On The Road Again 2017 #4

"sitting in a railroad station, got a ticket for my destination".... I wonder how many times I have typed or at least thought those words in the past 15 years. I  have lost track of the number of times I have sat either in the Sudbury Junction train station or at the other end in Vancouver waiting for yet another train. It is always with a sense of sadness and excitement that I wait for and eventually board the train. It is, in many ways, the beginning and the end of a journey. Every time I get on a train I am either heading out to visit friends and family, hopefully to have an small adventure along the way, or I am returning to my home, ready to get back into the grove of playing with wool and hanging out with friends. There are days when it all feels rather humdrum. It is not that I am not excited about the traveling but I have counted all of the cracks in the station ceiling a dozen times before and heard all of the groaning questions from first time passengers about why the train is so late probably even more often.

VIA has devised an interesting method of torture for such first time passengers at the Sudbury Junction train station. On the wall there is a large flat television monitor. On that monitor is listed the number of the train (#1) , what track it will arrive on (only one of the two tracks is reachable from the wooden boardwalk that leads from the station), what time the trains is scheduled to arrive, what time it will actually arrive at and in a fiendishly clever way of driving people mad .... what is the current time. What is particularly fiendish on the part of VIA is that if one arrives 40 or so minutes early, the scheduled time of arrival and the actual time of arrival are the same. Sometimes, the video screen states that the train will even arrive a few minutes earlier . However, about 15 or 20 minutes before the train is scheduled to arrive, the actual arrival time starts to gradually move forward. Sometimes everyone gets excited because it appears as if the train will be arriving within the next 8 or 10 minutes; then all of a sudden the numbers change and the train is going to be 12 or 14 minutes late; this cycles continues - sometimes for well over an hour. People are teased that the train's arrival is imminent and then hopes are dashed once again as the board informs all that no- the train will be 14 minutes late.

After a while all but the most optimistic  have been continued to accept that the train is late now and will be late all day, and the next day and the next. If there is a particularly friendly station master who can properly commiserate with the crowds, he or she can get people laughing at the trains lateness - surely the first step to accepting that one's train will not arrive at one's destination on time.

Like I said fiendishly clever....