TRTO  à MTRL (5hrs, 28mns, scheduled VIA rail)

TRTO  à MTRL (5 hrs, 30mns, scheduled, in theory, by car)

.  .  .

Only 3 minutes late leaving Union Station in Toronto, heading for Gare Centrale, Montreal.

Nothing to quibble about there. Basically a rounding error.

Now, 2 hours and 18 minutes on, watching the world go by at 150 km/hr between Belleville and Kingston. It’s unhinged how much I love travelling by train, moving at this graspably inhuman speed while daydreaming, free associating, plotting revenge on my enemies because suddenly I realize we’re only going 44 km/hr in the middle of nowhere. Why, man! Why do you have to be harshing my mellow like this?

(Breath deep, calming breaths, my friend. Relax into varying speeds. Just like life itself, conducted at varying speeds. And whatever you do, don’t think about who owns the rails you’re currently riding.)

.  .  .

It would be alright to live with your backyard facing railway tracks, I think, thundering past communities built with their backyards facing railways tracks. Would it? my rational mind queries. Sure, I respond. Being constantly reminded that there’s a big world out there, outside your window. The world’s a-turning and people are going about with their lives, to-and fro-ing. Who doesn’t want to bear witness to that 6-to-8 times a day?

.  .  .

Kingston, 2hrs, 39mns after our departure from Union Station.

Union Station, Toronto. In case you’re just joining us on our journey here.

Under 3 hours to Montreal now.

A little bit of wistful melancholy. Less than 3 hours left on today’s train trip. **sigh** What other mode of transportation that you use do you bemoan its termination? Oh yeah. That flight could’ve been a whole lot longer, you think, waiting to deboard. Oh man! I so don’t need to get out and stretch my legs, a constant refrain on long road trips in car.

Could I have made this trip quicker driving?

Probably. Yeah, likely. Depends. On traffic.

Would I be slowed to a crawl, as this train currently is, on a stretch between Kingston and Cornwall? Who knows? All travel comes with its own set of unforeseen contingencies. What I do know is that if bar service had commenced while I was driving like it just did here on the train, there’d be some frowning, disapproving killjoys getting all up in my grill about it.

Oh, look!

A squirrel!!

.  .  .

Lunch. Not at an Enroute. Not that this is haute cuisine. Roughly equivalent to an airplane meal. The bun’s just a little warmer. Perfectly serviceable, is what I’m saying without the cramped threat of juicing up the front of my shirt or my lap. No more so than if I were at home eating, and the kitchen were prone to sudden lurching. And whose kitchen isn’t?

(What am I even doing here with this? Speeding along at 130 km/hr with no hands on the wheel makes me delirious, it seems.)

Washing down whatever this really sugary confectionary dessert thing is with a robust PQ IPA which is something I rarely do at home. Or driving in my car.

.  .  .

You really get to see the backside of some places along a train’s route, don’t you. Lookit that truck depot in Prescott. What exactly is that tailings pond looking body of water outside of that industrial-looking building just past Maitland. Maitland, Ontario, that is. Swimming pools and movie stars. So, you want to live with your backyard facing the railroad tracks, do you? my rational brain reminds me. Obviously, I push back. There are backyards and then there are back yards. There’s no room for rational thinking when you’re travelling by train. Why would there be? That’s almost the entire point.

.  .  .

Not much love shown to Brockville this trip. (For those following along closely, you’ve noticed we’re geographically heading in the opposite direction than the train is actually going in, east to west rather than west to east. That’s the beauty of nonfictional speculative writing. You simply don’t have to follow that straight line from point A to point B.) The train stops in Brockville but not at the Brockville train station. Just past it. Literally, Just past it. I can look back out of my window and see the station. The train’s at a standstill for a few minutes, only occasionally pitching back and/or forth with the bumped feel of extra cars being added to it. Maybe there are so many people getting onto the train at Brockville that they had to add extra cars to accommodate them? I think, not at all convincingly, even to myself. There’s nobody waiting to get on the train at Brockville. Do Brockvillians not travel? Don’t travel by train? Don’t travel east by train? Conversely or contrastingly, take your pick, does no one travel to Brockville? If not, why not? Or perhaps, it dawns on me, both conversely and contrastingly, maybe those who travel to/from Brockville don’t like to be seen travelling to and/or from Brockville, so they board the train away from the station, surreptitiously, on the sly, in order to avoid getting the neighbours riled up and the local gossips’ tongues a-wagging. What the fuck is wrong with Brockville? I wonder.

