VIA Rail’s The Ocean is the keystone of Canadian railroading history. People think of the CPR, the Last Spike, and the Canadian, but that’s the second half of the story. The CPR brought British Columbia into Confederation, whereas the Ocean‘s route made Confederation happen in the first place.

The Intercolonial Railway, linking New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the Canadas, was so important it was written into the British North America Act, 1867: Canada’s original constitution. The Atlantic colonies struggled to lay rails that, to the provinces of Canada, represented a vital link from the port of Halifax, the only major port in British North America accessible by ship all year round. These were the dangerous years following the American Civil War, when the Americans had crushing military superiority, expansionist ideas, and protectionist trade policies, while Canadians had good reason to think England could counterbalance that. The Atlantic wanted to link their rails and dilute their debt in Canada’s greater population; Canada wanted an all-red route for Imperial troops to Ontario and Quebec. No agreement should have been more natural, and it says something about the era that it actually worked out.

It cuts against the grain for a westerner to admit it but the Intercolonial Railway created the country. The Canadian Pacific merely expanded it. The Ocean follows nearly all the old Intercolonial route, now owned (of course) by Canadian National, and has since the first Ocean Limited set off in July 1904.

Yet it is, in every other way, a less historic train. Most carriages are from the 1990s, positively new for us, and it’s old without feeling historic; frankly, it’s shabby. The Ocean is a real transport link, the only practical overland transit between the Laurentian corridor and the Atlantic, but it survives because, when VIA’s budget was slashed, it served more valuable swing ridings than its sister cutting through Maine.

While it remains an interesting, beautiful experience (and, as a one-night trip, reasonable for even the ordinary person), it is relatively low on soul. Also time, so this post is a lot shorter than the last.

Intermission: Toronto and Montreal

My journey on the Ocean began in Vancouver, where I had taken the Canadian to Toronto over four nights. Despite what my friends probably thought I actually was in Toronto to hang out, not just for an excuse to ride the train, and there were two enjoyable, thoroughly unprintable nights in the centre of the universe.

Unfortunately, I had brought a souvenir from my trip on the Canadian: a monstrous cold, which I managed to superspread in the approved 2020 fashion. I then brought two more onto the next stage of my journey: a lack of sleep and a screaming hangover. Some of that was my fault.

In such a state, train travel is more than usually comforting. I had the early train out of Toronto Union Station to Montreal, a trip of a bit over five hours, and since this was my once-in-a-lifetime sleeper car crossing of Canada I had resolved to go business class. So, the Union Station business lounge, the third-most depressing place of its type I have encountered. It comes out well compared to the Salon Panorama Lounge in Vancouver, and to its sister in Montreal, but not much else. Air travellers might think of those mediocre airport lounges you get in with your American Express Lower-Upper-Middle-Class Card. It’s crummy, but you enter for the lowest possible hurdle of exclusivity from the madding crowds; not food, drink, nor service.

Union Station is a grand old building, give-or-take the seemingly permanent construction, but the business lounge has gotten so odd. There’s a space reserved for Prestige Class passengers on the Canadian, and a rather large space it is given that VIA Rail runs dozens of trains a week from Union of which the Canadian is two. It looks like a hotel conference room.

In the normal section there is a little plaque honouring the dinnerware used on a visit to VIA Rail by the Belgian royal family, but the actual dinnerware is long removed. On the bright side, there is a large quilted map of Africa with the countries replaced by Canadian provincial flags that got lost on its way to the Value Village. There were more Granny Smith apples than I had ever seen before in one place, the coffee was insufficiently strong, I was very tired.

Of my trip up the Corridor, suffice to say that it alone in my cross-country-and-back odyssey was completely punctual. Take that, haters! I was in a 40-year-old, soon-to-be-retired LRC car rather than the new Siemens equipment so, in a trip that was otherwise very novel, I experienced what I’d experienced before: the regional airliner decor straight out of an early Dash 8, the comfortable enough seating, the meal which is like what Air Canada business class tries to be, the quiet, pleasant, and timely trip which I know perfectly well is the exception even on the Corridor, but which happens to be the only kind I’ve ever had there. We actually had to wait at Dorval for a bit because we were early. Truth be told I’ve always been intellectually fond of the LRCs, a considerable Canadian engineering achievement which was of course ultimately wasted as successive Canadian governments resolved on increased total dependence on the United States, a policy that could in no way ever backfire¹.

