A Good Day's Work Read Online Free Page A

commuters grabbing the GO train; jacked-up merchant bankers eager to spend their spoils in the alehouses of Yorkville; weary secretaries bound for the peace and quiet of the burbs. It was Toronto, so no one lost it completely. But people shoved and ran. Voices were raised.
    Not like tonight. Granted, 8:30 p.m. is long past rush hour, and a lot of the traffic through the station is subway riders anyway. Still, I take it as symptomatic that in the busiest rail transportation hub in the country I can see only a smattering of humans amid the Missouri stone walls, the Tennessee marble floors, the Bedford limestone columns. Railways built this country. Confederation would never have happened without the Canadian Pacific Railway: British Columbia made a transcontinental railway a condition for joining the country. On the opposite coast, Prince Edward Island was only lured in when John A. Macdonald agreed to assume the huge debt from the island’s own ill-fated railway scheme and promised a communications link to the mainland.
    Before the CPR’s completion Canada was a string of unconnected settlements separated by huge expanses of forest and prairie. The snort and hiss of the locomotive and the feats of the rail line’s civil engineers—the 94.2-metre-high bridge traversing Alberta’s Oldman River, the eight-kilometre tunnel through the Selkirk Mountains in British Columbia—became a shining symbol of what this new country could accomplish. The CPR tied the country together “like a line of steel from coast to coast,” Pierre Berton, the author of
The National Dream
and
The Last Spike
told me once. “Our cities and towns popped up along it like beads on a string. Without it we would have developed vertically rather than horizontally. We became the nation we are because of the railroad.”
    But that was before two-car families and long-haul jets that could make it coast to coast without refuelling. People stopped taking the train. Freight, especially bulk commodities, became the dominant railway service. Built to create a nationwide passenger carrier similar to Amtrak in the United States, Via Rail Canada gradually assumed all of the country’s main rail passenger services. But successive federal governments slashed funding. Twenty years ago Via cut its passenger network in half, axing some of its most crowd-pleasing runs. Today most of Via’s traffic is on the commuter run in the Windsor-Quebec corridor. Even freight carriers have been closing stops in smaller cities to boost profit margins.
    Still running, though, is Via’s flagship train, a replica of the original Canadian, which made its first trip in 1955 and has been refurbished to harken back to the great age of rail. Its 2,775-mile route takes in most of Canada’s scenic panorama. Who knows for how long in this age of quicker is better andeverything must pay its way. That’s why I was in the all-but-empty grandeur of Union Station, joining the trickle of passengers pushing luggage carts and pulling wheeled suitcases toward the check-in counter: the Asian tourists, the middle-aged woman with the T- shirt that said Don’t Piss Me Off, the chunky brunette sporting a Swimmers Do It Better In The Water top, the trim old dude in a trilby and a tartan tie. Nobody—particularly not the guy with the middle part in the short-sleeved dress shirt who looks unnervingly like Dwight Schrute—is cool. They’re mostly white and getting up there: men in sensible pants with elastic waists up around their nipples, ladies with plaster of Paris perms.
    Maybe it’s the anticipation of a transcontinental trip on one of the world’s great passenger trains—perhaps it’s happy hour at the Panorama Lounge—but they’re also, to a person, exceedingly happy. Giggling, goofing around, their laughter ricocheting down the corridor. That makes them starkly different from the average wretched air traveller. This,