On September 11, 2022, I boarded a VIA Rail train at Toronto Union Station, headed for Montreal, Quebec. After having spent more than three months travelling in North America from coast to coast while doing remote work for my job in Paris, I was about to start the last week of my trip before returning home to France. The week’s itinerary was set based on two important events:
- September 12: a reunion concert of the band Porcupine Tree, in Montreal, Quebec.
- September 17: my brother’s wedding, near Saint John, New Brunswick.
Taking the train in Canada: Part One
I love trains, and will do pretty much anything within my power to avoid taking a plane on any given route (and will generally choose my travel destinations based on their accessibility by train). Naturally, for travelling from Hamilton to Montreal, I did not hesitate to reserve a trip through VIA Rail, Canada’s national rail operator, instead of flying. I took a GO Transit regional train from Hamilton to Toronto Union Station, then boarded a train headed towards Montreal, with the scheduled time indicating that the trip would take five hours.
There were no particular problems that I encountered during the trip, but I was bothered by the slow speed. In the UK, you can travel by train from London to Glasgow (a further distance than Toronto-Montreal and with a less-direct route) in 4.5 hours. In Morocco, you can travel by train from Tangier to Casablanca, a distance of around 300 kilometres, in just over two hours, with departures every hour. In France, you can travel from Paris to Lyon (~400 kilometres away) in two hours or to Marseille (~660 kilometres away) in just over three hours, and throughout most of the day there are two or three departures on each of those routes per hour. Canada’s government-owned rail operator, however, lacks the ability to connect the country’s two most populous cities, which are 500 kilometres apart in a straight line, in fewer than five hours, and only provides six departures per day in each direction. It’s no wonder that so few Canadians consider the train to be a viable option, even between the two cities in the country that are best-suited for inter-city train travel due to the fact that they both have relatively well-developed public transport networks available to intercity rail passengers upon arrival.
After arriving in Montreal, I walked to my hostel, stowed my bags in the locker under the bed, and went out to explore the neighbourhood, though my mind was mostly caught up in anticipation of the concert that I was going to see the following evening.
Seeing Porcupine Tree
Although I had meant to visit Montreal for a few years, my main reason for visiting Montreal on this particular occasion was for a concert, one that I did not think I would ever be able to see: a concert by the band Porcupine Tree.
I was first introduced to Porcupine Tree in 2008 or 2009 by a man named Ryan, who was a counselor at a computer-focused day camp where I had volunteered during my summers of high school. I enjoyed some of the group’s work, but listened only occasionally and didn’t find myself connecting with much of their musical catalogue. I lost interest after a while, and didn’t listen to or think about Porcupine Tree for a long time.
Years later, during a university course on the topic of surround sound music production, I rediscovered Porcupine Tree, as their founder, Steven Wilson, had not only ensured that many Porcupine Tree albums received a surround sound release, but had also become somewhat of a noted figure in the progressive rock and progressive metal music production scenes, creating surround sound mixes for contemporary bands of the era – Anathema and Opeth come to mind – as well as new surround sound mixes of the back catalogues of well-established groups such as Yes, Rush, Jethro Tull, King Crimson, Marillion, and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. As I listened to Porcupine Tree’s albums to study the surround sound mixing techniques, I discovered that I was able to connect with the music much better than before, and for a few months, I went through a phase where almost everything I listened to was by Porcupine Tree. After that, I moved on to discovering other music, but continued to give their repertoire lots of attention.
Unfortunately, it seemed that I had rediscovered Porcupine Tree too late to see them perform, as the band had become inactive in 2010 following the end of their tour in support of their most recent album, The Incident. In the years that followed, Steven Wilson went from insisting that the band was not broken up but simply inactive, to saying that a reunion was not impossible, to finally indicating with decisiveness that the band was gone, despite the lack of a formal announcement of the group’s breakup. However, in September 2021, after more than a decade of public inactivity, Porcupine Tree announced that they were releasing a new album, one which had been produced in complete secrecy over the preceding decade – an album with the intentionally ambiguous title of Closure/Continuation – and that the release would be accompanied by an international tour. The album was released in June 2022, and the North American tour was to start with a concert in Toronto on September 10, 2022.
Though I had gotten some of my Porcupine Tree “fix” by having seen Steven Wilson perform some of their songs at his solo shows, I was thrilled at the possibility of getting to see the band perform with most of the original members. Seeing the very first Porcupine Tree tree concert in over a decade would have been great, but due to an error on my part, I mistakenly thought that it would take place on the same night as a close friend’s wedding (which was actually one week earlier), so I instead secured a ticket to see the second show of the tour, which would take place in Montreal.
