In the early
afternoon I spent an hour or two in the dome car - talking to or actually
gently intruding into other people’s conversation. The seats are more
comfortable up there. I decide to offer to move up there if in fact they were
short of seats.
Listened to the
musician for a bit. It must be very difficult to sing to three or four people. Fortunately
two of the people were also singers and so it was rather nice.
According to the
attendant we will be getting into Jasper around 5:30. They need to change out
one of the engines…..not too sure why - perhaps that is why we have been going
so slow. It does mean that we will be here at least for an hour which will keep
us 5.5 hours late.
For the first
time since using the train, I decided not to get out to buy food at Jasper. I
still have a bit of cheese left and a bagel as well as a muffin, lots of
granola bars and some trail mix. It was getting close to dark, it looked cold
and it just didn't seem to be worthwhile to get bundled up and then hang around
outside for an hour or so waiting for the train to get loaded. Later I noticed
some a herd of elk wandering around. It would have been nice to get a picture
of them.
Boarding this
time went well. The attendants were really well organized. They knew exactly
who was going to go where, they switched some people around so families could
sit by each other and it all went smoothly. They had warned us beforehand what
was going to happen so there were no complaints. Four Via Rail engineers got
on. They were dead heading a few hours up the line. I think they were the
over-booking. They stayed in the doom car so it was not a problem.
Finally had a
short chat with my seat mate. he certainly is not very talkative - either
napping or playing with his phone. He is a 3rd year accounting student at UBC.
He had wanted to get into engineering but his marks were not high enough, he
then thought about psychology but didn't like it enough so he switched to the
accounting program. Not exactly a driven student passionate about his area of
study. We spent time talking about accounting. I tried to ask him if they
studied ethics - he said no and I think,
wondered why I would ask this question. He asked almost no questions of me
except to wonder about visiting other parts of Canada and when it would be the
best times to do.
It was hard
sleeping my last night on the train. My rear end was sore, it was hard to move
around without disturbing my seat mate and every snore, cough or mumble seemed
to fill the car. As delightful as train travel, those cars are not made to be
so full. I would wake up every hour and by looking out the window, into the
dark and snowy landscape try to determine where we were. It was a rather futile
exercise except when we stopped at Kamloops where I knew where we were at least
in part because of the sign of the train station.
I do distinctly
remember stopping for six freight trains during the run from Jasper to Kamloops.
At least two were over 130 cars long. That means we spent in that rather short
stretch of rail, at least an hour waiting.
One of the plus
parts of being late was going through the last range of mountains in the
daylight. While it was quite foggy - it was very interesting. The rocks, the
river all looked rather harsh and less beautiful than at other times because of
the snow on the ground.
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