Holiday day 13 (March 14th) Third full day aboard.
The wilderness to Edmonton to Jasper, 17 hours behind schedule
Time is starting to play tricks on me. Not only are we passing through time zones and changing clocks, but the itinerary no longer matches the days, let alone the hours. Our list of arrival times at various locations doesn’t fit with where we are, and I have a strange feeling I’m on the wrong day. However, according to the timestamps on my photos, our third full day on the train (and the fourth and last night) saw us stop at Edmonton and reach Jasper at 23.00 that night, instead of 06.30 that morning. It doesn’t help that my phone hadn’t coped well with the changing time zones and although the clock updated, the time stamp and other time-related functions didn’t. One of my images shows the time as being ten in the evening when the picture was taken in daylight. Anyway, I am pretty sure that the third full day on the train was spent heading towards Edmonton where Neil hoped to meet his cousin, and then on to Jasper, and we were running something like 15 hours late. When we did arrive at Jasper, we were 17 hours behind schedule, and one of the reasons for this was, unsurprisingly, trains.
I don’t mean to bring up Harvey and the Detainers again, but I must because freight had a lot to do with the ever-increasing distance between scheduled arrival and actual. Basically, we had to wait for the drag to go past.
Freight takes priority over tourists on this busy and vital rail line between west and east coast, and when a freight train is coming the other way, the passenger train must give way, pull into a siding and wait. You may be used to the trains in the UK or wherever passing each other, and they tend to happen with a whoosh and a vacuum between carriages and passing truck, everything rattles for a bit and then it’s over. Not so out in the wilderness or, later, through the mountains. When a freight load is coming at you, they saunter past at a sedate speed apparently having all the time in the world to get wherever they’re going. There’s nothing to do but count the number of cars. As some of these slow-moving trains (known as ‘drags’) are two miles long, you’re usually well asleep by the time you get to thirty as it’s a bit like counting sheep.
Whatever, we weren’t in a hurry, and although the shifting schedule made for impossible planning (and Neil never was able to meet his cousin), we weren’t in any hurry. Vancouver would still be there when we arrived.
What do you to do for a whole day on a train with only minimal fuelling and supply-pickup stops? Well, there was jigsaw action happening in the saloon, and anyone was welcome to drop by, put in a piece and help it along. When we finally did leave the train in Vancouver, it was complete bar three missing pieces, which I thought was rather sad,
The scenery that had started out as snow and trees became snow and fields, and at one point, we sped through a near white-out.
The conditions changed fairly rapidly, so sometimes we were looking at grey and other times, white, with occasional bursts of wintery sky and cloud, trees, of course, and frozen rivers.
We were passing through or near places with familiar names but in unfamiliar landscapes and others with unfamiliar names but in what was by then, a very familiar landscape. Between Saskatoon in Saskatchewan and Edmonton in Alberta, on the map at least, you can find Battleford and Cut Knife before passing close to Maidstone, and further west, Paradise Valley. On to Viking, Bruce and Ryley which sounds like it should be someone’s title, ‘Have I introduced you to the Viking, Bruce Riley?’ Actually, if you zoom into Google Maps as I am doing, searching for the actual rail route with no success, you find that Holden and Poe come between Bruce and Ryley, another suitable name for a character. ‘This is my friend, Holden Poe…’ Somewhere beyond our windows and the snow-covered fields, lay Beaverhill, which sounded like something from The Hobbit, as did Adrossan, and either side of them, North Cooking Lake and the South Cooking Lake. I wonder how they got their names? Oh, and slightly further to the south-west of Edmonton, not far from the airport, you can spend some time in Devon.
All these places are on the map, but we didn’t see any of them, or if we did, we didn’t know it. The day was mainly about looking out of windows, chatting, watching people do a jigsaw and drinking tea. There were, of course, the meals to look forward to starting with brunch.
One of the policies on the VIA Rail Canadian is that you have no set place for meals, apart from in the dining car, that is. You arrive, and the maître d’ shows you to a table which you share with another couple. If you’re on your own, you may end up sharing with a couple or another single, and a couple will be sat with you later, or… Well, you get the picture. No-one dines alone, but if you’re a group of four, you’re not split up. This can lead to all manner of unlikely dinner guests and conversations. We spent lunch with two of the trainspotters who, when they discovered we didn’t know our 4-6-0- Wheel arrangements from our GE U18B baby goat locomotives and had no idea what a cinder dick was, they kept their own company, and we enjoyed an angle-cock free meal.
I have to pop over to a siding here as I scroll through an American railways glossary, agog at some of the wonderful terminology. For example, did you know that a small locomotive is called a dinky? (Bless, sounds rather cute.) Or that, in the manner of filleting a fish, one can also filet a double-stack container to a single-stack? A Gandy dancer isn’t, as you might think, Neil in full flow, but a track maintenance worker in the USA and a hack isn’t a writer like me, but a caboose (also known as a brake van, way car, end-of-train-device and, more alarmingly, a flashing rear-end). If you want to go slightly more bizarre, then how about knowing your mother is a locomotive paired with a slug, itself a locomotive with or without an operator’s cab which lacks a diesel engine… Can’t see the point of slugs, no operator, no engine…
It gets better. It seems that SpongeBob isn’t a popular cartoon character, after all. It’s a Rebuilt CSX SD40 locomotive with a yellow nose and nose-mounted headlight, something I am sure you already knew. Among this fascinating glossary, I came across some everyday items which demanded further investigation. Toasters, (EMD AEM-7 and ABB ALP-44 locomotives), toupees (single stack trains coming from reduced clearance territory with additional containers placed on top for the rest of its trip; the opposite of filet), and a screaming thunderbox (another locomotive that goes by the catchy name of EMD F40PH). In my opinion, no home is complete without a screaming thunderbox, and a man is not dressed without his Thunder Pumpkin.
