On
this trip I spent over 200 hours riding on trains. This experience was
not as rewarding as I had fantasized it would be. It was very irritating
and uncomfortable. I swear I must have been cursed with terrible train
partners. That, or there's just something about people on trains.
On
the first leg of my trip a plague of teenage girls descended upon my car and
spent the entire first night giggling and cavorting and just generally preventing
sleep. Next, on the way to Churchill, someone has brought an honest-to-god baby
aboard. It should probably be illegal to bring a baby on a 40 hour train ride,
although I guess such a law would seem silly because who would want to do this
in the first place? The woman in front of me, that’s who! Well, let’s be fair.
It’s not quite a baby, more like a toddler, but is that really an upgrade? I
guess if you’re a parent, it must be very rewarding to see your child progress
from the writhing and crying stage to the flailing and yelling stage (which
they will remain in until age 22).
Anyway, this baby spent the whole night yelling about something (gaabee?)
and I’m pretty sure it went through a stage where it was just yelling the word
shit over and over. You got that right kid. The mother kept shushing it in
these urgent, quiet tones, as if the baby would eventually pick up on the
social cues or something and say ‘oh, pardon, I have no idea what I was
thinking yelling like that for hours’. I
have to say, although it was the shouting that woke me up, what made me lose
the most sleep was the existential crisis it triggered about whether I really
do want children. Don’t get me wrong, I love kids. I work with kids. I just
don’t really love babies, and if I ever have one, I promise not to bring it on
a train.
Aside from the dramatic Candian Rockies on the
first day, the ride itself was not very eventful. We kept passing by the
remains of telephone poles, which had been
disused for years, in various stages of sinking into the muck. Some are
held up
by other poles, tripod-style. It reminds me of that bit in Monty Python
and the
Holy Grail about swamp castle. So we built another telephone pole! It
fell
over, burned down, and then sank into the swamp. It really makes you
wonder
what exactly people are doing out here, that they’d colonize someplace
so
nakedly inhospitable to them. Is the need to expand so great that we
just do it
thoughtlessly, without any regard to whether or not it’s actually a good
idea?
The railroad, by the way, is also sinking into the swamp. An American
company
does the rail maintenance for viarail, laying down new track as needed.
Evidently, they do not do this job very well. Before I came on this
trip, it
didn’t really occur to me that a train could experience ‘turbulence’,
and now I
know both that it can and why. Turns out it’s america’s fault. I like to
imagine that when the train’s pace slows inexplicably, that it’s because
we’re
approaching a particularly faulty section of rail, and we have to, like,
creep
carefully over it, like an explorer on an old rope bridge.
More
than anything else, the train is slow. Aside from the aforementioned
swamp, there are plenty of other issues that can cause endless delay.
Sometimes it's too hot and the train must creep along at 10 miles per
hour to avoid warping the track. Sometimes a freight train breaks down
in front of you and you just sit still for hours. Sometimes it just
seems as if something is wrong with the train as it sits in the station
with no one apparently doing anything to make it leave on time or fix
it. Mostly, however, the problem is that the railroads themselves are
owned by the freight companies. This ends up meaning that the freight
trains have priority and that passenger trains must essentially pull
over and wait for them to pass, no matter how long that might take. In
some places it means sitting on a side track for 2 hours. Capitalism,
everyone!
The coach class, which I am of course a part
of, is forbidden from interacting with our
betters during non-dining hours. We are not even allowed to use the
showers, which sit in the nearly-deserted upper class cars largely
unused. And the website explicitly lied about the
train’s wifi capacity (it has none). There is a weird, enforced class divide where
the coach passengers actually end up poorly fed and smelly by the time they
reach their destination. Didn’t want to pay the extra? This is what you
deserve, you Poor. For every dollar they invest on, like, train improvements,
and such, ViaRail can expect to make 70 cents back. I learned this from a
fellow traveler, but he seemed well informed, so I kind of just believe it. Plus
it would explain why it feels like as little effort has been put into this
train as possible. Capitalism, everyone! Oh wait, that's the punchline I used last paragraph. Guess it's still true.
