Tag: BC

The Race Across BC

On April 11, 2023

Over the last few days, thanks mainly to this excellent post by Andrew Kurjata, anyone excited by regional transit in British Columbia (ahem.) was sharing and discussing the premiere of the third season of ‘Race Across the World’, a British ‘Amazing Race’ style travel show.

This season features five pairs of British people attempting to make their way overland from Stanley Park in Downtown Vancouver to St John’s, Newfoundland, literally across the entirety of Canada. This is an incomprehensible long distance for your average archipelago-bound Brit.

In episode one, the five pairs attempt to complete the first leg of the journey; from Stanley Park to Tlell in Haida Gwaii, a remote island chain in the far north of the province that I hadn’t heard of but is (according to Wikipedia and the producers of Race Across the World) known as the Canadian Galapagos for its remoteness and biodiversity.

This handy map of Canada shows just how huge it is by European standards. I’ve marked the destination of episode one, Tlell, with a red cross. Prince Rupert, the staging point for the ferry to Haida Gwaii is the red circle. The blue line is the BC Ferries route via Vancouver island that three teams took, the brown lines are the bus + hitchhiking routes chosen by the remaining two teams. The yellow line is the unmentioned rail based route. More on that below!

Being a fairly standard format reality show, the first episode of Race Across the World S3 features introductions to each pair of characters and their motivations for doing the show (why we should care about their story) and the obligatory hyping of ‘Destination BC’.

For anyone who knows the province there are some unexpectedly hilarous moments including the narrator of the show referring to Merritt as a ‘tourism hotspot’ (I kept looping this 3 second bite and laughing my head off) and the ‘country music capital of Canada’ (the country music festival won’t be returning to the town in 2023), as well as one contestant complaining that Canada seems quite expensive, having only visited Downtown Vancouver and Whistler, two of the most expensive places in the world’s second largest country.

Aside from the inevitable reality show drama and the culture-clash humour of seeing a familiar place through foreign eyes, the real treasure of this episode is watching people from a place that has reasonable intercity and regional transport attempt to move through a place that does not.

A few caveats: the contestants have money and a camera crew, but can’t use phones, internet etc. They can ask friendly strangers to look things up for them, though. They also stop by pre-organised ‘work’ stays or side-trips where they do cute little Canadian activities such as visiting a bison farm, working in a ski gear shop or going bear-spotting.

I’m also aware that not all of the UK enjoys great regional transit, but until you’ve been to Canada, honestly you don’t know how bad it can get. I’ve spent most of the last four years living in regional NSW and I’m prone to complain about the state of things back home but even I’ve been caught by surprise. Similarly, most foreign visitors to North America are used to the United States being the more car-centric and hostile to transit users/cyclists/pedestrians of the pair. In general, this is true. Public transport (transit) in US cities and the pedestrian and cycling environment is almost universally worse than in Canadian cities. Once you leave the big cities (and medium sized towns) though, that quickly falls apart.

Canada has Via, a national passenger railway operator, which is generally similar in scope and operation to Amtrak. But otherwise, there is really no government subsidised intercity transport. What exists exists because the profit imperative makes it so. As I discussed in a previous blog, despite living in a town that is a major railway junction, I have no access to intercity passenger rail. The only road coaches that service the town are run entirely for profit and cost as much as a typical airfare or hiring a car. So they’re really only used by those with absolutely no alternative. Almost everyone visiting this part of the world comes with a car or hires one when they arrive.

An Amtrak promotional phot of the Cascades train passing by a beach while a father and son watch on. — The best intercity train in BC is operated and funded from the United States.

In the U.S, Amtrak operates not only long distance trains (similar to Via’s Transcanadian but generally 2 to 3x more frequent) but also provides shorter ‘inter-city’ style service subsidised by the relevant states. A great example is the Cascades route between Vancouver, BC and Eugene, Oregon which runs several times per day and is funded two thirds by fare recovery and one third split between the two U.S states. I guess BC gets a free ride!

A map showing the route of the Amtrak Cascades train from Vancouver, BC to Eugene, Oregon. — The route of the Amtrak Cascades train. Frequent, reliable and useful intercity rail travel…American style!

For whatever reason this doesn’t occur in Canada and so aside from the totally tourist orientated, reliability unreliable and infrequent Transcanadian and the aforementioned Amtrak service heading to the States there is no regional rail service out of Vancouver.

Okay so that’s the context, back to the show.

The 5 groups set out from Stanley Park, asking people they meet along the way where on earth Haida Gwaii is and how they can get there. Most groups quickly figure out they need to get to Prince Rupert, the staging point for a ferry to the island chain, but there are a few different ideas about how to get from downtown Vancouver to the northern port town.

