Another morning. The news now is that we'll hit Kamloops about 11:30 (though at least one person on the crew has been saying 11:15), then four to five hours on the bus to get us to Vancouver. I do the math, and wonder how rush-hour traffic is heading into Vancouver.
 |
| Scenery from the train |
| 1200x1600(228k) |
We've finally got some good views of the scenery, but it being early morning in B.C., there's a fair amount of fog in the valleys, and since the train mostly runs in valleys....
The gang in the bar-car has changed dynamics a bit. One of the more outgoing guys was a hockey coach from Edmonton, who got off the train about 8pm last night. The rest of us got to make phone calls from there (there was decent cellular coverage), and actual phones at the station, rather than nothing like there was in Saskatoon (since the train usually hits Saskatoon in the middle of the night, there are no longer any payphones in the station there - apparently there were forty or fifty people lined up to use a single cell-phone).
We've also lost a few of the bar-car gang at Jasper, which was a long stop about 4 in the morning. They spent some time taking some cars out of the train, which I'm not so sure about, since they'll probably have to put them back in on the return trip, and why waste the time here? Nobody has an answer for that one.
The word is that we'll get a ten percent cash refund or a voucher good for another trip on VIA for being so late. That's not making anyone especially happy, either.
Another interesting bit of group dynamics -- for whatever reason, I seem to have become the person in charge of sweet-talking Jen, who's serving us in the bar-car. When someone wants some special treatment, I get asked about it first, and then usually get asked to present the request to Jen. I've had fairly good luck too, but that may be because I've turned down the more outrageous requests up front.
A problem trying to take pictures out of the train windows here in the mountains is that the train was last washed in Toronto. The windows are pretty dirty at this point. Plus most seats in the Silver & Blue section (first class - which all the sleeping accomodations are) don't have that good of views. There's the dome above the bar in the bar-car which has some pretty good views, but that fills up pretty quickly. There's also the constant motion of the train, which means that without bright light (remember that fog?), slow shutter speeds mean blurry pictures.
It's interesting to see how difficult it actually is to get from first class to coach. I'd read somewhere that the way to travel on VIA was to sleep in first class and ride in coach. But our train is so long (29 cars, plus 3 engines), that it's quite a walk to get to coach. I'm on the second-to-last car in the train (the last one being the bar-car), so it'd be at least a dozen sleepers to navigate through to get up to the cheap seats. There's an explanation for Elizabeth, who was wondering in the terminal at Winnipeg why so few people from first class made it forward to coach. On a more normal run it might be possible to make the walk on the outside of the train at one of the longer stops, but because we're so wildly off schedule, those have been in the middle of the night. And the train's long enough that the only station so far where the whole train has fit on the platform at once was Edmonton last night.
Here's the rundown on the gang in the bar-car:
- The hockey coach from Edmonton, eh. He's been the most vocal and has been talking to a few people in the crew, so he usually has pretty good information. And a good sense of humor.
- The two ladies who hang out in the booth. They claimed that spot early on, and are fixtures there.
- Jane, the English gal. She's a mom of 15 and 18 year old boys.
- There's a woman whose husband's a surgeon. He spends most of his time either up in the dome or in their room reading a book.
- The woman from Florida (originally New York) who's widowed. She was with the tour that got off in Jasper.
- The father (retired) and daughter (a nurse) who I met in Winnipeg when we were first told the train would be late and who are from Minneapolis, too.
- Another couple who got on at Winnipeg (a lot of us met while waiting in the station for the train) who are from northern Wisconsin. The husband smokes stogies.
- And Jen, our bartender.
Of the lot, I'm either youngest or nearly so. I wonder if maybe that's why I've been chosen to wheedle favors out of Jen, since she's in her early 20s.
 |
| Getting on the Bus |
| 1600x1200(214k) |
We finally roll into Kamloops about noon. It's about 12:30 before the back half of the train pulls up to the platform and we can get out. I suspect we're going to miss the noon bus-departure for Vancouver, and we don't end up pulling out until 13:20. But then we have to stop at a Husky station to get some food. The original plan was for someone on the crew to make sandwiches for us to eat while on the bus. But we've got most of the crew on our bus, including the chef, and he didn't make any sandwiches. Turns out there either were none, or they went with one of the buses that left with the people from the front half of the train. The other bus from our half of the train went hungry.
The most annoying thing so far has been the fact that nobody seems to have known what was going to happen. There were rumors floating around the train (and I supplied more than a few of them after having talked to Deion (my porter, that's him on the left in the picture of us getting on the bus) or another member of the staff), but there were very few statements of what was actully happening and it wasn't until Edmonton that we were given an estimate for our arrival time in Vancouver that was less than six hours off the eventual reality (it was still off by a couple hours).
Originally we were supposed to leave Winnipeg at 1am. We actually pulled out at 6:23. The reported reason was that one of the engines was suspected of having problems with its brakes, so it had to be swapped out, and there wasn't a replacement ready. I'm all for having a safe train, but someone could have explained that to us, rather than just letting us sit in Winnipeg for four hours wondering why we weren't moving. Most folks were asleep, but there were a fair number in the bar-car and another group in the dining car who were sitting up waiting for the train to leave the station.
Then we were told we were going to make up some of the time crossing the prairies. Well, I have a rough idea of how trains are scheduled, and my suspicion was that we'd end up losing even more time as we made way for other trains that were still on-schedule. Turns out that was the case, but nobody from VIA seemed willing to give us that information (or even tell our crew).
Next we were supposed to be able to make phone calls from Saskatoon to change any arrangements we needed to. You'd think someone would check to make sure there's a phone at the station before telling us we could make calls from there.
We sat longer than expected
in Jasper again, as cars were removed from the train. Again, we weren't told about it in advance, nor were we ever really given an explanation.
 |
| Stuck in traffic in Vancouver |
| 1600x1200(169k) |
Finally, we were supposed to get to Kamloops at 11:15, then 4 hours on the bus, getting us to Vancouver around 3. Turns out it was noon before we pulled in, and the platform was only half as long as the train, so we had to get off in two steps. Our bus (the last one) didn't pull out until 13:20, plus we spent ten minutes getting the food that we were supposed to have, which put us right through rush-hour traffic (which included construction that started today). The Service Manager for the train should have known that and we should have been informed. I felt as though VIA were treating us like mushrooms (keep 'em in the dark, and feed 'em shit) the whole way along, and talking with the crew on the bus with us, they had the same feeling.
Personally, I wasn't that upset by it all. I kinda figured as soon as we left Winnipeg almost 14 hours late that we weren't going to make Vancouver until the evening of the 20th, rather than the 8am that was originally scheduled. As soon as I had decent cell-phone reception I called ahead to cancel the dinner I had planned for tonight and reschedule it to Saturday. But why didn't VIA ever tell us the plan? Pretty poor customer service from a company whose entire business boils down to customer service.
Previous day -- Vacation 2002 -- Next day