A Father-Son Excursion on Quebec's Century-Old Train de Charlevoix
// My first reaction, as my twelve-year-old son Desmond and I boarded the Train de Charlevoix, was the slightest sense of disappointment. Not with the surroundings, which, on this blue-sky summer morning, suggested a vintage hand-tinted picture postcard. A pair of trains, clad in a dashing livery of grey, black, and yellow, awaited the day’s passengers on a stretch of track paralleling a churning wall of white water, where a tributary of the St. Lawrence River spills over a cliffside north of Quebec City. Ten storeys higher than Niagara, the Montmorency Falls are stunning all year-round, though especially in the winter, when they congeal into an undulating ice sculpture that seeps clouds of ice-crystal-bedazzled steam.
It wasn’t the scenery, but the rolling stock that gave me pause. Last year, the Train de Charlevoix, a non-profit organization that runs Canada’s only excursion train outside the Rocky Mountains, made headlines when it brought in a hydrogen-powered trainset, the Coradia iLint, from Germany. The idea was that a train carrying fuel cells would be a perfect fit on this century-old railway, whose route along a sinuous riverine coastline makes it a challenge to fully electrify. But when the pilot-project ended after the summer of 2023, the railway deemed the Alstom-made train too costly for its budget.
The train we’d be riding today, one of four owned by the railway, was also German, but this was no bleeding-edge piece of rail tech: it was a self-propelled diesel motor unit—with a driver’s cab in the passenger coach—of 1980s vintage, originally built by Deutsche Bahn for suburban service. A form of transport North American trainspotters, who are fonder of heavy-duty locomotives, disparagingly call a “doodlebug.” This one was slightly down-at-heel, with faded upholstery and stickers that still read “Please do not address our driver!” in the original German.
