The Joy of the Journey

I was browsing through the Winter 2010 edition of “Going Places”, the CAA Manitoba magazine, and an article about train travel drew my attention.  “Trains-formers” by award winning author and journalist Charles Montgomery (www.charlesmontgomery.ca) eloquently expressed my own thoughts and experiences with train travel.  I’ve written on that subject here already, but a writer with 14 significant awards in the last 10 years can probably say it better than I can:

For if you are ever masochistic enough to calculate your own carbon footprint, you’ll realize that flying is just about the nastiest thing you can do to the planet.  Each passenger on a transatlantic flight blows out about as much greenhouse gas as they would driving a Hummer to work for a year.

After boarding the Eurostar high speed train from London to Paris:

As I sipped my Brut…it struck me that if I had chosen to fly, I would still be en route to Heathrow. Once I reached the airport, I would then have to spend two hours being poked, prodded and herded through its infernal collection of duty-free shops, deep-fry vats and flocks of rumpled departure lounge castaways.  And if my flight left on time…I would lift off at just about the moment my 10:40 am Eurostar train was to pull into Gare du Nord in central Paris.

There is something deliciously cinematic about moving across this earth by rail.  While air travel renders the world an abstraction from 6,000 metres, rail is inherantly voyeuristic, offering peeks through the world’s back door.

This next quote, better than any other, sums up my experience and feelings with long-distance train travel.  After two days on a train, I’m not weary or fatigued.  The only disappointing thing is that the journey is over, and it’s time to get off. 

I have a friend, a climate worrier, who decided to take the train from Vancouver to a job in Texas, even though the patchwork journey would take him the better part of a week.  He insists he had a marvellous time.  The trip was transforming, “like a dream.”  And he thought, deeply.

Via Rail’s Canadian…ambles between Toronto and Vancouver.  Yesterday’s traveller might consider the journey three days lost.  But slowness can be a virtue.  The train’s engineers are apparently so unhurried that they’ll take stop requests anywhere in the wilderness between Sudbury and Winnipeg.  Want to go wandering up the third creek east of that grey hill?  Just ask.  They’ll dump you and your backpack wherever you like and continue on their way.

I had my first experience on the Canadian when I chose to return from a business trip to Cornwall two weeks ago by train instead of by plane.  The relatively slow pace of the train did not discourage me, but quickly came to be something to rejoice in.  At one point, inching along a siding waiting for a freight train to pass, the conductor pointed out a fox watching us from beside the tracks.  Other similar pauses allowed me and my fellow travellers to drink in the beauty of the remote wilderness  through which the train travels.  Station stops allowed me to step off and see out-of-the-way places I would never otherwise experience.  Was 34 hours too long to travel from Toronto to Winnipeg?  I think it was just barely long enough.  When we booked a 2.5 day train trip to Jacksonville for our cruise in January, I must confess to being a little concerned about how long it would take.  My only regret looking back?  I wish it had been a little longer.