PWAC Victoria: Dave Preston, Writing Sample

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Rails & Rooms: A Timeless Canadian Journey

by Dave Preston ©

Join Dave as he rides the ribbon of steel on a 5,000-mile journey from coast to coast. This cross-Canada travelogue takes a humorous but informative look at Canadian railways and the heritage hotels that were built along them. Published by Whitecap Books, 2001, 256 pages, softcover, black & white photographs, ISBN 1-55285-009-9, $18.95 CDN. All rights reserved. Order from www.whiteroseinc.com

Excerpts from the book

There are many ways to get from A to B -- or from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia, for that matter. I've flown this expanse, driven most of it, ridden a motorcycle across much of it, and hiked for days along its lakesides and riverbanks. But it wasn't until I rode a train for 4,414 miles across every Canadian province that still has a track that I truly appreciated this country's size and diversity.

Our nation's love of rail travel has been a torrid and well-documented affair, spanning more than a century and a half. Canadian railway history can be traced through hundreds of separate companies to its birth in 1836, when the Champlain & St. Lawrence Railroad became the first public railway in the land. In 1850, Upper Canada had just sixty-six miles of railway track, but by 1943 there were more than forty-three thousand miles of route being operated by thirty-eight separate corporations.

In his 1934 book, English Journey, British author J.B. Priestley wrote:

When people moved slowly in their travel there was time to establish proper communications with what was strange, to absorb, to adjust oneself. Now that we are whizzed about the world, there is no time for absorbing and adjusting . . . By the time we can travel at four hundred miles an hour we shall probably move over a dead uniformity, so that the bit of reality we left at one end of a journey is twin to the bit of reality we step into at the other end. Indeed, by that time there will be movement, but, strictly speaking, no more travel.

I wanted to see Canada from a passenger train window, in real time. I wanted to head west from one bordering ocean to the other, at a speed that would make changes in topography barely perceivable. But then, as hours rolled into days, I'd appreciate the grand geographical and cultural differences that both separate and unite our regions. A train, I thought, would provide a journey that would get me right into Canada, tunnelling through rock when it had to.

Upon completing Canada's first transcontinental railroad, the grandfather of CPR, William Cornelius Van Horne, said: "If we can't export the scenery, we'll import the tourists." By 1900, the CPR had thriving hotels in Montreal, Quebec City, Banff, Lake Louise and Vancouver. At first, these hotels were not the world-famous destinations they are for today's tourists; more often, they were simply comfortable stopping-off points for those affluent travellers en route to the Orient.

Like the railways that bore and nurtured them, the Canadian railway hotels spin a story that is long and perplexing, involving all manner of politics, confounding economics, hundreds of companies and thousands of business deals. My story doesn't simplify or explain this complex evolution; it is merely a personal account of a train journey that includes visits to some of the grand hotels that still provide rest and relaxation for travellers. This is the story of a month-long trip that took me gently across Canada, and occasionally through time.

By 10:30 p.m., most folks were already in bed. A few staff were having coffee and a cheerful chat in the dining car, but apart from that the train rumbled as quietly as it could through the night.

I had promised myself I'd get up to see the sunrise, so I didn't really sleep, but kept leaning forward every half-hour to raise the blind, making sure I didn't miss daybreak. I was also cold so I remade the bed with another VIA "pure new wool" grey blanket and tried again to sleep. Then I got up, put more clothes on, got back in, checked the blind, looked for more blankets, remade the bed, used the washroom, remade the bed, and checked the blind. I finally decided to cancel my date with the sunrise and drifted off into a fitful slumber. Minutes later I was woken when the train stopped, only to realize the sun was coming up! So I leapt out of the blankets, pulled on the few clothes I wasn't already wearing, grabbed a camera and notepad and went up to the dome car, looking like something that small children fear lies hiding beneath their beds.

Six of us were gathered in the car at that point, watching the mist roll lazily over the muskeg and stretch out across scrubby woodland. A couple of late stars hung in a blue, lightening sky, but I couldn't see the moon. Even without the evidence of frost, it looked to have been a cold night. One or two passengers were joking about sleeping, or not. "The brochure said the train would rock you to sleep gently, I got whiplash!" Some did sleep well, and didn't hear the engine whistle, or the stops and starts, or the other passing trains. The black box of my body had recorded it all, however. Despite my aches and shivers, foul breath and ridiculous hair, I was pleased I made the effort to see the sunrise in all its morning glory. It lit up the leaves along the trackside, more yellow and golden than those of yesterday, with birch bark the brilliance of new snow.

After smashing into a farmer's wagon loaded with 50 pounds of butter and 80 dozen eggs on May 4, 1833, George Stephenson thought a large whistle might be a good idea, to warn people of the train's approach. The whistle was designed as a musical chime -- eighteen inches long and six inches across the bell, emitting a sound described by one early railroader as " . . . the squeal of a lawyer when the devil first got hold of him."

