(The following column by Tom Claridge appeared on the Orangeville Citizen website on September 14.)
ORANGEVILLE, Ont. — A couple of years ago, my curiosity was piqued by the present of a VIA Rail sign on the side of the stately CP Rail station in downtown Sudbury.
After all, I knew full well that VIA’s transcontinental train, The Canadian, doesn’t stop there, instead using the CNR trackage and the nondescript station at Sudbury Junction on the city’s northeastern outskirts.
The observation led to a visit to VIA’s website and discovery of the fact that there still is a passenger train in Canada that uses CP Rail tracks.
Dubbed The Lake Superior, although it never does reach the lake, the train operates between Sudbury and White River, nearly 300 miles away, leaving Sudbury at 9 a.m. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and returning from White River on the following days.
If you look closely at the Northern Ontario side of Ontario’s current Official Road Map, you’ll see the entire route, which takes the train past four communities in Greater Sudbury (Azilda, Chelmsford, Larchwood and Levack) before reaching the first main divisional point, Cartier.
Just north of Cartier, the rail line crosses Highway 144 (the road between Sudbury and Timmins) and heads into the wilderness, following the Spanish river valley as far as the resort town of Biscotasing, near the river’s main source, Biscotasi Lake. From there it heads cross-country to Chapleau and lesser-known points such as Dalton, Missanabie, Franz and Amyot.
The website includes a timetable that increased my curiosity, in that it calls for the southbound trip to take a lot longer than the northbound one, the arrival times being 5:45 p.m. at White River and 6:30 at Sudbury.
Interestingly, the website and even Google were of little assistance in getting much information about the service, beyond the fact that passengers were advised to pack lunches since no meal service was offered!
But with family members now living in Sudbury, I decided I’d like to take the trip and was delighted when son Chris announced that it was going to be my birthday present.
Booked a few weeks earlier, the trip involved leaving on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 29, after we’d finished editing the August 30 paper, spending that night in Sudbury.
It was only the next morning that we discovered that the train consists of two Budd (rail diesel) cars of the type that once provided speedy passenger service between Toronto and Owen Sound and which I personally used on weekends in my university days back in the late 1950s. (Believe it or not, the return fare between West Toronto station and Shelburne was just $3.25 and the trip usually took only about 90 minutes!)
Only one of the two Lake Superior cars is for passengers, the other being a baggage car that I found is often filled with canoes owned by adventurous souls embarking on voyages up and down the Spanish, which empties into Georgian Bay’s North Channel at the town of the same name.
Once aboard, I discovered that the passenger coach actually had a lunch counter equipped with a refrigerator and microwave, VIA having long ago decided it could no longer afford to have it staffed.
(A more pleasant discovery was that the conductor was nevertheless bringing bottled water and Tim Hortons coffee aboard, with passengers being asked to make voluntary $1 donations.)
As for the train crews, they were the friendliest one could ever hope to encounter, the engineers being seasoned CP Rail veterans and the conductors and baggage men (yes, they were all male!) equally affable VIA employees.
The trip was both educational and a fascinating experience that would be enjoyed even by those who don’t fit the “rail fan” label.
The scenery was reminiscent of that found on the popular Agawa Canyon excursions out of Sault Ste. Marie, with countless lake and streams in view as the line snakes its way through the Canadian Shield, although we learned that because of the absence of maple trees the fall colours aren’t as spectacular.
Invited to spend much of the trip up in the cab, I soon discovered that the train’s speed was highly dependent on two factors: the number of freight trains and the preferences of dispatchers based in Calgary.
Both factors worked against us on the northbound trip, when we met about 10 enormously long freight trains and were held up further by a work train that’s laying quarter-mile-long welded rails near Dalton and a malfunctioning signal that required us to stay under 15 miles an hour until we finally reached a green signal. We were two hours and 20 minutes late into Chapleau and finally made it to White River shortly after 8 p.m.
Southbound, the trip was a study in contrasts. Although we had to make at least half a dozen unscheduled stops to pick up canoeists and their baggage, the friendly dispatcher gave us preference to the point where the only other holdup was the work train and we made it to Sudbury nearly half an hour ahead of schedule!
In short, the trip was fabulous, and VIA’s “best kept secret” is a gem waiting to be discovered.