The Rail Way

Not Even a Wayward Moose Can Ruin The Trip for 'Train People' in Canada

As in most cases where people sit cooped up for long periods with little to do, rumors travel quickly on a train. In my experience, they generally start at the back, in, say, the glass-lined sightseeing car that serves as VIA Rail Canada's caboose. From there they quickly work their way forward, through the fancy sleeper cars and then the less-fancy sleeper cars, to the dining car, to the cafe car and then to the comfort-class car, where, despite the name, passengers are given a pillow and footrest and little else.

When a rumor at last arrives at the conductor, 18 cars and iterations later, it typically goes something like this: Our train, the Ocean, is stopped here in the middle of nowhere at 7 a.m. because a moose wandered onto an adjacent track and was struck by a fast-moving freight train. Dying, the moose staggered a bit, and then, in a kind of death lunge, threw itself onto the Ocean's track, coming to rest antlers-up.

If true, this was significant. Antlers-up is one of the few ways a moose can damage a passenger train, it turns out. Usually such encounters end with the doomed animal being obliterated without anyone noticing; or, as one man in the glass caboose put it, "You hear a bump and somebody says, 'What was that?' and you think maybe it was a bump but maybe it was a moose."

But antlers-up is something else. If the Ocean rolls over antlers, "they could break air lines and electrical lines under the train," said a man named Freddy, a Rail Canada engineer who happened to be on vacation with his wife.

Around this time Bob wandered into the conversation, a barefoot American in a bathrobe seeking coffee in the caboose. This was his second time taking the Ocean from Montreal to Halifax. He deposited himself next to Freddy, and soon the car was filled with bleary-eyed passengers in various states of dress, all of them wondering why the train hadn't moved in more than an hour: the pair of retiree couples from Michigan, the smartly dressed man from Miramichi, the German guys who apparently do nothing but travel the world in search of the best train rides they can find.

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Among the other rumors we'd heard was that passenger train service is experiencing something of a renaissance in North America, thanks to the triple threat of high gasoline prices, epic dissatisfaction with the airline industry and a world situation that almost demands a retreat into nostalgia. Indeed, more than 28 million people have ridden Amtrak trains in the past year, the most in the line's history, and VIA Rail Canada, its north-of-the-border counterpart, is experiencing its own ridership increase. This renaissance is no rumor.

"People take a plane to get someplace as fast as they can," Ron Doiron told me. "People who take trains aren't interested in that."

Doiron's declaration sounded innocuous enough to my ears, but to inveterate train people -- namely, the caboose crowd -- they were full of code. Plane people "are the ones who created the mess the world's in now," confided a woman in French, drawing some sort of connection between the headiness of Wall Street and the speed of air travel. The upshot: If Wall Street had been run by train people, they'd know that life is about the journey and not the destination, that life isn't about only the heedless pursuit of goals but also the avoidance of collateral damage.

And so we sat, waiting for them to clear the moose.

I liked Doiron, especially his job. Unbelievable as it may sound, Rail Canada employs a "learning coordinator" on some of its trains, a plaid-vested chap who is something of a cross between a pedant and a concierge. For those passengers with the means to afford Rail Canada's Easterly class, the trip includes sleeping accommodations, meals and, best of all, access to that caboose, where stairs lead to a second-floor observation dome, a thrilling conservatory on wheels. There Doiron would serve champagne and hold court, regaling us with stories of the struggles between the British and Acadian French, while the Ocean wound its way through forests of sumac and sugar maple, their leaves a hundred brilliant colors on this equally brilliant October afternoon.

Our journey had begun the night before, the Ocean having left Montreal's Gare Centrale at precisely 6:45 for its northeastern trek across Quebec. Dinner was served immediately in the dining car, a handsome beige room where there was a tablecloth and lamp for each of the 16 tables and where I got my taste of both whiskey-infused salmon and the Ocean rumor mill. The Canadian stock market was in danger of imminent collapse, maybe, and all because "70 percent of our exports go to America," said one man in between forkfuls of braised short ribs. Somebody else had heard that 401(k) accounts would soon be "frozen," but that was okay because there was hardly anything left to freeze. Eventually, however, as the lights of Montreal receded and the landscape became dotted with fewer and fewer porch lights, thoughts slowly turned away from journey's end to just plain journey.