At every road crossing a white "W" sign appears on the right of the track. It stands for "whistle" and reminds the engineer to sound the horn. Unfortunately, real whistles went the way of all rail steam, long ago. Today, engineers press a large, square yellow button and a loud horn blares out the warning, but it's still called a whistle. There's a federally approved arrangement the engineer must play: two long blasts, then one short followed by one long blast as the train actually crosses the road. If the train's moving slowly, the driver can extemporize, as musicians are wont to do when time's available. When the whistle sounds, a bell automatically kicks in and will continue to ring until the engineer turns it off by pressing another yellow button.

Ever since a dreadful September 15 in 1830, when the Rt. Hon. William Huskisson got run over and became the world's first railway fatality, we've tried to be careful with these hefty metal monsters. A 3,000-horsepower locomotive drinks almost five gallons of fuel an hour just idling, and when it's really into the sauce and moving at its top speed of ninety miles per hour, there's very little that can stop it in a hurry. Flesh is weak, and never more so than when it's pitted against thundering iron and steel.

Quebec serves up many cultural differences for the visitor to celebrate. One is that you can't make a right turn on a red light. Another, which intrigued me as I stood at the station exit, is that cabs do not respond to the usual pedestrian hand signals. Nor do they respond to shouting, frantic waving or the piercing two-fingers-in-the-mouth whistle I learned in high school. They respond to their radio dispatchers and that's about all.

About twenty of us train passengers celebrated this latter cultural difference that grey Tuesday afternoon, as we tried to get a ride from the station to somewhere else in the city. An enterprising young woman and I finally hijacked a cab as it dropped someone off at the station and failed to make its getaway. I shared the ride for five minutes up steeply winding, narrow streets and through a stone archway to the Château Frontenac. I paid my share, bid my accomplice bon voyage, and pulled my luggage out of the cab and into the impressive front courtyard of the hotel.

Samuel de Champlain certainly knew a good site for a building when he saw one. Landing in 1608, he founded Quebec City and put up a modest fort on this spot in 1620. A few years later, Champlain's settlement became Fort St. Louis, then Château St. Louis. It was destroyed during an attack by Sir William Phipps and the British, then rebuilt by the French governor Comte de Frontenac in 1692. Again the British roughed it up and the chateau finally burned to the ground in 1834. For almost sixty years, the city's premier vantage point lay fallow, despite several proposals from ambitious citizens of the time. Most schemes were dismissed because of a lack of funding. Finally, in 1892, the high-rolling railway barons (Sir Donald Alexander Smith, Sir William Van Horne, Sir Thomas Shaughnessy and their associates) formed the Château Frontenac Company to build a luxury hotel to attract Europe's travelling elite. They named it after the former French governor.

I'll get the word magnificent out of the way, as it's impossible to describe the Frontenac without using it at least once. One of CP's signature hotels, its design is based on the sixteenth-century royal chateaux found in the Loire Valley. Several of them, such as the Chambord, begun in 1520, had riotous rooflines with tall chimneys, pinnacles and dormers strewn about with finicky classical excess. The Italians are often blamed for this lavish influence. Other buildings, like the Château Fontainebleau, were a little more sober, and their steep roofs and robust chimney stacks were quite practical for the Canadian climate and for many CP hotel designs. Some claim the Frontenac was modelled after a lunatic asylum built in Buffalo, New York, by H.H. Richardson, but enough drawing-board gossip for now.

Suffice to say that architect Bruce Price, coaxed away from the United States in 1886 to design the Banff Springs Hotel for William Van Horne, still knew what he was doing six years later when he came to Quebec. After the hotel opened to much fanfare in 1893, it became the first stop in North America for many affluent visitors arriving here by ship from Europe. The CPR would then show this well-heeled crowd the delights of Canada, by train.

I entered the lobby and stood for a moment enjoying the rich ambience of oak panelling, gleaming brass fixtures, heavy wall sconces, curious oil paintings and enormous floral arrangements. The hotel reeked of class and appeared to be every luxuriant thing I was led to expect. Alfred Hitchcock arranged for a murderer to be killed here, in a celluloid manner of speaking. During the Second World War, Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt planned the Normandy invasion under this very roof. Musician Pierre Marchand gave more than thirteen thousand concerts in this building. A man named Edmund Leonard set a residency record by living at the hotel for twenty-nine years and another man, Lionel Verret, set one by working here for more than fifty. The Château Frontenac had served many purposes, and all of them with class. It would certainly do for me. Rails & Rooms by Dave Preston - Order from www.whiteroseinc.com

Dave Preston
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Last updated: June 24, 2001 http://www.islandnet.com/pwacvic/presto08.html