Steel Rail Stories

Trip dates: September 22 to 24, 2007

VIA Rail's Corridor trains ply the mostly urban environment of the Windsor-Quebec City corridor; I find them the most utilitarian and least tour-friendly VIA trains in Canada. I departed the 2.5-million-strong city of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario, covering 539 kilometres to the 1.6-million-strong city of Montreal where the Ottawa River meets the St. Lawrence River.

The Ocean has been operating for more than one hundred years, making it North America's oldest continuously-operated named passenger train. It travels 1346 kilometres between Montreal and the city of Halifax in Nova Scotia. In between, it follows the south shore of the St. Lawrence River to the Matapédia Valley; it passes Chaleur Bay to cross New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

September 22

Ten a.m. and I am sitting in the lounge in the lower concourse of Union Station. It was strange to ride in a taxi along routes I would normally cover on foot or by bicycle. It's striking, the difference between security for travel by rail and by air; today I just walked into the station, checked my luggage, and that was it. I was just walking the back corridors down here, looking at the posters for the different trains and scheming for my next trip...

On the way to Montreal, I didn't have a window seat, so it made for a long ride. And then once I got on the Ocean train, there was no dome car. It was one of the new Renaissance trains, which many people criticize; it's a tough act to follow the old stainless steel HEP cars. Because I was travelling alone, I was put in a single seat so I got the benefits of both a window seat and an aisle seat (however, it was narrow and barely reclined, so sleep would be difficult). We left Montreal at sunset over a long bridge and rolled through flat plains ringed by sudden high hills. Then the rest of the province passed by in darkness and on through the night.


September 23

When the sky was lightening I sat up and saw New Brunswick with its bays, high treed hills, swamps, and frequent but small towns, the sea and wooden sidings shining in the rising sun. I think one of the reasons I like riding the train is that when I'm sitting inside it, the way it moves reminds me of dreaming--when it moves slowly, it's a silent, beautiful dream, and when it speeds along, it's a whirlwind crazy dream with leaves pulled spinning into the air.

At Moncton station we stopped by the same rubble pile as the last time I came through--three years have passed and it's still there. Past Moncton the fields were embossed with countless rivers with bright red muddy banks shining in the retreating tide. When we crossed into Nova Scotia, the hills disappeared for a while and grasses grew in the cleared plots, interrupted by young-looking deciduous forests and by creeks in small ravines. I was listening to an album of songs based on stories from a small mining town in the Yukon and I realized two things: first, that since the artist grew up in this part of Nova Scotia, I had chosen music with a connection to the landscape I was seeing, and second and conversely, on a sunny warm late-September day, these songs about lonely mountains and ice creeping in through cracks in the walls didn't seem real, as if I wasn't close enough to being killed by the land to understand them.

At the Truro station there was a wonderful, very long mural painted by many different artists showing different aspects of the town: train engines old and new, kids playing in Hockeyville 2006, the VIA Park car inhabited by anthropomorphic Canadian wildlife, churches, and other sights the people of Truro thought important to show to visitors. Halifax appeared as we rounded the Bedford Basin edged with dark green trees on rising rocks. Once in the city, I wandered through the public gardens in the evening light under ancient twisting silver maples and a tree planted by schoolchildren in 1898 to commemorate the death of a soldier in Nigeria.


September 24

Today after the conference that I was in Halifax to attend ended, I squared myself to a steady wind and climbed the hill of the Citadel. This hill is a drumlin, formed by a glacier like McNab Island and George's Island in the Halifax Harbour; later, fortifications were built to take advantage of the location above The Narrows. I paced out the star-shaped gravel path circling the deep brick moat, with grassy cannon ports above on the left and the city and sea arrayed below on the right. I felt the ancient connection of this hill to the two islands hulking in the harbour and thought of miles of unknowable ice slipping silently out to sea.