For backpacking Brits, the distances are impossibly far and their assumptions that wherever they end up there will just ‘be a bus’ are reliably proved wrong. One pair ends up taking a $500 taxi at one point to get to Port Hardy on Vancouver Island, while others find themselves stumped by the lack of information at bus stops and take to just flagging down any bus or coach that passes by; a strategy that proves surprisingly effective. I suspect having a camera crew in tow helps quite a bit in that regard.

A woman stands in a gas station holding up a sign that reads 'Prince George please' — lol.

All in all, three groups take the regular BC ferry service from Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, a straightforward public transport journey, and make their way via ridesharing organised by the people they’re staying with or taxi to Port Hardy from where they board a ferry to Prince Rupert.

The other two groups attempt to make the trip overland. One pair heads to Whistler by bus while the other pair decides for some reason that is not at all clear (but I expect the small bison ranch they visit has something to do with it?) to head to Merritt, a small town in Interior BC that is not really a common destination, nor a particularly useful transit hub. Each group then hitches to Prince George and then Prince Rupert; journeys of several hundred kilometres each. The editing team sort of cuts over exactly how they do this, because one pair seem to get a ride all the way from Merritt to Prince George which just seems tremendously unlikely. I think you could wait around a gas station in Merritt for a week before finding someone heading all the way there. It’d make more sense to get to Kamloops or Cache Creek first, which I suspect is what actually happened. Or perhaps the film crew bus gave them a helping hand…

Either way, on the evening of Day 5, just in time for the thrice weekly ferry to Graham Island in the Haida Gwaii, all five groups descended on the port of Prince Rupert – how convenient!

What about the train?

You may well ask.

What struck me as interesting, about what is clearly an extremely produced and planned show, is that no one even makes mention of the train. Now we know passenger rail in BC is lacking, but it just so happens that Vancouver to Prince Rupert is actually the longest journey that can be made entirely by rail in the province!

The BC and Alberta section of the Via Canada service map. — The Via map makes Vancouver to Prince Rupert by train seem like the obvious choice.

By taking the twice-weekly Transcanadian from Vancouver to Jasper in the Alberta Rockies the contestants could then change onto the thrice-weekly Jasper to Prince Rupert train that connects with the ferry to Haida Gwaii!

Voila!

I had a quick look at short notice fares and they come in at about $750 CAD for two, which is about on-par or cheaper than the amount most groups spent on strings of buses, ferries, taxis and private rides.

A screenshot from the Via website of a booking from Vancouver to Prince Rupert in April 2023.

Race Around the World doesn’t tell us exactly what day this is all occurring on which makes checking timetables tricky, but there is one big clue. On Day 5, one pair of contestants are trying to hitch a ride from Prince George to Prince Rupert. The legend who ends up taking them in his car (for $250 for an 8 hour trip…which is actually 16 hours by the time he drives home. I hope the production crew were a bit more generous than the stingy contestants!) tells us that he has an annual tradition of swimming in a nearby lake every May 1st, which, given that they then go swimming together, is presumably the current date. So, assuming that Day 5 is May 1st, 2022, the teams must have set off from Stanley Park on April 27th, 2022; a Wednesday.

I’m not sure how much Via timetables have changed between 2022 and 2023, but at the moment the Transcanadian is leaving on a Monday and a Friday at 3pm and arriving at Jasper the next day at 11am. The Jasper to Prince Rupert train (which definitely needs a cool new name…) leaves Jasper at 12:45pm on Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. The train overnights in Prince George (where the Via website warns you that you need to book a hotel) before arriving the following day at 8:25pm in Prince Rupert (the towns along the way need cool new names too…there is some precedent in this regard, until 2010 Haida Gwaii was known as the Queen Charlotte Islands).

SO. According to my rough calculations, a group that left Stanley Park and made their way to Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station, would have been able to buy tickets onto the Friday Transcanadian, spent Saturday night in Jasper, boarded the Prince Rupert train the next day and arrived at Prince Rupert wharf on Monday evening. This would’ve given them 90 minutes to change onto the ferry. Sadly, they would’ve been one day behind the rest of the contestants who made it onto the Sunday evening ferry.

Okay, so the train didn’t turn out to be a winning strategy, but it still seems like a really sensible first port of call. After all, it’s really just a quirk of the timetable that it wasn’t the better option. If the race had started on Friday morning instead of Wednesday the train would’ve been a clear winner.

Despite some on-time reliability issues the train is probably going to, on average, work out better than relying on a once weekly ferry from the northern end of Vancouver Island or hitching along some very remote stretches of highway north of Whistler.

