Train brain is an expensive affliction in Canada

Two days of my life are spent travelling 450 kilometres and back. That's just crazy in this day and age.

I was invited on a journey into the forest to learn about wood, starting with the trees in Algonquin Park and ending with marvellous mass timber buildings at the Canadian Nuclear Laboratories in Chalk River. But first, I had to get to Petawawa, Ontario. Of course, I chose to take the train; I never fly if rail is an option. I didn’t even look at the schedule for Porter or Air Canada; I have “train brain.”

I had to be in Ottawa by 2:30 PM, and the 8:32 departure should give me lots of time to get from the suburban train station to downtown, but the IMPORTANT NOTICE gave me pause, so I decided to take the 6:32 train to ensure that I wouldn’t miss the lift to Petawawa, two hours upstream from Ottawa. Had I not been so doctrinaire, I might have checked the airline schedules, because the Toronto subway system doesn’t even run until 6:00 AM. Instead, I booked an Uber.

I could have taken the subway as the train left 20 minutes late, which I didn’t mind, I had my comfy business class seat and lots of time. We then chugged 20 kilometres to Guildwood Station in Scarborough, where the train stopped, and we waited due to “operating issues in the track ahead.”

And we stayed stopped. FOR THREE HOURS AND FORTY MINUTES. You know there is serious trouble when they bring out the bar cart at 10:21. No explanation, no apologies, nothing. I asked if I could get off the train and grab a cab to the airport, but the cost of a ticket on the day of departure was close to a thousand bucks.

When we finally left Guildwood, it still looked like I might get to Ottawa around 2:30, given my four-hour window between my scheduled arrival and our departure for Petawawa. My host even delayed the departure an hour and offered to pick me up at the train station in the Ottawa suburbs.

5 hours and 15 minutes late!

But Via Rail runs on tracks owned by Canadian National Railways, and freight trains have priority. Every time I checked the arrival time in the app, it kept getting pushed back. At 3:45, they left without me, and I was facing a very expensive Uber ride.

Looking at the map and the Uber app, I decided to get off the train at Fallowfield, a suburban station just outside of Ottawa on the Petawawa side, and it is a good thing I did; just as we pulled in they announced that the train had to pull over for 25 minutes to let the train that left Toronto at 8:32 pass and get to Ottawa first. The conductor actually suggested that there was an Ottawa Transpo bus at the corner that could get passengers into the city faster.

I was surprised to get an Uber in about three minutes, although the driver complained that he didn’t like such long trips; he had prostate troubles and stopped three times to run into the bushes. Two hours later and $240 poorer, I got to Petawawa in time for dinner.

I had a wonderful trip (which I will cover in another post) and returned to Ottawa at 5 PM on Thursday. Others on the trip headed to the airport, but with my train brain, I hadn’t even considered that, and had booked a hotel for the night since there were no trains that late in the evening. It was my wife’s birthday on Friday, but I would be home by 2 PM, so this was not a big deal.

Until it became a big deal. The train kept pulling over to the side to allow freight to pass, and the delays kept adding up. This trip had a very talkative, apologetic conductor who kept delivering updates, primarily for passengers with a 4:15 connection to continue on to London and Windsor further west.

It looked like they would make their connection until 4:05, when the train stopped again, five minutes from Union Station. Now we were on tracks operated by Metrolinx, the provincial agency that runs the commuter trains, which evidently get priority. We sat there until 4:20. Who knows when those Windsor people got home; I made it by 5:00. Another day lost.

I had lots of time to figure out what my train brain cost me on this trip: two Uber rides totalling $270, a night in an Ottawa hotel, and two days of lost time, rather than a couple of hours in a turboprop from the Toronto Island Airport.

Via Rail “generously” offered passengers a 100% credit for the trip to Ottawa since it was over four hours late, and a 50% credit on the trip back. Except that the credit is only good on the same route within twelve months, and I can’t imagine I am ever going to do that trip again. I am going to try to get reimbursed for the Uber trip, but I do not have high hopes.

So why am I taking up your time with this rant?

When the Canadian government took over the passenger rail system and created VIA Rail in 1978, it made a terrible deal with the railways; they are still fighting over it. CN controls the tracks and tells VIA when and where it can go. It’s no way to run a railroad.

It means that train brain becomes an expensive affliction in Canada. I do not suffer alone in this; read Taras Grescoe complain about the same Siemens Venture trainset that I was on, although my troubles had nothing to do with the hardware. Trains should be a viable option between Toronto and our capital city, and not take two days out of my life. In this day and age, we deserve better.

---

You would think I would have learned my lesson by now.