’s
Amtrak. Well, at least VIA tries:
for every trip late by more than an hour, they give you a credit of 50% of
your ticket price towards your next ticket purchase. (Had I known that, I
would have bought the return ticket from Toronto separately on the
expectation that I would likely get it at half-price.) I cashed in the
CAD137 of such credit from the Toronto trip for a first-class ticket to
Montréal tomorrow night (Monday morning I hop on a plane back
to CA).