As a result I had four hours to burn in Montreal on a frigid, sunny day before my next train, an overnight on the Ocean. This is only theoretically a great time when one is alone, in absolutely no mood for the pub, and carrying enough luggage to make the icy streets of downtown Montreal in winter feel treacherous underfoot. I walked around for not very long at all and then went to the lounge, the second-most depressing place of its type I have encountered, to graze on Granny Smith apples and wait.

And wait.

And wait.

The Ocean
Day 1
Central Station, Montreal, PQ
underway 2 hours late

I had never taken the Ocean before, in any capacity (in fact, this was my first time in Canada east of Montreal). I’d booked a trip on it in March 2020, and if you’re wondering how that went re-read the words “March 2020.” That trip did end in my worst Air Canada call centre experience ever, trying to rebook a flight at the outset of a pandemic, and my best Air Canada economy class experience ever, wandering through a deserted Dorval airport with my then-girlfriend thinking “that guy’s cough sounds awfully dry” and “is my forehead warm? it feels like my forehead might be warm,” before enjoying a Boeing 737 MAX 8 more-or-less to ourselves (this was before they were regularly turning into debris fields so it felt reassuring at the time).

The Ocean is like the Canadian only different. There is no Prestige Class. There is your economy and your sleeper plus with meals included, but the meals are catered and heated up on-board rather than made to order. Thanks to track challenges in Halifax there are no dome cars², there is no television or champagne or wine tastings, there is not even free coffee right there for the taking, and it’s not much like a cruise ship on rails at all. As a result, naturally, the Ocean runs at a significantly greater loss per passenger mile than the Canadian does, $1.26 to $0.79 in 2023.

I see that, on Black Friday 2019, I paid $680 for two Montreal – Halifax tickets in a Renaissance sleeper³. In 2025, I paid $432 just for myself, deeply discounted, of course. Regular fares start at $167 for economy and $704 for a sleeper, plus tax. Except when VIA puts on some Budd sleepers to meet demand the standard accommodation, even for a solo traveler, is a bedroom for two, and if that sounds rich know that when researching this in January 2025, several summer trains already had their sleepers sold out⁴. VIA Rail can’t supply the number of tickets the market demands, so prices go up. There are economic theories that explain this, I am told.

The experience of boarding the Ocean in Montreal was very similar to boarding the Canadian in Vancouver, except because of all the traffic out of Central Station the lounge was open. There’s a little kiosk marked “THE OCEAN” out in front of the lounge with nobody at it, waiting to check you in and book your meal time. I’d stick my head out of the lounge now and again to see if staff was there, but it never was until a little notice came on the departures board and the inevitable, unnecessary giant line formed. Reaching the end of it I was told that the early dinner seating was all booked up so I was put down for the second seating at 9 PM, which felt very French. I was also, for no reason I ever discovered, given a little teal wristband.

Reflecting on the nature of the Two Solitudes, but also how good my bed was going to feel, I proceeded to the boarding line and stood, aimlessly, until well past the assigned time, when one of the four VIA employees milling about by the stairs down to the platform came by to say “we’re not ready for you yet” and sent us back to the lounge to stew indefinitely. Around this time, the first e-mail blast hit my inbox to tell me that, once again, my train was going to be delayed before it left.

