Take the train, coos VIA Rail Canada, and the come-on is appealing. After all, is there a more comfortable way to travel?

Unlike the airplane, you arrive at a downtown station (no $30 taxi ride to a suburban airport) minutes before departure. No need to check your nail file and clear security; just hop aboard.

Unlike the automobile, you need not worry about driving or burning gasoline. Think smaller carbon footprint.

Unlike the bus, there is no traffic. On the train you can move around, use the Internet, enjoy a hot meal at your seat or have a drink in the lounge car.

Well, not really. What should be true of train travel in Canada isn’t. Our rail service is abysmal, one of the great failures of public policy.

We are at least a generation behind Europe and Asia. The costs are mounting. A country that built a mythical transcontinental railway in the 19th century has largely abandoned passenger service today.

Oh, how far we’ve fallen. Let us count the ways.

Take the train to Montreal from Ottawa, for example, and you have a choice of six departures a day. Only the first, at 6:34 a.m., allows you to arrive by 9 a.m., in time for the business day.

The next leaves at 9:24 a.m. The last returns to Ottawa at about 6:00 p.m., eliminating the prospect of an evening in Montreal.

The schedule surely has a logic of its own but what it doesn’t have is frequency. Six trains a day in each direction between the national capital and the country’s second largest city is a gesture, not a commitment. Serious service is trains every hour from early morning to late evening, like inter-city buses.

As for a downtown station, that’s true in Montreal and Toronto. But not in Ottawa, which abandoned its train station in 1966 and built a new one miles from its centre.

It was an act of staggering genius, for which Ottawa is justly legendary. (Think Scotiabank Place, which rises in a cow pasture in Kanata). The train station is so embarrassed to be where it is that it announces itself with only a tiny green directional sign. Brilliant.

Delays are not uncommon, particularly to Toronto. On that route, VIA offers all of five trains a day.

As for speed, the journey is not going to set any records. The fastest train to Montreal takes one hour and 58 minutes. That must be the express. The slowest takes two hours and 16 minutes.

Between Ottawa and Toronto, the travel time is about four-and-a-half hours, give or take 15 minutes.

For all that, the experience is pedestrian. The carriages are old, the interior worn and, on this day, the windows streaked. If you want to use a laptop you have to balance it on a tray; only one set of seats has a good-sized table, and it is in first class.

Continue reading >>> By Andrew Cohen, Citizen Special

Canada By Train: The Complete VIA Rail Travel Guide

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