My first full day in Montreal was spent mostly in excited anticipation of this concert. I wandered around the city, treated myself to good meals at some vegan restaurants along the way, and enjoyed the pleasant weather. In the evening, I made my way to the Place Bell stadium in Montreal’s nearby suburb, Laval. After scanning the ticket from my phone to enter the stadium (and getting an amusing compliment from the ticket scanner about the tiny size of my phone), I was thrilled to see a sign announcing that the show was to be “phone-free” at the request of the band:
At most concerts that I have attended (essentially in the last fifteen years), many of the attendees seem to spend much of the concert recording videos on their phones, sending them on WhatsApp, and posting them on social media. I don’t understand why one would spend money on a concert ticket only to spend most the concert staring at the performers through a screen (thus blocking the view of other members of the audience) instead of looking at the band directly, if one were actually interested in enjoying the performance instead of just broadcasting on social media that they went to the concert. This behavioural issue is divisive among fans: in online forums, many unpleasant words have been exchanged among people on both sides of the issue, be it the phone-lovers who accuse the phone-haters of preventing them from capturing memories of the concert for future reference, or the phone-haters accusing the phone-lovers of being selfish and preventing other attendees from enjoying the concert in its full glory without having a sea of smartphone screens in their field of vision.
Apparently, Porcupine Tree was willing to take a stance on this issue by making the event phone-free, and their rule was generally respected, with the security guards near the audience intervening when spectators were using their phones in an obvious and disruptive manner. This was a big change from some other concerts I’d seen, where the musicians practically encouraged the audience members to be taking photos and videos, and it made the event even more enjoyable than it would have been otherwise.
In the end, the concert was great. Journalists have written about this tour, and I don’t have anything else to contribute: the performance were great, the sound quality in the stadium was excellent, and the musicians played through a lengthy and varied setlist that was almost three hours long.
Wandering aimlessly around Montreal
For the remaining two days before my departure from Montreal the evening of September 14, I did not plan out what I would do, instead just relaxing and enjoying some time spent wandering around the city. September 13th was somewhat rainy, so I ended up spending time in cozy cafés and relaxing in the common area of my hostel.
On September 14, a pleasant, sunny day, I spent most of the morning and afternoon with another guest at the hostel where I’d been staying, Bar, who was visiting from Israel. We explored the Mount Royal area of the city, seeing a bit of the campus of McGill University (where I had once hoped to pursue a Master’s degree in Sound Recording, many years prior) and walking all around the cemetery and park on Mount Royal itself, followed by some exploration of second-hand stores and restaurants in the area.
As the afternoon turned into the evening, I collected my belongings from the hostel, bid farewell to Bar, and headed back to Montreal’s train station, for my next long-distance Canadian train adventure.
Taking the train in Canada: Part Two
By 6:40 PM, I had boarded another VIA Rail train, The Ocean, providing service from Montreal to Halifax, Nova Scotia. A few years earlier, when my parents lived in Halifax, it would have been unsurprising to imagine taking this train to its final destination, but on this occasion, I would only be taking it as far as Moncton, New Brunswick, where my father would pick me up and bring me to the city of Saint John for my brother’s wedding. The scheduled departure time was 7:00 PM on September 14, with a scheduled arrival time of 1:23 PM on September 15.
Unfortunately, this train experience was much worse than the relatively short five-hour trip from Toronto to Montreal. It was an overnight trip, and given that I would be spending the night in a not-very-comfortable seat, I already didn’t expect any enjoyment or even to sleep very much, but things started out poorly even before nighttime: the train car was frigid. The weather outside was warm, typical of a nice end-of-summer day in Montreal – one cold easily call it “T-shirt weather,” and most passengers were dressed accordingly – but the air conditioning in the car seemed to be set to the lowest possible temperature. Everyone was quite cold, and although I hesitated to say anything to the crew, it was only a matter of minutes before other passengers asked if the temperature could be increased, to which the crew responded that this was not possible. It seemed that the crew was unable or unwilling to decrease the amount of air conditioning, and that everyone would just have to adapt. However, due to the summer weather, most people did not have coats or sweaters available, and the train crew had no blankets, so we were all condemned to freeze like popsicles. Although I have occasionally been bothered by feeling too warm in French trains without much air conditioning, it was much more tolerable than being stuck inside a very cold train car for almost 20 hours on a hot summer’s day.
You might be wondering how my math has become so bad: 7 PM (Montreal) to 1 PM (Moncton) is 17 hours (due to the time zone change from Montreal to New Brunswick), so why would we be in the train car for 20 hours? More importantly, why would the train even be scheduled to take 17 hours, let alone 20 hours, when driving from Montreal to Moncton through Canada is only a nine-hour, 980-kilometre trip? Well, this is where VIA Rail fails spectacularly in serving Canadians: long-distance rail service.
VIA Rail owns barely any of the the tracks used on its long-term routes, with most of its routes running on tracks owned by rail freight companies like Canadian National and Canadian Pacific. As a result, not only are the tracks designed and maintained only to the standards required by low-speed freight trains, but the freight trains are also given priority on the tracks, requiring VIA Rail to stop trains containing hundreds of passengers on sidings while freight trains pass in the opposite direction, sometimes for hours at a time. This results in train trips where the average speeds are often only around 50 kilometres per hour (less than half of the speed a car would travel on the highway), and where any scheduling conflicts with freight trains result in passengers arriving hours late.