The hommes running the departure board would, every fifteen minutes, add another fifteen minutes to the expected departure time, which was not helpful. In between involuntary microsleeps and exhaustion-induced hallucinations, I brought my train up on VIA’s tracking system to see that the train had returned to VIA’s Montreal maintenance centre, fairly near but most emphatically not in Central Station. It was an ill omen, and meant those fifteen-minute increments were only so much nonsense. I slipped away to get some McDonald’s, and no sooner had I paid for a burger than they announced the train’s dinner was canceled and sleeper passengers got to line up for free meal vouchers they could take to McDonald’s. They promised the train existed. Eventually, after not more than a couple hours, this proved true, it began to move out of the maintenance centre, and after yet more pointless queuing we were shown onto the platform and the usual smiling professionals directed me to my bedroom, which was, for a single traveler trying not to spread his germs, a palace.

VIA Rail’s Renaissance fleet was built in England by the late, great Metro-Cammell company. Based off the British Rail Mark 4 day coach, the Renaissance cars were designed for a cross-Channel-Tunnel sleeper service, the Nightstar, which would take passengers overnight between major but secondary cities, for example Glasgow-Brussels. Going through the Chunnel meant they had to be more sturdily-built than the usual British coaches; going through the old-school British railway network meant they had to be smaller than typical European (or American) construction, to account for all the 200-year-old tunnels⁵. As a result these cars were highly specialized, neither fish nor fowl, and when the company planning the Nightstar service realized that no available British locomotive could power the train even if there was enough passenger demand, which there wasn’t, the project was killed with 139 carriages no European company would ever want in varying states of completion⁶.

Enter VIA Rail. To give the devil his due, North American mainline railroads legally require much sturdier structures than their European equivalents, so the heavy strengthening for the Channel Tunnel was a minus to most countries but a plus to us. And because of that, VIA Rail was able to purchase 139 brand new passenger cars, not all fitted out but all structurally complete, for less than $1 million each, which for a sleeper fleet seemed a bargain at the time. They were finished at Bombardier’s Thunder Bay plant⁷ and sent off to run in eastern Canada, where they were immediately and spectacularly unsuccessful.

They were, of course, smaller than the usual VIA Rail equipment. A 70-year-old Budd long-distance coach seats 62; a Renaissance coach seats 48. Since the only sleeping class accommodation is double bedrooms on the Renaissance versus the variety on a Budd car, the Renaissance fills up with solo travelers and the numbers get even worse. Therefore, in all cases you need more cars to carry the same number of passengers. This increases maintenance costs on a per-passenger basis and those costs were already bloody high enough as it was because the Renaissance equipment reacted to Canadian winters like a Florida snowbird spending his first December back home. Anywhere the car had fluids, chances were they would freeze and burst. The toilets were a problem. The doors were a problem, which gets to be an issue when the toilets stink. The brakes were a problem. Most of it was a problem, right down to the fact that Renaissance cars can’t be coupled to anything else in VIA’s fleet without a special “transition car” in-between⁸. Despite being the newest part of VIA’s fleet, when the new Siemens equipment arrived on the Windsor-Quebec City corridor the Renaissance coaches were the very first to be retired, and nobody has missed them. But they still run on the Ocean: the last two working sets out of a 139-car order that’s barely 30 years old, with the rest cannibalized for spares to try and keep the train going until new long-distance equipment is available in hopefully 10 or 15 years⁹. There has been no “Heritage Fleet” program to renew the Renaissances. Nobody would want it.

The decor of a Renaissance is very ’90s Euro chic, Tony Blair, Cool Britannia; comfort is out, cheap veneers and flamboyant colours are in. Even in coach, taking a 70-year-old Budd car is a luxury ride, a trip through history; dome cars, comfortable seating, thoughtful touches around every corner. The Renaissance cars resemble nothing more than a crappy motor inn, but clean. Doors stick, veneers peel, the corridors are slender and without refuges so the only places to pass are the vestibules, the alleged closets are mad abstract nightmares useless for anything except string beans and camera tripods, the weird pull-out table is accessible from only one of the double seats and blocks the bathroom door because what kind of elitist might want to use the bathroom and have a table, the doors stick so badly that sleeper passengers can look forward to a steady bass of the triple-thump as neighbours use their washrooms, and they even sound weird as they ride.

