Train in Vain

I enjoy traveling. I enjoy discovering the slight differences in an otherwise generic string of hotel rooms, in spending hours waiting for a flight, in the way the waiting just slows down your thinking and forces you to take a little time for yourself. Why I differ from your average traveler on the joys of waiting, I am not sure, though this one trip may have something to do with it.

See I once spent twelve hours traveling from Belleville, Ontario to my home in Toronto. For those of you unfamiliar with this distance let me just say that normally, on a normal train ride, you could cross this distance in slightly over an hour. I said just slightly over an hour, not just slightly over twelve hours. Through some quirk in the universe I found myself boarding a train at 7pm and getting off at 7am.

So what happened? Well I’m glad I’ve rhetorically asked myself that, see it began as soon as I had boarded the train in Belleville. No sooner I had sat down then the train started to roll backwards. And it kept going. It wasn’t just a “whoops, through that into reverse” sort of embarrassing lurch backwards before correcting it. It kept going.

A half hour later our reversing stopped. And then we just sat there, in the middle of nowhere, the nearby woods all around us just ever so slightly backlit by the moon in an intimidating ‘your screwed if you leave that train’ sort of manner. We sat there in what quickly became complete silence, after everyone on the train car exhausted looking around and going “what do you think is going on?” and the person next time them replying “I don’t know?”

Finally we got some information as the captain… is it a captain on a train? A pilot? I think it’s an engineer who drives a train… well after a quick research session of typing “who drives a train?” into Google I’m happy to report the first search result is “Brazil's president drives bullet train on private leg…” Since this about exceeds the budget for research I have hear at Confessions of a Cidiot, or really just exceeds my interest in knowing, we’ll have to go with this.

So Brazil’s president comes on the PA system, deciding to fill us in, “Hello everyone. You may have noticed we were traveling backwards there for a little bit…” he seems unsure of this statement, as if perhaps without degrees in train driving we might not have caught this little tidbit for ourselves.

“What happened is this,” continued el presidente as he went from unsure to the tone reserved for a man about to explain to his wife how he ended up smelling like stripper. “Another train broke down out here, and so we’ve, we’ve, well we’ve decided to backup so we could hook the other train onto ours and just pull it on into Toronto!” His confidence building towards the end, before adding for good measure, “so yeah, once we hook the two trains together we should be on our way.”

What our good friend the president of Brazil left out was that no one aboard his train, or that of the train behind us, knew anything about hooking two trains together. This was information that probably would’ve been good for the Prez to know ahead of time, before we say started a half hour trip away from our destination, but now it was to late and none of us 400 passengers were going anywhere until someone figured out the correct way to hook two trains together.

Of course being towards the front of the train we had little idea as to what was transpiring, the attendant in our car every few minutes bitterly informing us it would just be a couple of minutes more. For those of you unfamiliar with Canadian train customer service, each train car is staffed with one attendant who is, surprisingly and what one would assume is a physical impossibility, always a little more bitter then your average bitter flight attendant. She, and it seems to be about 80 percent of the time a she, with 15.5 percent of the time a bald man, and 4.5 percent of the time a man with hair, almost always speaks in a thick French accent. This accent always hints at being a little forced, as if in the hopes that if you think English isn’t their first language you won’t ask stupid questions like “why did you sell more tickets then seats on a train?” (It’s happened) or the more timely “why have we spent two hours on a train and are only further away from our destination then when we started?”

Traveling by train in Canada makes you appreciate flying, in ways you thought not possible in this day and age of liquid fearing, pay us if you want your in-flight meal, and we’ll have to run a background check on you before we give you the plastic knife, airline service.

People began to grow restless, our female attendant and the bald male attendant from a few cars up who had come to help her out began fielding questions from every person missing a connecting train, bus or plane, every person who had a special event to go to that night, or just anyone who didn’t think spending the night in a train not built for overnight service was a fun idea.

“What’s going on?” was the standard question. The attendants sighed (forcing them to interact with a passenger is really asking a lot) before launching into the fact we’d only be a few minutes longer.

The true answer went something more like this: the diligent engineers at the back of the train, with their handy tools for the job, one watt key chain flashlights and all, had finally identified why the concept of hooking one train to another was just so darn tricky. The train from Montreal, the one that had broken down, had at some point along the way collided with a deer. The key clamp that would secure their train to ours was now buried deep under a pile of White Tailed Carcass.

