On the Road Again #7

We were suppose to pull into the station in Winnipeg at 8:00 AM. Instead we were just arriving at Sioux Lookout. It had been a long night with a series of stops waiting for freight trains to pass us by. For example, we had stopped for over an hour to allow for three freight trains, heading west to pass us. To say that it is frustrating would be a profound understatement.

It was clear that at that rate of travel and all of the frequent stops for trains to pass us in either direction, that we would not be in Winnipeg until late in the afternoon. Which meant for me, that I would probably end up staying in a too expensive hotel for the night.  Perhaps I can get VIA to cover the cost of said hotel.

Yesterday, the attendants were very much present and there were a number of relatively humerous announcements. This morning there has been nothing - not even an explanation as to why we are so late. The car is still very empty and everyone seems to be accepting with some grace the massive delays - not that we have any choice.The attendants went around and gave everyone a slip of paper that entitles us to a free lunch - a sandwich, a chocolate bar and a drink.....given the lack of vegitarian options - I suspected that I would get stuck with a chocolate bar. ( to be fair - after the snack car attendant gave me the list of foods available, I said that I didn't eat meat - she then offered a little card board box with some rather bland humus, some veggies, crackers and a small bag of nuts - it was not too bad at all - not enough to sustain someone for nine hours - but it was a start)

At some point during the night a number of men and I assume their sons got on - I would imagine that they had been waiting for six or so hours at some bug invested spot; there were however in surprisingly good spirits. I would suspect that if it had just be a group of older men, or a group of teenage boys they would have been much grumpier or noisier or drunk - as it was they were quiet and their complaints were minor.



I later heard from another passenger who had been waiting for the train for seven plus hours that VIA had closed the station and they had had to spend the night sleeping on the platform - being attacked by bugs. Shameful!!

On the Road Again 2017 #6

This train trip has been a bit of a roller coaster in terms of being on time. It left just over an hour late, Three hours later we were not only on time but in fact a bit ahead of schedule. Three hours after that I would estimate that we are at least an hour if not two behind schedule. In the last hour we have spent far more time waiting for freight trains along some siding or another than we have moving. It could get frustrating if I did not know that by tomorrow morning we might have made up all of the time we have now lost - or we could be three hours late- either way it has nothing to do with me - it is totally beyond my control.

The stop in Hornepayne which is suppose to be 50 minutes was only 10. Anytime saved here was quickly frittered away by the train sitting on a siding for awhile just ten minutes outside of Hornepayne.

Train is very quiet - there are lots of seat empty although the attendant told me that at Sioux Lookout 30 people are getting on. However that will be late tonight and I have every intention of being sound asleep - using both seats.

There is only one child on this part of the train. She is, I would guess, around 18 months old. She and her mom got on at Sudbury Junction where it was dark outside and the air was fully of ravenous black flies and mosquitoes. However, the only thing that that child wanted to do was to go outside and practice her climbing up and down steps. Any other activity, especially being inside caused loud screams. Ear drum piercing screams. Poor mother, she was less than happy. Of course the half dozen other passengers waiting for the train were not all that pleased either. While I have had my ear phones in for most of the day, it would seem that the young child is much quieter on the train - much to everyone's relief. I think however, that mom is having to work fairly hard to both keep her daughter entertained and corralled.

There are two young couples on the train. I think one of them is from England and the other is perhaps from Germany. At one of our many stops in the middle of nowhere, one of them noticed an animal swimming in creek. They pronounced it as either a beaver or an otter. I give it a quick look, suggested that I thought it was a beaver and they believed me. There were less sure when I suggested that the train trip was like a ride at Disney World and that the animals were trained to swim along side the train for the passengers entertainment.Just doing my bit to entertain the visitors.

There is an interesting older woman who got on at a small stop after Sudbury. I can't quite figure out what it is, but I suspect that she might have some sort of dementia, either that or she is just use to having people answer her questions more than a few times.She is pleasantly dressed and groomed but there is something about her that is just a little bit off. She has managed to have both of the reasonably young train attendants waiting on her. Perhaps she is just smart. I have never seen a VIA staff person going to buy water for a passenger.

Just east of Longlac we waited on siding for the east bound  VIA train. When it past us - looked just as empty.

On the Road again 2017 #5

It strikes me as I watch the passing of an endless stream of images framed by the steel frame of the train's window, that I am less emotionally engaged in this trip than any other that I have taken in the past 15 years. Normally when I head west, it is at the end of a long spring where my anticipation for my summer trip builds after numerous dreams/fantasies about hitchhiking and at least a few attacks of spring fever. But now for the second summer, I am heading west  to go back home. In fact, with the exception of hitching from Winnipeg to the west coast tomorrow morning, my trip is over. It feels wrong to me- as if I have done something out of order. I never promised that any of my writing would make any sense but this feeling may make less sense than normal.

My pack is perhaps the lightest it has ever been. I am not planning on doing a lot of camping and therefore I am carrying only the basic necessities (although because of the internal frame on my fifteen year old pack, it is surprisingly heavy -even when empty). But the fun I usually  have in packing my stuff, of deciding what I need and what I really don't need was done a month ago -  when at least part of my agenda was figuring out what I could fly with. (I just at this moment remembered that I never bought gas for my stove. If I stop somewhere in the middle of nowhere I will not be able to make tea- dumb). The process of my packing has been backwards and I suspect that the gas is not the only thing I have forgotten.

I also suspect that the other reason why I have invested less energy into this return trip is that my thinking for the past month has been focused on past trips. I have just finished the first draft of my "book". I started last June trying to develop some sort of a framework for sharing the stories of the various drivers I had met in my travels. I worked on it again in December when I visited Sudbury and for the last month I have spent a few hours most days re-reading and editing some of those stories. It is a surprisingly exhausting process. As I read the different journals that I originally produced and the hundreds of blog entries that I have generated in the last seven years, those stories reminded me of those events ; they have allowed me to re-live those trips; to visit again some of my drivers. So many of those freshened memories needed to be savored, to be touched in my mind for a few minutes. So often those memories reminded me of another time, of another driver, of another scene from some other trip and I would spend half an hour trying to find my notes on that trip as well.

So by being lost in the past - delightfully so - I have had less energy and perhaps less need to dream of the upcoming trip. I am not sure what the next step in the process should be. I suspect that my just over 117,000 (150 single spaced pages) is far too long and now I will need to spend hours going through it, chopping/deleting those delightful and important memories. And of course this trip will generate a whole new set of images to be savored in the future.

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....