They aren’t all bad. The bed is comfortable as could be, and easy to pull down for even unskilled labour as opposed to the gymnastic gyrations of a Budd upper berth. There are power outlets, and the plastic mechanical punch-card door keys look quaint but do the job whereas the Budd bedrooms don’t lock on the outside at all. The communal spaces, though dated, have worn enough to appear neat, inefficient and unergonomic but sort of striking. As on the Canadian, the sleeper attendant fastened onto me as someone riding the train the whole way and appointed me Mandatory Emergency Door Open Passenger Guy; the Renaissance doors are much easier to open than the Budd ones, at least in theory.

I got a good taste of Renaissance reliability even apart from the two-hour stop in the maintenance centre before we boarded. We wound through Montreal, a city I know fairly well, by night, examining the skyline for the first time from unfamiliar angles. It was pleasant. They provided bottled water to the sleeping cars, which I felt in great need of, and my hopes were high. But shortly into our journey, I thought I smelled a burning rubber aroma in my cabin. As I checked for my bag being too close to the radiator it faded. Then it grew stronger. Then it grew concerning. At the very moment I was deciding this was a big deal, the fire alarm went off and the train stopped.

I was not unduly alarmed, by the standards of being on a train with a screeching fire alarm, because on the Canadian I had talked to a frequent Ocean passenger who had regaled me with how boredly competent the service staff had gotten with handling fires on board. This case proved somewhat different: my carriage had just received a new wheelset with new brakes, and it was the brakes that were smoking. An engineer came back to get a look, and as he did the service employee guiding him said something along the lines of “the passengers are complaining” about the fire alarms and the smell of toxic gases filling their cabins. Now, thought I above the eardrum-bursting beeping, I don’t like to make a fuss, but…

Although the attendants around my car clearly spoke French as their first language and weren’t a thousand percent comfortable with anglophones, they did keep us informed and unworried, which was a great thing, and the engineers worked to alleviate the issue. It was announced that coming into Saint-Hyacinthe we’d be performing a sharp brake test, so they could wear some of the new car smell off the brakes and make sure we wouldn’t do a Lac-Megantic. This sounded more exciting than it wound up being, and if I hadn’t been told it was sharper than usual I’m not sure I’d have noticed it. The burning rubber smell never really went away, but it was no more than perceptible from then on out.

This concluded the day’s excitement. I was very tired; the bed was very comfortable. I had vaguely planned to get out at St-Foy, the closest stop to Quebec City, to photograph a skyline for a city I’d never seen, but screw that. Sleep was better. Apart from all the weird noises.

The Ocean
Day 2
Amqui, PQ
2 hours 15 minutes late

Wake up. Wear clothes. Eat breakfast. Return to seat; the unobtrusive attendant has quietly made my bed but left the pillows for dozing. Train life is good when you’re not on fire.

The night was lusciously comfortable. The “bedroom for two,” on the Renaissance sleepers as well as the old Budd cars, are two bunks one on top of the other, so in principle I had the same sort of bed I’d enjoyed in a berth on the Canadian for four nights. In practice, I am sure that the Ocean was more comfortable. Maybe it was that I was very, very, very tired; it felt like a great night’s sleep anyway, and I woke up near Amqui, where Lake Matapedia turns into the Matapedia River, not as grand as the St. Lawrence but, in the winter, better for it, as the chunks of ice floated by on the water and the snowy terrain maintained more than enough variety to be interesting.

I so obviously had a bad cold by this point that it would have been irresponsible to circulate in the social cars the way I had on the Canadian, so my bedroom-cum-plague-shack did noble duty keeping me from excessive superspreading. However, it may not have made much of a difference had I been well. The Ocean is not the Canadian. It draws fewer tourists and more people trying to go places. The one family I had any sustained conversation with was a mom and son heading back to Halifax from a hockey tournament. I do not recall noticing anything other than Anglo- and French Canadian accents the whole trip, and certainly never talked to a foreigner; perhaps relatedly, when I did pass through the service cars, they were all empty or nearly so. The attractive but unconvivial seating no doubt does its part. The one time I did see somebody there, it was an older couple, the male of which was obstructing the hallway taking pictures through the window: I was in absolutely no hurry so didn’t rush him, but his wife saw me and did, and from his surprise he seemed not to have expected anybody to come by at all.

