24 hours ago I was sitting in my friend’s Montreal apartment weighing my options. I needed to find a way back to Toronto.
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Most people make travel plans before embarking on journeys, but that’s never been my thing. What was surprising was how bad my final choice was compared to how great I initially thought it would be.
My quick brainstorm produced these possibilities:
- Bus at $60
- VIA train $145
- Friend’s car $25 gas money
- Porter plane over $200
- Ride share $25-35 gas money
- Car rental $15
Eliminations were swift:
- Said friend’s car was full and he wasn’t about to swap out his wife for me.
- Being a good driver means being a bad backseat driver, and the idea of hopping in a mystery vehicle with a mystery person isn’t high on my good-plan list, so ride sharing is out.
- Porter is evil and expensive. Out.
- National Car Rental would give me a medium sized car that I could drop off at Union Station for the price of having a train do the very same thing, so scratch that.
- I wasn’t hot on the idea of paying $145 for a one way trip from Montreal to Toronto but a quick Google search reveals a 50% discount when you book your trip with Visa. Jackpot!
The next couple of hours were spent congratulating myself on a Googling well done. I imagined my idyllic trip: a little reading, some WiFi access, and a couple of bagels I picked up at St. Viateur. It was going to be great, a four-hour (and change) journey on the rails that unite Canada.
Except the trip was a massive failure.
Nearly an hour delayed to leave, an hour stuck behind a freight train and another delay to pick up more of VIA’s disgruntled passengers stranded just outside of Oshawa.
I hated the thought that maybe people in cars weren’t jerks who loved making carbon footprints, but just knew our trains suck. I was still sticking with dreamy thoughts of an efficient futuristic mode of travel. But reality meant I was over 2hrs late on an under-5hr trip. It was shameful.
And VIA knows it. Half of VIAs trips last winter were late. Note that VIA considers a 15-minute delay as “on time.” Those rickety locomotives won’t see a penny of repair money ($232 million from Ottawa over 5 years) until March so deep freezes will continue to destroy rail switches and make signals fail. At least VIA doesn’t fly planes.
The worst part is I love trains. The mode of transport works so well in my head (and in Europe) and should work so well for the Windsor-Quebec corridor. Yet, that trip took hours longer than driving.
You could blame chance, an aging fleet of EMD F40 locomotives, and low ridership – and you should. The 70s era experience is embarrassing and frayed. I’m not asking for a Maglev, but it’s not looking good for intercity rail if VIA can’t even match a bus trip at double the cost.
Oh, and the WiFi is slower than my cellphone browser. Idyll officially destroyed. Well, at least my bagels were delicious.
