Passenger Trains > Troubled trip from Toronto to Vancouver

A friend and his wife left Toronto on VIA 1 The Canadian last Thursday. They got as far as Sioux Lookout where the roue was blocked by a derailment, so they were bused to Winipeg. They were given the option of flying to Vancouver or staying in Winnipeg (at VIA's expense) and catching Sunday afternoon's train to Vancouver. They chose the train of course, since that was why they were taking the trip. Sunday's VIA 1 was several hours late, but finally left town. Last word was the train made it only as far as Kamloops where the Fraser River Canyon is blocked with snow slides. So they will be bused into Vancouver. From what my friends tell me VIA handled things as well as could be expected under the circumstances, but the trip was still a big disappointment. The good news is apparently VIA will give them a voucher for another trip.

I mention this for two reasons. One, simply because it is an interesting trip report. But more importantly, I wonder if other readers here have more information about what was going on operationally with CN.....CN must be tied into knots, but I have not heard anything about it elsewhere. And were there any detour routes that could have been used.

John West

How many times you see an Amtrak cancellation due to something similar, and the dreaded message, "NO Alternate transportation provided?"

VIA gets it.

As for detours, good question. CN parallels CP through much of the territory between Winnipeg and Kamloops, and on/into Vancouver. Why they didn't detour is a good question.

AlwaysLate Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> As for detours, good question. CN parallels CP
> through much of the territory between Winnipeg and
> Kamloops, and on/into Vancouver. Why they didn't
> detour is a good question.


For the most part CP and CN parallel each other west of Kamloops mostly on opposite sides of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers. Heavy snowfall on Sunday Dec 2 followed by warm Pacific air and heavy rain have brought numerous slides of snow, rock and mud down on multiple locations on both CN and CP lines. There is no alternate route for Via to use, or any of the 60+ freight trains that run through these canyons every day.

cp1400

I might mention that my friends have been VERY complimentary of VIA, both with regard to general on train service and dealing with the problems. Yes, VIA gets it. But nevertheless a good trip turned to horse poop, but c'est la vie.

My wife and I were supposed to have been with them, but had to cancel at the last minute. What will be interesting now for me is how long it takes for VIA to issue my refund. I asked the lady at our post office how long it would take for my returned tickets to get to Montreal, and she said two days to two months. Huh? Yeah, the Canadian postal service is the second worst in the world. Second? Who's first? The Italian postal service. Oh. Well, at least the Royal Canadian Post is in friendly if not efficient company.

The detour limitation in the Fraser River canyon does not surprise me. In looking at some old maps the detour possibilities between Sioux Portage and Winnipe, if the lines still exist, appear to involve a long circuitous routing back and down to Thunder Bay. So the fact they didn't attempt that is understandable, even if they could have.

JBW

The Canadian has had a lot of problems in the last week or so thanks mostly to CN having four derailments all within a week in Northern Ontario. Having about half your trip on a bus is pretty grim especially during wintertime. I am due to leave Toronto on the 18th of this month for Vancouver, thence to Seattle on the Cascade connecting the next day with the Coast Starlight for Los Angeles. Given the recent disasters courtesty of CN and now with the mud and snow slides and flooding in the Pacific Northwest, I am quite worried if I will ever make it. A bus is simply too horrible to contemplate.

P.S. regarding the Canadian Post Office, there is no way that a first-class letter should take any more than about three days to make it from the east to the west. Perhaps that person was including the time to process your claim and not the actual delivery of the letter. Canada Post has considerably improved its service over the strike-ridden days of a few years ago.

VIA will try every effort to take care of its passengers. I've left Sioux Lookout twice in the winter and then ran into problems. So irony I guess on that one. And yes, I would expect VIA to give complimentary vouchers for a future trip on the Canadian. They are pretty good about that and giving vouchers for late trains still!

royaltrain Wrote:
>
> P.S. regarding the Canadian Post Office, there is
> no way that a first-class letter should take any
> more than about three days to make it from the
> east to the west. Perhaps that person was
> including the time to process your claim and not
> the actual delivery of the letter. Canada Post has
> considerably improved its service over the
> strike-ridden days of a few years ago.

I like how Canadians do lots of things, but the Post Office? I'll just say that last month I mailed two post cards from Quebec City to Pennsylvania and they both took 9 nine days to reach their recipients.

Dave

I have to disagree about the improvement in the Canadian Post Office as well. I have had several first-class letters from the US take more than a month to be delivered in the past year, and first-class mailings from a business I get regular mailings from in Manitoba usually take about two weeks to reach me in Ontario.

On the other hand (and adding railroad content), my tickets for a Milwaukee 261 excursion arrived here two days after they were mailed, so you just never know.

Maltby Turn out.

Amtrak has been known to cancel trains prior to their initial departure while not providing alternate transport, but I don't recall ever hearing of them doing so once the train was underway, particularly in such a remote location as the Canadian was in in this story. There's a big difference.

Regarding detours, at least in the case of the first derailment described, there aren't alot of options to get from the CN at Sioux Lookout to the CP. Not sure if the CN branch to Thunder Bay still exists, but depending on where the derailment was it may not have been an option.

Dave

DavidP Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Regarding detours, at least in the case of the
> first derailment described, there aren't alot of
> options to get from the CN at Sioux Lookout to the
> CP. Not sure if the CN branch to Thunder Bay
> still exists, but depending on where the
> derailment was it may not have been an option.

I believe that within the last couple of years, CN arranged trackage rights over CP between Thunder Bay and Franz that allowed it to rip up its own line down to Thunder Bay from Longlac. So any detour from Sioux Lookout would have had to reverse direction and travel all the way to Oba, thence down the Algoma Central to Franz, then west on the CP to Thunder Bay to regain CN rails. Way too cumbersome to contemplate, not to mention the expense of all the extra and pilot crews.

Pilot crews? For the most part, VIA engineers are ex-CN engineers. VIA would be able to get pilot crews a lot easier than Amtrak I would think.