The service cars are, by the way, the only place on the train with the infamously reliable, robust, and high-speed VIA Rail wifi. If you are a Canadian with a Canadian cell plan, this will make no odds: where there’s no cell service, the wifi can’t reach the Internet for they use the same towers, and at other times your phone will be faster and not involve sitting in a weird Renaissance bench as you live-X your trip. The service cars have little cafe booths which, on the sleeper end, was shuttered-up for my entire trip, and while I was by no means in the mood for a drink I would have struggled to find one if I was. Ain’t no cruise ship going on here.

The dining car is a neat place, probably the most homey of the public spaces, and with the bonus that the small car means there are tables for two as well as four, letting couples dine together without having to talk to strangers. Although it’s not the courteous four-star dining experience of the Canadian and the bench seats are more “family restaurant” than “life-long memory,” the service and the meals were both good. My omelette was, in hindsight, an obviously silly choice when I knew very well meals were reheated onboard, but everything one reasonably thought might be a hit was.

In a classic VIA touch, on account of our late arrival to Halifax, there’d be a dinner to make up for the one we missed out of Montreal; the worst part was that lunch was at two PM and dinner was at five. I am a food enthusiast but even so this was a bit rich. I skipped dinner, which I wouldn’t have done if I had known Halifax better and realized I’d be picking out of the bloody grocery store deli that night.

What was there left to do but look out the window on our way through Atlantic Canada? Admittedly, that was a joy. It is a striking trip. Here, one rides by the highway, so slowly thanks to CN’s lack of maintenance on this line that even through a blizzard the cars absolutely sauntered past us. There, one goes past the pleasant rivers of New Brunswick, seeing small old towns, some of the oldest vestiges of civilization on this part of the continent, the powerful snow making the trip seem more peaceful than otherwise. There were no awe-inspiring sights, no Rocky Mountains, nothing for the postcards; there was also scarcely a single moment of the daylight journey that was anything less than pretty.

As mentioned, this was my first time in Atlantic Canada, and through my disease fog I enjoyed the passing scenery in a stupefied way. I wonder if I am unusual among Canadians from other parts of the country in having no clear vision of Atlantic Canada. On the Canadian, I was able to whip past towns like Wainwright knowing where I was, and even when we got into eastern Saskatchewan where my geography is less precise my blood knew the feeling of the place. The British Columbia interior I know more by experience, and the wilds of the Canadian Shield are so wild one expects not to know them; that’s part of the fun. New Brunswick and Nova Scotia have obviously been settled country for far longer than the places Canadians consider the centre of the universe, but they just went by the window. I enjoyed them, but I had no feel, no narrative; like a decent YouTube video, they were pleasant images that happened. This says nothing about Atlantic Canada. It’s truly beautiful country but there is something in that land, the land of many of my forefathers, that is absent from me, and as the scenery went by, I felt it missing, and I wondered if it was just me. The Atlantic provinces have not escaped globalism, not by any means, but outside the fashionable cities with international airports there is some “there” there, and one notices it, if only by not quite being a part of it.

The one smoke break I took was in Moncton / Moncton était la seule ville où j’ai débarqué du train, the Mecca of official bilingualism, where the signs say Stop / Arrêt like people are going to squint at the big red octagon going “qu’est-ce que le heck does that say” and T-bone a bus on its way to a Liberal Party fundraiser. Official bilingualism, as I always say, is serious business. In eastern Canada towns got to keep their train stations near the centre of town, and Moncton’s is a rather undistinguished but not ungracious building in the midst of, well, town. It looks like a place you’d go to to catch the train; it has all the romance of a useful, likable component of the public good, and that’s pretty substantial. Nice things made for use, not just as nostalgia trips, are nice, although these days with three trains a week Moncton’s pleasantly-situated station hardly sees more service than Edmonton’s hinterland-of-a-former-airport station does. I didn’t see Moncton at my best, since I was coughing and exhausted despite a great night’s sleep, but I’d go back.