But again we didn’t know all this up in our car. Instead we were greeted with our own personal bad news; the train was out of food to sell us. Well they weren’t completely out of food, but as the bald attendant tried to explain in thick accented English when pressed on the issue, “well, we are not totally out of food, but we do not have enough for everyone, and so we will not sell any of it to anyone. It’s only fair.” The man’s reasoning was not greeted with as much understanding as he seemed to be expecting, perhaps had he explained to us about the mush formally known as deer no one would be quite in the mood for food.

The P.A. system jumped into action again, “hello, this is your president of Brazil speaking (as you can imagine this isn’t a direct quote), what we are going to be doing is pulling forward, then backing into the other train. Thank you for your patience.”

And so we did, for the first time in hours the train began to move forward, then backward. The engineers had decided removing road kill from the front of the locomotive wasn’t in their job description, but perhaps if we backed into the train the force of our train hitting the other would dislodge the deer and we’d be good to go. This line of thinking is perhaps why Hollywood has produced few films where the hero was a brilliant train engineer.

The deer remained stuck, and, as we’d learn later, the engineer radioed up for the train to pull further ahead, then back faster! Nothing, “faster!” the engineer called again. No one ever recounted a story about any crew member wondering if it was such a bright idea to slam two trains together over and over, faster and faster. I suppose possible train derailment is a good alternative to deer guts on the hands.

El presidente took us up to ramming speed on the third pass, and miraculously it did the trick. The two trains were hooked. The funny thing was, in all the commotion in trying to hook our train with good old disabled Train 65, no one thought that once we were hooked up together we’d still have to overcome the mechanical difficulties that plagued the first train in the first place, problems with the brakes.

“We are all hooked up to the other train now; we’ll just be a couple more minutes, thank you for your continued patience.” The PA system ensured us. Somewhere at the back of the train our heroic engineers went to work.

Myself and the girl sitting next to me took this additional couple of minutes to get to know each other. When these ‘couple more minutes’ turned into several long hours we began to find we had learnt more about one another then some family members knew, and we were dangerously low on idle chit chat to pass the time.

Our fellow passengers in the car were starting to get a little paranoid in ways only passengers aboard a train in the 21^st Century could, the best theories on what was really going on it was agreed, were a terrorist attack or a hidden camera reality show.

The reality show theory began to gain steam as a third attendant, this time representing the 4.5 percent young, not yet bald male’s, came aboard our car and informed us every bathroom on the train had been used to capacity, that the septic tanks were full, and that we were going to have to go outside from here on in.

The women aboard our car were outraged, and for the next half hour or so anger over the idea of using the woods as a washroom filled not only our car, but every other car in the train.

Slowly people broke down and gave in, leaving the train they were instructed not to go more then five feet beyond the tracks by attendants who held flashlights on everyone, ensuring no one tried to flee the prison we had all paid to board and make a go of it in the woods.

Every so often a woman would come back in from outside and exclaim “I just urinated in the woods!” and all the other women aboard the car would cheer, as though we had entered a very, very, special edition of Oprah.

I myself eventually gave in and left the train to venture out into the cold January night. Walking past my fellow travelers to a secluded little spot I looked all around at the thick, pitch black wall of forest around us. As I began to unzip I started to do some calculations. I began to run the odds of the fact that maybe I wasn’t a main character in this story; here I was the furthest one away from the door to the car, adjusting the glasses I wore in only the way the first guy to die would. His body mysteriously being dragged into the woods by some unseen force, another passenger, perhaps our hero, seeing me lifelessly disappear into the woods would try to warn others, but who would listen? Not only does the first person to die in a horror movie have the sad fact that he’s dead going for him, his death always goes unnoticed.

I quickly zipped up and returned to the train.

Before long we were finally moving, another half hour we were back in Belleville. Seven hours of traveling and I hadn’t made it an inch closer to home. We stopped well some people were unloaded onto stretchers and the rest of us used the stations washrooms and lone vending machine.

An hour or so later we boarded again. The trip, we were reassured, would not be much longer.

A half hour past Belleville we allowed a freight train to pass us, how this is possible to allow one train to pass another train I may never know, but needless to say as it got past us is broke down. In all seriousness, it stopped dead in front of us. We began the waiting game again.

And so you see to this day I can stand, no, I might even enjoy a red eye from Los Angeles to Toronto with a four hour stop over in South Carolina. At least there’s no deer.

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