Christmas & New Year on the train - part three

In Vancouver I stay at a quirky old hotel on English Bay. Built in 1912 and covered in Virginia Creeper, the Sylvia was the tallest building in the West End until the 1950s.

Its main claim to fame is as the home of Vancouver’s first cocktail bar serving the likes of writer Malcolm Lowry and actor Errol Flynn. I suspect my parents were also among its early patrons.

My rooms face out onto the bay and its beach with a view of ships waiting to enter Vancouver harbour.

With only thirty hours, lots to do. My first stop is not the normal tourist destination. As a child, a favorite place was a Vancouver institution, the old White Spot restaurant on Granville. If I was lucky, my parents would submit to eating in the car rather than the dining room. Car hops brought orders on metal trays that fitted across the seats. I always ordered ‘chicken in straw’. Here’s part of the menu from the time.

The original White Spot – along with its ‘treasure chest’ for well-behaved children – burned down in the 80s, so I head to one downtown. Not as atmospheric and no ‘Chicken in straw’, but I have a reasonably good ‘Wild Pacific Salmon Burger’.

It may say something for my age and state-of-mind, but my one souvenir from Vancouver is a history of the White Spot that I managed to find in a secondhand bookstore.

Speaking of souvenirs, I wander into the Winter Olympics merchandising section of the (Hudson’s) Bay, a major Canadian retail chain. Vast. It takes up most of the department store’s considerable main floor and customers waving credit cards and cash are being steered into special queues to increase the Bay’s profit margins.

Visiting Vancouver a little over two months before the Olympics is proximity enough for me. I have a reduced rate for the hotel, easily get tables in restaurants and empty taxis are a dime a dozen. I guarantee you it'll be different in February.

Here’s the Olympics countdown clock and – unusual for a modest nation – one of the biggest Canadian flags I’ve ever seen.

In Vancouver, I wander in a state of mild melancholy (or perhaps it's the west coast damp). No relatives or friends now here, but, like many, I am drawn to the place of my birth and formative years.

Of course, Stanley Park is always on the agenda. This shot is taken near the park entrance looking across to the sails of Canada Place.

Nearby, at Lost Lagoon, I find this park bench decorated for Christmas, just sitting there unvandalized.

We didn’t live in this part of the city, but I love Vancouver’s West End with its eclectic mixture of architecture. Many of the apartment buildings are only three or four floors, some with – by conservative Toronto standards – wildly adventurous colour combinations.

I also make a pilgrimage to the elegant Marine Building, an art deco classic inspired by New York's Chrysler Building. As you can see below, in my day, at twenty-one floors high, it was one of the city’s landmarks.

Now, from some angles, it’s almost lost.

Another old favorite is the wonderful, 1912 Vancouver Sun building, once the tallest in the British Empire. It's redolent of linotype presses, Remington typewriters and grizzled reporters filling the newsroom with smoke.

And finally, some Vancouver neon. Even the staid Sylvia has it. Why doesn’t Toronto have decent neon?

Christmas & New Year on the train - part two

0945 Christmas morning and we’re in Foleyet, Ontario. Boy, is it quiet. No sign of life other than us. Not even a dog barking.

For a confirmed city dweller, the solitude is a bit unnerving, although my pained expression is perhaps more result of the cold.

In the afternoon, we’re in Hornepayne, another isolated settlement. As we’re running early, we have nearly three hours to explore. This is the main street.

I talk with a Hornepayne resident. The population, she says, is declining and all the kids want to do is leave. What do young people do for entertainment? “Make out at the gravel pit.”

I like this ‘sled parking’ sign.

Bar a few passersby in pickups, a large part of Hornepayne’s population seemed to be testing out new toboggans on the hill above the train.

One of the VIA attendants – on the right in this shot – ‘borrowed’ a tray from the dining car and turned it into a temporary sled.

A few hours later, the usual Christmas dinner is followed by traditional railway plum pudding. Just enough Christmas for my liking.

Boxing Day in Winnipeg and seriously cold. Even the local VIA employees say it’s cold, but, being a know-it-all Torontonian, I’m determined to get to the corner of Portage and Main, reputed to be the coldest intersection in Canada. Here’s Portage Avenue at 0930 with hardly a car in sight.

And people in the few nice, warm cars are likely laughing at the idiot, freezing tourist taking a self-portrait.

Taken a few hours later while thawing out in my cozy bedroom. This is Portage La Prairie and a reminder of the small town railway stations which once, with their local chitchat, potbelly stoves and telegraph agents, were at centre of so many communities. Happily, this one has been saved.

December 27 sunrise over the Prairie. As at sea, the best part of the day on a train is the very early morning.

Overnight snow has accumulated between the cars, which makes walking to the dining car a series of quick and chilly dashes.

A memory from childhood is of lying in my berth listening to the locomotive’s whistle in the night and the clanging of railway crossing signals.

Later, as the plains go on and on, I listen to my iPod on which, among much else, there are seventeen podcasts of Garrison Keillor's 'The News from Lake Woebegon'. Wonderful for travelling.

Nightfall west of Edmonton.