Even after dark, the lights of Bedford, Nova Scotia in the hills were well-worth beholding, and while the trip through the railyards and industries of the Port of Halifax couldn’t be called beautiful, they were certainly interesting; not an experience you get in Vancouver, for example, where the ports are a ways away from the lines the Canadian touches. We arrived in Halifax two hours late, and after checking into the surprisingly excellent HI hostel in Halifax, I learned how much I didn’t want any of the late-night food options and bought a sandwich and chips at the nearby Loblaw’s. Such are the vicissitudes of travel. Halifax is an offputting town, run for tourists and foreign workers even in mid-winter, with a scent of unchecked seediness. It felt even more like Victoria than I expected, and though nice to visit for a night, if you lived there you’d have to put up with some things.

The Ocean‘s trip that should be quicker than it is. In 1957, the Ocean Limited ran to a 22 hour, 15 minute schedule; today it is 24 hours, 23 minutes. Unlike the Canadian, the problem is not that there’s too much freight traffic, but rather that there’s too little, and despite tens of millions in subsidies CN has let the track deteriorate so far that the train has to run slower than geography and equipment will allow. As good state capitalists, we would rather write plurality-American shareholders large cheques indefinitely than run a rail line as a public service.

This feels like a solvable problem. If a rail line is uneconomic to the private sector, but serves a public good, the public should own it. A public line would run at a loss to the taxpayer, yes; experience abundantly proves it. We can’t pretend that VIA Rail would ever compete to lower costs and attract customers. But if government is less efficient than the private sector, which it is, it is at least more honest (yes!) than government writing cheques to the private sector without daring to specify its expectations, because electoral politics demand a visible effort and the foreign donors demand that not too much be asked of them.

Beneath every discussion of travel policy, there is a dichotomy. Canadian airlines are subsidized with capital expenses, government bailouts every time the weather is adverse, and an official public expectation that the airlines shall treat passengers ten percent better than rats on a cargo ship. VIA Rail gets small capital subsidies, because capital expenditures are new costs to defend, and hundreds of millions in operating subsidies, because an operating subsidy is “the way things are” and too established to attack. In air travel, there are times when Air Cheapo bounces one cheque too many and the embassy has to fly 500 people out of Martinique. In rail travel, Canadians get home, one way or another, every time, but some are so delayed and round-about they provoke questions in the House.

We, in the broadest, American empire sense of the word “we,” live in an age where travelling is considered a virtue of its own. We go to the Caribbean and stay at an all-inclusive and perhaps take a bus tour to Havana where our guide extracts hard currency from our wallets, or we take a cruise to arrange the same conversations a million cruisers before us had, or we go to Europe and find the restaurant where we say “huitres avec le vin rose” and they reply “oysters with rose, very good.” This is a hoary old cliche, writers as separate as Mark Twain and Evelyn Waugh wrote about it, but all the same, it is deadening.

The railway is not, inherently, on the right side of that equation. Flying or driving is certainly quicker and easier than taking the train, but the train is so much quicker and easier than walking or riding that the difference is one of degree, not of kind. Yet we should ask ourselves, is cheaper, faster really better? I lived for many years in Victoria. What was the point of Halifax if I arrived and said “this is Victoria,” not because they have the same heritage (it’s similar but not as similar as all that), but because they have responded identically to the same cultural pressure?

As I write this, there is a renaissance in alleged Canadian feeling, which consists of politicians saying they are American Democrats, not American Republicans. The stars of twenty-year-old beer commercials and triple-citizens who live in Los Angeles alike are unanimous that Canada is not for sale (to this uncongenial American government; the country of course having been sold off to friendlier faces decades ago). It is all fabulously cheap, and the proverbial space alien watching the Dominion will know very well what we aren’t (Republican Americans) but have no idea what we are.