Of course the show is designed to give the appearance of reality rather than actually replicate it and the exact reasons for ignoring the existence of the train service in favour of promoting Merritt, of all places, is only clear to the powers that be.

All in all I really enjoyed this episode of a show I otherwise wouldn’t have watched and it’s a handy reminder to Canadians that your regional transit ‘system’ (I use the term loosely here) is honestly one of the worst in the world. And that’s coming from an Australian.

If you want to stream this episode of Race Across the World you can currently find it here.

Canadian Pacific train on the Kooteney line on the banks of the Columbia River.

One day a year the Golden Age of rail travel returns to rural Canada

By Jed C

On February 10, 2023

In Transport

Rural Canada can be a sad place to be a transit enthusiast.

I sit in my living room, scrolling through social media, watching my brethren enjoying the trappings of transit fandom across the globe.

But here, in rural British Columbia, there are no grand openings of new train lines to attend, no new rolling stock to spot in testing and no functioning transit system to get about on.

On the other hand, freight trains abound!

In the small town on the banks of the Columbia River in the Canadian Rockies where I find myself, big red diesel locomotives emblazoned with ‘Canadian Pacific’ trundle by several times a day and I’m fortunate enough to have them practically in my backyard.

Sometimes they’re pulling assorted goods wagons, mostly they’re laden with coal. One thing I never get to see going by are the smiling faces of trans-continental travellers.

North America is home to some of the world’s busiest and most productive freight railways but the passenger services are famously skeletal. They make NSW Trainlink and V-Line look almost European by comparison. Still better than South Australia, though.

Amtrak, and its Canadian counterpart Via, provide a barebones service across the continent. Sadly for me, that service does not extend very far in Western Canada.

In September 2022 Amtrak restarted their Covid-paused Cascades service from Portland and Seattle to Vancouver, BC, which barely scratches the bottom corner of the province.

Via (pronounced in the North American style with emphasis on the ‘V’ sound: a cleverly chosen name for the bilingual country’s national rail operator being a French word that has been adopted into English) run a couple of routes across BC but they are few, far between and frequency is measured in ‘trips per week’.

It wasn’t always this way.

Canadian Rail History 101

The history of rail service in Canada is expectedly complicated.

The abridged version is that the many varied and competing private and/or publicly funded railways that sprung up in the golden era of rail construction were consolidated through the 20^th century to become two huge companies that own almost all the track in the country (and quite a bit in the United States besides): Canadian Pacific (CP) and Canadian National (CN – of CN Tower fame).

Each company has its own extensive freight network and their own Trans-Continental routes. The more Northern route across the country that passes through cities like Edmonton and Saskatoon is operated by Canadian National and the more Southerly route, passing through Calgary and Regina, by Canadian Pacific.

A screenshot from the Canadian Rail Atlas — Red for CP, Blue for CN. Only tracks in Canada are shown. Via’s passenger services are highlighted. Notice how all those lines crisscrossing the prairies of Alberta and Saskatchewan gather together into a single valley as they approach Vancouver. That is the Thompson River Valley which features the eponymous river, the Trans-Canada Highway and two sets of railway tracks: CN on the northside of the river and CP on the south. This screenshot is pulled from the Canadian Rail Atlas which has a bunch of toggleable layers showing rail service across the country.

In the Golden Age of the railways both companies ran competing transcontinental services for passengers along their respective routes. They fought for business with tight timetabling, reliable services and grandiose marketing campaigns.

1920s Canadian Pacific tourism poster advertising the Fastest Train Across the Continent — This 1924 poster shows what the railways thought discerning customers wanted: fast speeds, stunning vistas and class based segregation!

As the postwar decades brought competition from jet aircraft, and high-speed highways became the order of the day, demand for (and profitability of) the railways plummeted. The railway companies started to close passenger routes forcing the Federal Government to intervene by creating Via to provide passenger service and keep the show on the…rails.

When two (transcontinental train services) become one

When Via first launched in 1977 there were two transcontinental trains: the Canadian that had been run by Canadian Pacific on the Southern route and CN’s Super Continental on the Northern route. Both trains ran every day in both directions.

As planes became faster and cheaper and highways better and more plentiful successive governments took a hatchet to Via’s funding leaving the railway to slowly reduce service and cancel routes.

Fast forward to 2023 and it’s a very different picture. There’s only one route now: it retains the Canadian name, but mostly runs along CN’s Northern route.

Since 1990, Calgary and Regina, the largest city in Alberta and the capital of Saskatchewan respectively, have had no intercity rail service at all.