There are so many delicious words and terms in this glossary, I could go on for hours about black widows and bluebirds, cabbages and catfish, or hoggers and mating worms, but I won’t. The couple of railfans beside us that lunchtime had clearly digested the entire ‘Railway Enthusiasts Dictionary of Cant and Other Arcane Language.’ So much so, I can only describe them as FRMs, or if you want it spelt out, F***ing Rail Nuts – and yes, that is an official term according to Wiki.
But at least there was pudding.
Onwards, into the afternoon, with the scenery becoming less rural as we approached Edmonton, occasionally stopping to get in touch with fresh air and freezing temperatures, and ever westwards towards our next pitstop.
These pitstops were not just for fuel and fags. There was a chap towards the front of the train with his massive hound who, when not sleeping in its vast cage, was being otherwise well behaved. It looked forward to a good walk when we did stop for fifteen minutes, or as good a walk as it could get in that amount of time.
Other passengers boarded, mainly front-enders who were hopping between one town and another, and as they embarked, so some of our American friends disembarked to make their own way home. They were cutting short their trip because of the ever-circulating news about possible border closures, rising numbers, and the possible need to quarantine. News of the outside world wasn’t exactly viral if you will excuse the term, but news of the virus was filtering in. Keith, the tour manager, made regular announcements, assuring us we were still going to make it to Vancouver and nothing there was yet closed, and our flights were not being cancelled as some were, so we had nothing to worry about. As I said, there was nothing we could do about it anyway, so there was no point in worrying.
Afternoon rest times were taken in the cabin for the sake of actually using it for something other than sleeping, and we trundled ever-closer to Edmonton.
There was a slightly longer stop there, though not the three-hours as stated on the original itinerary, and not at 20.50 on day… whatever, but according to my photo time stamp, 22.15 but in broad daylight, as you can see.
Actually, and others will correct me if I am wrong, I think it might have been late afternoon, as we didn’t stop for long and we reached Jasper at 23.00 that night, and the estimated time between the two places was six hours.
We said goodbye to Chance at Edmonton, wished him well and wondered how he would get on with the temporary reset of his life. We had time to explore the station concourse, which took all of ten minutes, most of that time spent investigating vending machines and sanitising hands as hand-san was everywhere by then.
And then, it was back on the train and dinner.
We had meals with members of our party, but one was spent in the company of a French-Canadian lady who spoke no English (and why should she?), and who behaved like a duchess. Conversation was had in the manner of someone pressing a teabag with a spoon, and my school French came back to me in waves of Greek.
It’s happened before. When in France for my uncle’s funeral, having lived in Greece for only two years, I went into a shop to buy something trivial and used five words to ask for it. Three words came out in Greek, one in English and the other in French, even though I had constructed the sentence in French in my head, rehearsed it and thought I knew what I was asking for. At least I got it, though, and similarly, our dinner conversation was, in part, understood. It left me with a headache as all French lessons at school did, and I’m not sure if there was a little Latin thrown in by accident, there were certainly lots of hand gestures.
And so, that evening (I think) we climbed through the night and into the Canadian Rockies. While journeying towards Jasper and the next stop – that we were determined not to miss even though it meant staying up until after midnight – we spent time with some of our party in the saloon. In this photo, you have a rare sighting of Harvey (right), he of the Detainers fame. You can tell it’s him, he’s wearing his red lanyard with pride, and, in this photo, being usually quiet about running boards and slack action.
And then, finally, we arrived at Jasper and our first sight of the Rockies, except we couldn’t see them in the dark. You know you’re in Jasper when you are told to…
As we weren’t wandering far from the station because as we only had 60-minutes, we didn’t need bear spray, and the shops were closed anyway. A few pubs were open, and we headed for the nearest to find it was welcoming on all levels…
Inside, we had time for one glass of wine, and just enough time for Neil to interview a local chap about God knows what while our glasses demisted, and we enjoyed the brief change of scenery.
That guzzle was followed by a chilly walk back to the station…
That’s condensation, by the way, nothing else, not even the perfectly legal happy-smoke that was everywhere. Neil interviewed a random woman in a glamorous (fake) fur coat, but I can’t remember exactly why or what about, we had a laugh, froze our thunder pumpkins off, and headed back to the station. On the way, we pressed our faces to the window of Buffalo Betty’s Gift Store, wondering how she got her name and then crossed the road to the railway station.
There, the train was rather majestically waiting for us. Not quite the Orient Express, but still romantic.
It was after midnight as we waited in the ticket hall with people who had been waiting for a train they expected 17 hours earlier, but it was a friendly, chatty place, mainly because Canadians all seem to be friendly and chatty, and devilishly polite too, something I might remember to mention in a couple of days when we’re in Vancouver. For now, though, it’s off to bed, and you may need a decent night’s sleep because tomorrow we have the Canadian Rockies to get through. Although we missed some of the mountain scenery because we were travelling through it at night, the delay meant we got to see other parts of it that passengers on that train don’t usually see. We took hundreds of photos, so rest up now, and I’ll meet you in the flashing rear-end tomorrow.