Unbelievably, this ties into the railways. Railways are fixed things. They are placed for a purpose and struggle to supplant it. Air Canada can send planes to New York rather than Gananoque when the profit/loss report says they ought; a railway cannot. A trans-Canadian railway cannot be anything else, it cannot help but stitch the country together, or at least it can’t until high authority decides it is more desirable that Canada pawn the family silver and abandon it. Sir John A. Macdonald recognized this; the only election he ever lost was because he went to the wall for an all-Canadian railway rather than an American-Canadian one. Sir Wilfrid Laurier recognized this, or at any rate put up with it, when he turned two bankrupt transcontinentals into the truly all-Canadian Canadian National. This has never been a consensus, but it has been something that all Canadian nationalists recognized, in opposition to the continental idea that we are one flavour of American or another.

To cure this problem is beyond the author’s skill. Yet it is the single Canadian problem, to overthrow New York and Hollywood’s post-national ideas and resurrect the English and French, the Protestant and Roman Catholic, conceptions of two peoples in one land that saved us in 1776 and 1812. Quality passenger trains between Montreal and Halifax are so obviously a small part of that battle that one trembles to raise them. Yet they are a part; excising Canada from the idea that we are defined by efficiently catering to America. Saying that yes, we are two nations in one house, and we will endure economic loss to keep that house in good repair. The easy way of the American twenty-first century is economy class air travel, grotesque airports, and travel slop; for Canada to survive, it must take the hard way. Not the quick buck and the easy road, but the independent one at whatever cost. Those ideas are not yet dead, for as shabby as the Ocean is, without them I could not have taken it at all.

1. The LRCs were a remarkable tilting train that were designed to give Canada 120-mile-an-hour service at an affordable cost using an existing, elderly, but still hale Alco diesel engine that Montreal Locomotive Works had a license for. They were successful, with fewer teething problems than most equivalent efforts including the current Siemens train sets. Unfortunately, CN rejected the concept of higher-speed trains on their rails because of the increased wear, while other obvious and planned routes like Edmonton-Calgary simply never happened for lack of political will to force them onto a rail network, private and public, that just wanted passenger service to die already. Instead of running with two locomotives at high speed, the LRCs wound up running with one locomotive at good but thoroughly conventional speed. The LRC locomotives themselves were retired early, because the government viewed buying new locomotives from the United States as preferable to supporting locomotive maintenance and construction in Canada.
2. Train nerd footnote: the Ocean used to run with domes, but a couple years ago the Port of Halifax cut off VIA Rail’s access to the track out of Halifax station that they could use to turn the train around. Instead, the train runs with two locomotives back-to-back at the front, and at Halifax they are removed, run down the other platform, and hook on to what was previously the back of the train for the return to Montreal. A scenic Park car is not only pointless but dangerous pointed directly at the nose of a locomotive, so they are no longer used on this train. This also means that the seats in the Renaissance cars face the back of the train for the eastbound journey from Montreal to Halifax, and the front of the train for the westbound journey, which on the bright side means sleeper passengers get the better views from their windows all the way.
3. Actually, I’m pretty sure my then-girlfriend paid for it but she’s not reading this.
4. As elsewhere on VIA Rail, you can get 10% savings here and there with a CAA or Hostelling International Canada membership, but the best way to save money is to buy on a classic Discount Day and travel in the winter.
5. This is called the “structure gauge” and would have made a good train nerd footnote if even I was enough of a train nerd to footnote the many details of that.
6. In fact, even daytime services through the Channel Tunnel from outside London, the so-called “Regional Eurostar,” have been unable to take off in the 30 years since for many of the same operational reasons.
7. Well, many were. As the Renaissance equipment proved less and less adequate, empty shells that proved surplus to requirements were left to rot in a field for decades. VIA Rail was smart not to send good money after bad, but the Renaissance deal turned out pretty poorly for them overall.
8. And even that is an oversimplification: not every Renaissance car can be coupled to every other Renaissance car either. Good grief.
9. If not sooner; both VIA and passengers would certainly prefer to run the Ocean entirely with the 70-year-old Budd cars if there were enough units available.