Skipping ahead,

likewise, at Cornwall—unlike Brockville—announced as an official stop, the train pulls up at what looks to be a non-station. Just in the middle of eastern Ontario scrubland. Another clandestine all-board? I don’t know. Isn’t this how those hostage/heist movies start? Inexplicable stops in the middle of nowhere, allowing nefarious terrorist/kidnappers to skulk onto the train in order to spring their nefarious plots on unsuspecting passengers? That’s definitely something that could happen in eastern Ontario.

.  .  .

Spies vehicles driving the 401 off in the distance while the train does 160 km/hr.

HAHA! FUCKERS! TAKE THAT!!

.  .  .

We cross the Ontario-Quebec border slowing down nearly 30 km/hr, from 140 to about 112. I wonder if that’s a jurisdictional thing, trains having to go slower in Quebec than in Ontario. That seems impossible to imagine although I realize mine may be a dated mindset. You see, when and where I was growing up, the belief was that Quebec drivers were far more aggressive than their Ontario counterparts. Speeding, tailgating, dangerous overtakings on hairpin turns. (“They’ve got more European blood in them,” my grandmother whispers to me by way of an explanation. “Lusty drivers, those Frenchmen.”) Of course, I drive in Toronto in 2026. Absolutely none of this, if it were ever true, is now applicable. Toronto drivers are the worst drivers I’ve ever had the displeasure to drive amongst. Bar none. No question. End of discussion. Without any of the lustiness.

Which is one of the reason I am on a train, going to Montreal. Going only at 94 km/hr. In the Quebec countryside. And I want to know why.

.  .  .

Listening to Rostram’s American Stories (ironically, if I’m using the word correctly which I rarely do, even with the album’s upside down Stars’n’Stripes cover design) while looking out the window at harvested Quebecois farmland, going 125 km/hr is a pretty sublime way to travel, to experience life.

Is all I’ll say.

For now.

.  .  .

We’re 10 minutes west of the Dorval station at 2:01pm. I suspect the veracity of our scheduled 2:00pm arrival at Gare Centrale in Montreal unless we go for broke and pick the pace up to slightly more than the speed of light and start travelling back in time. Which would be brilliant although there are no seat belts in sight and having just eaten lunch, that could get kind of messy. Still. Who doesn’t want to experience moving faster than the speed of light sometime in their life?

A guy can dream.

But you know what?

I don’t care. Not really.

I want to stay on this train forever. I want it to keep going. Never stop. Not even so much as a Brockville stop. Just plow on through, right past the rest of the province of Quebec and into the Maritimes. I want there to be a bridge, not only to PEI but to Newfoundland and Labrador too. I want there to be a chunnel under the Atlantic so I can ride this train all the way to Europe, maybe Africa. Why not Africa? since we’re dreaming big. I want to ride this train until it makes a direct connection to the Orient Express. All the way to Istanbul.

I have been day drinking. On a train. From Toronto’s Union Station to Montreal’s Gare Centrale. And we’re only going to be a little late.

.  .  .

45 minutes late, to be exact. Not the nightmare scenario Via delivers up to its passengers on too regular a basis, it seems. Regular enough that people avoid taking the train because, well, you never know, do you. Dependability and all that. It isn’t the rail system a 21^st-century country should be operating through its most populous corridor.

Still,

today I can’t complain. (And who would listen if I did? I crack wise to myself for no particular reason.) Sometimes, just sometimes, the fun of getting away doesn’t have to start upon arrival. It’s the journey not the destination, yeah? If half they fun is getting to where you’re going, then that’s half the battle. Or something. I don’t care. I just spent 6 hours or so on a train. There are worse ways, far worse ways, to idle away your life.

And like that, I am in Montreal.