A Ride on Via Rail Train 65

I really want to like Via Rail. I really want to recommend taking the train between Canada’s two largest cities, Montreal and Toronto. In terms of emissions, it’s a far less polluting way of travelling than doing the same trip by car or plane. And I always anticipate the experience with pleasure. Slowly pulling out of a big-city train station, gazing out the window at the shores of the St. Lawrence River, maybe ordering a Bloody Caesar (a Canadian rail staple) somewhere around Kingston, getting halfway through Birnam Wood or whatever long novel I’ve started. Yes! Train travel is the way to go.

Yet Via Rail never fails to mess the experience up. I’m aware that complaints about modern transportation tend to get filed under “first-world problems.” Boo-hoo, poor little rich people got to their fancy business meeting a little late! (It’s a miracle, comedians remind us, that we get to fly in the air at jet speeds or zoom along superhighways at all!) But here’s the thing: in Asia, especially in China and Japan, the pokiness and degree of lateness we experience in Canada and the U.S. on Via Rail and Amtrak would never be tolerated. Japanese shinkansen often arrive at the destination station on the second, and even on urban trains commuters are given apology cards on the platform (to hand to the boss) if a train is more than 2 minutes or so late. Morocco, Laos, and Turkey have high-speed rail—hardly “first-world” countries, but their passenger rail networks are now more advanced, and efficient, than ours.