In its heyday, the Canadian was a crack express and freight trains gave way. Now, freights have priority. The train was running very late, so the Rockies were crossed in darkness, which for those only going one way defeats the purpose of the trip. In another post I’ll hope to have pictures from my return. For the time being, I’ll cheat and include one shot from a previous journey in 2005. This was taken just east of Jasper.

Christmas & New Year on the train – part one

That’s me with a porter when my parents and I were travelling on the ‘Canadian’. In the 1950s it was one of the world’s most luxurious trains. We lived in Vancouver and often crossed Canada to visit family in New Brunswick.

Dad would take two double bedrooms connected to create a suite. It really was first class, a train on which one dressed – even I wore a jacket and tie – for dinner. I remember the chief steward greeting my parents by name, escorting us to our places and fresh flowers floating in bowls on the dining car tables. The Canadian was so stylish that Vogue magazine devoted virtually an entire issue to the streamlined pride of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR).

The picture below – the original came from Canadian Pacific’s archives for one of my television stories – shows the train’s bar. Although obviously posed, it does give a sense of what the Canadian was like more than half a century ago – high heels, furs, cocktails and cigarettes.

For a small boy, the trip was a wonderful lesson, an early introduction to the history, size and variety of my country. I treated the train as a playground, was allowed in those days to wander off, no doubt getting under everybody’s feet until Dad came to administer discipline. I have hugely happy memories of the Canadian.

This past Christmas and New Year, I was supposed to be circling the world on a freighter. Then pirates attacked ‘my’ ship. Alternative plans for the Philippines in December and January fell apart and, unable to book late, I couldn’t accept an invitation for Christmas with friends in Puerto Rico. As so often in the past, kind friends wanted me to join them and the family in Toronto, but I decided not to terrify the grandchildren.

What to do? At the last minute, I was able to single book a double bedroom on the Canadian. I decided to escape Christmas and spend four nights riding out to Vancouver, a night there and four nights back to Toronto.

Union Station on Christmas Eve is very nearly deserted with only one or two trains still to arrive and just the Canadian - Train No. 1 - to depart. I like getting to the station early to savour the journey.

No security check; no passport and immigration; no heaving airports, uncomfortable planes and worrisome connections; no missing luggage. (All this, of course, was in advance of the added complications caused by the attempted attack on the aircraft landing at Detroit.) Just an empty platform and cars – still stylish after more than half a century – again about to cross much of the continent.

In the observation car, seasonal goodies, hot cider, canapés and sparkling wine await sleeping car passengers.

At 2200 the Canadian pulls out under Toronto’s CN Tower. For awhile we watch Christmas lights, then city becomes country, the lights dwindle and most head for their berths.

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Two years ago I was on a tall ship in the South Pacific. Last year I was on the Amazon. This Christmas morning I’m in northern Ontario. Ten passenger cars, one baggage car, two locomotives. Thirty-seven passengers in all. Click on the picture and try to spot the forward dome.

After bacon and eggs, a small - but thoughtful - Christmas present of chocolates and VIA logo stuff, time to reacquaint myself with the train.

First though, here’s my cabin, a room meant for two. Fine for one, but with two you’d have to be very happily married – or desperately in love – to get along for four nights in these tight quarters.

Virtually the same as when I was a boy, although passengers nowadays must wonder about the mysterious small compartment in which you once placed shoes for the porter to shine.

One improvement which I didn't much miss when a child – showers.

Here’s the rear observation car decorated with flashing Christmas lights.

The stairs leading to the dome. With self-service coffee thermoses and now obligatory - although often blindingly obvious - safety notices, not quite as elegant as once. Still, an oasis of restrained calm by comparison with most modern modes of transportation.

Christmas morning in the dome. The couple on the left are from Washington, DC, and the pair on the right from Toronto and off to Vancouver Island to get married.

Below the dome is a bar – the mural lounge, so named for the painting (one of sixteen for sixteen cars). The original paintings, commissioned when the train was launched in the 1950s, were of the national parks after which each rear dome car is named. Eventually, wear, tear and cigarette smoke led to the paintings’ replacement. Smoking isn’t allowed now, but the new paintings – to my mind not half so appropriate – are well protected in sealed frames.

The paintings may be new, but the marvellous, original etched glass remains.

This is part of the coffee shop in the forward dome car.

Dining on the CPR – announced by a waiter with chimes – really was something, right down to the silver finger bowls. VIA’s dining service plumbed gastronomic depths in the 1980s, something I unhappily experienced. However, the standard of catering has vastly improved with emphasis on Canadian regional foods and wines. The dining cars – and meals are included for those in sleeping cars – are still quite lovely, although travellers certainly no longer ‘dress’ for dinner. I’ve seen not a single tie.

The dining cars also retain their wonderful glass with representations of Canadian birds.

On my occasional trips, I enjoy reacquainting myself with the Canadian’s details – the fluted stainless steel exterior; the rear lounge’s drink stands with long unused matchbook holders; the curved and illuminated Lucite railings leading to the domes with their stylish 50’s armrests.

In my next post, across Northern Ontario, the Prairie and into the Rockies.