The now abandoned Calgary Via station is in the podium below the city’s eponymous tower while Regina’s heritage listed Union Station is home to a Province-run Casino!

The Canadian is down to twice a week and delays are so bad that the timetable has been padded out by an extra 12 hours compared to mid-century travel times.

Via’s case isn’t helped by the growth of freight rail in that same time period. Freight is enjoying something of a rail renaissance in North America. Sadly, for train travelers, these freight trains get priority along the way which can leave passengers floundering in remote rail sidings for hours at a time.

It’s a predicament that makes it very, very hard for Amtrak and Via to increase services or guarantee reliability.

Things got so bad that in 2017 just 8% of trans-continental services arrived on time, and that’s despite the 12 hours of padding in the timetable!

The Golden Age in Golden

Golden, BC, was once a rail hub, founded to support the construction of the Trans-Canadian line through Kicking Horse Pass and Rogers Pass (both interesting tales). It’s still a busy freight hub, but passenger service has been declining since the 1950s when passenger services ended on the the Kootenay branch line to Cranbrook and beyond as the highway improved.

When The Canadian was rerouted in 1990, the town lost its last passenger rail service.

Greyhound stepped in to fill the gap, minus the undeniable style of long distance rail travel, largely replicating the train with a coach service between Vancouver and Calgary.

In 2020 Covid hit, and Greyhound pulled out of the Canadian market leaving many towns across the country with no intercity public transport at all. Lucky for Golden a bus line called Rider Express filled the gap providing a pricey coach service once or twice a day. Since then, anyone hoping to reach the mountain hamlet must have access to a motor vehicle, book a $200 airport shuttle or board a slow and expensive coach.

The more well-known nearby tourist towns of Lake Louise, Banff and Canmore have found themselves in a similar predicament. As the popularity of visiting the Rockies skyrockets, mid-century auto-focused planning decisions are causing major headaches. National Parks are replacing overcrowded parking lots with shuttle buses at popular spots like Lake Louise and the owners of Mt Norquay ski resort are considering building a new train line direct from Calgary airport to increase their customer base.

A photo of a train at dusk with spectacular mountains in the background and low fog settled over the river. — 3 CP locos pull a coal train north-bound on the Kootenay line on the banks of the Columbia River. Most likely bound for the Lower Mainland and beyond.

As of 2023 there is still one way to enjoy the magic of rail travel as you cross the Rocky Mountains along the (arguably more scenic) Canadian Pacific track, but you are going to have to pay for it. If you’ve got a spare $2000 per person you can take the Rocky Mountaineer tourist train that runs twice a week in the summer months. You’ll overnight at a hotel midway in Kamloops so it ends up taking 36 hours end to end, 3 times as long as the coach. You also won’t be able to get off in Golden, the train passes through but it doesn’t stop. This is purely a tourist train and is of no practical use for the people that live in the towns along the way. In fact, the train ends in Banff, which doesn’t have an airport or any other train service (yet!), so to get out of there you’ll have to either fork out for a return ticket, rent a car, or take a bus the last hour or so into Calgary.

Christmas Cheer

Each December, however, the sad plight of the Rocky Mountain railways is forgotten, if only for one beautiful neon-lit moment.

In a spectacular branding exercise meets goodwill generating foodbank fundraiser, each December, Canadian Pacific gives something back to the towns that their coal and freight trains ceaselessly rumble through. The Holiday Train brings some of that Wintry Christmas Magic we hear about from Australia, but that you can only truly obtain in the Northern latitudes.

The Canadian Pacific Canadian Holiday Train (they run an American version on their tracks south of the border) has run every year, Covid excepting, since 1999. Last year it left Montreal, in the East of the country, on November 27^th, stopping countless times on its way across Canada before finishing up in Metro Vancouver on December 18^th.

A crowd of people enjoy the entertainment of the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train in Banff on a winter night. — The Holiday Train hit the popular tourist destination of Banff at prime time, 7pm. I suspect a slightly smaller crowd greeted the train in Golden at 2pm the next day.

The train has a few bands and entertainers on-board and is adorned in Christmas lights. It pulls up in each town, possibly near, or at, the abandoned train station, the young (and young at heart…and old, and railway enthusiasts of all ages) take photos, the performers do a few numbers each and, in less than an hour, the train blows its horn and rolls another town down the line to do it all again.

For the towns in the Rocky Mountains and across the vast prairies of Central Canada that grew up alongside Canadian Pacific railways, it’s a beautiful but poignant reminder of what once was. In each town, for one brief hour in December, the Golden Age of rail travel returns.