The twenty hours were cold, slow, and relatively monotonous. On-train food service, limited to a small food cart for passengers who didn’t pay the expensive rates for sleeping compartments, had little to offer as far as plant-based food was concerned, so I ate the bits of food that I had brought with me, and stared out the window, first into the dark night, then into the grey, gloomy landscape, as night turned to morning. Most parts of the route had little-to-no mobile network reception, so for those who had not thought to bring books or other forms of entertainment, it was a good time to meditate and allow one’s thoughts to wander.
As the day went on, it became clear that we were far behind schedule and that we were not able to make up the time lost. I sent my father several messages updating him on my whereabouts, as each confirmed delay required him to change his departure time from Saint John to come pick me up at the train station in Moncton. I ended up arriving in Moncton in the late afternoon, and was thrilled to get out of the still-very-cold train car into the warm, sunny afternoon weather. This first experience in long-term train travel in Canada will likely be my last for a long time; although I will still travel by train instead of plane when forced to choose between the two, willingly choosing VIA Rail after this experience would seem like an almost-masochistic choice if any other option were to be available.
Wrapping up my trip where it started, in Atlantic Canada
As my father drove us to Saint John, I reflected on the months I had spent in North America, and looked forward to my imminent return to France. I had enjoyed the experiences and challenges of the summer, but I was ready to go back to my job, my city, and the people I had missed since my departure.
For this wedding, I had been bestowed the honour of being one of my brother’s groomsmen. The other members of the wedding party invited by my brother had arrived from Ontario early that day, and the groomsmen had already spent part of the day engaging in activities suiting my brother’s sense of bonding experiences, such as going to a shooting range. I was not sad to have missed this occasion to learn how to shoot a firearm, and was happy to arrive in Saint John just in time to meet the wedding party as they gathered at a downtown restaurant.
This dinner provided the opportunity to see some of my brother’s friends from high school for the first time since I moved from Ontario to Alberta in 2012, and it was interesting to see how they had changed and developed over the decade since I had last seen them. Of course, spending time with my future sister-in-law and her brothers was also great fun, though I had seen them much more recently.
After dinner, we moved down to a bar by the waterfront, where I was presented with an axe with my name inscribed in some kind of Nordic runes. This was to be part of my attire as a member of the wedding party, due to my brother’s Nordic-inspired wedding theme.
Not long after receiving my wedding axe, it was time to go to to my hotel room and sleep, which I was eager to do after such a sleep-deprived night on the train.
The next day was mainly spent with the other groomsmen preparing for the wedding by setting up for the reception dinner/dance, in a theatre that had been rented for the event. After putting up decorations for a while, we faced a delay due to a delivery of tables that had not yet occurred, so we migrated back to the bar at the waterfront, where we spent some time engaging in rather animated discussion of some issues related to inclusivity in the workplace, until we were joined by the bride and bridesmaids. When it was time for dinner, I took refuge at VEGolution, which appears to be Saint John’s only vegetarian restaurant and which had great vegan options. Afterwards, I rejoined the groomsmen as we waited to finish setting up for the wedding reception. The tables had still not arrived, so I thought that it might be fun to try to set up a chess game on the floor tiles using spare pieces of paper.
After attempting to play chess for a bit, the game was interrupted by the arrival of the last supplies we needed. We were able to finish the setup for the wedding reception, then I went back to my hotel and slept relatively early, to prepare for the wedding the next day.
After waking up at an abnormally early hour the next morning, I joined the family members who were about to drive out to the location of the wedding ceremony, on a family-owned rural parcel of land, a bit after 7 AM. Suits and dresses were put on, and many photos were taken, both serious and amusing. The wedding photographer captured one of the most bizarre photos of which I am the subject:
The wedding ceremony itself, a combination of relatively traditional wedding elements with Nordic additions from my brother (including groomsmen bearing axes, and the drinking of mead), was pleasant and heartwarming. I was happy to see that my brother had found a person with whom he would seek to grow, prosper, and share moments of joy.
After the wedding ceremony, guests stayed for a while to talk, munch on some light food, take photos, and so on. Eventually, the congregation of guests made their way back to Saint John, though several hours remained before the evening reception would begin with dinner and dancing. During this break, I returned to the vegetarian restaurant in Saint John to pick up some dinner for myself and my mother (as the wedding dinner, not particularly vegan-friendly, was based around whole pigs being roasted over rotisserie-style grilles in the parking lot behind the wedding reception building), and made my way to the wedding reception. Speeches were made, food and alcohol were consumed, and eventually, the wedding dance began, continuing late into the night. After several hours, people started heading home, and eventually the last remaining younger attendees of the event, who danced until the music stopped, migrated to a pub. Things wound down as we conversed about various subjects, and after saying my goodbyes, I returned to my hotel room to prepare for my departure.
The next morning, I was dropped off at the airport, where I found several other members of the wedding party who were waiting to return home to Ontario. We said our goodbyes as they boarded their flights to Ontario, and I waited for my flight to Montreal, where I would connect to a flight to Paris. After the quick flight to Montreal, I had several hours to wait before overnight flight to Paris, which allowed me to catch up on some work e-mails and prepare for my return to France. Then, after more than three-and-a-half months away from home, I boarded the final flight of the trip, excited to finally return to my friends, my job, and generally my life in Paris.