Via is one of those services that is so shit that even Amtrak is better. Yes, AMTRAK.
Worth noting that in the 2019 network, everything outside of the dark blue route has had their services cut so much that it's practically useless as a means of actual transportation. In 1979 every route was served at least daily, today Vancouver receives two trains a week, which is so shit that it was faster to travel from Toronto to Vancouver in 1880, than it is today. It's even cheaper/faster to take Amtrak between those two cities, than VIA (I know because I've used Amtrak to travel from Ottawa to Vancouver many times)
AmTrak is very bad, but at the very least it's nowhere near as embarrassing as having a national passenger railway network that doesn't even serve your countries fourth largest city (Calgary), despite it being a perfect distance away from another major city (Edmonton) to connect by rail.
Route cuts have also had a very negative effect on Indigenous communities all over Canada, all of those cut stops in Northern Ontario are almost all fly-in only communities today, which has tremendously awful effects on their access to goods/services.
The worst part is VIA Rail doesn't seem to care about bringing back service to the 2/3rds of communities that were cut from the rail network, instead they're doubling down on the Quebec City-Windsor corridor, while cross country rail is relegated to being a quaint attraction for tourists.
VIA rail fucking sucks; and it's awful because Canada could easily have a very good rail network if the government was willing to invest, and stop letting VIA get bullied by freight rail.
cross country rail is relegated to being a quaint attraction for tourists
I've seen ads for these in Germany, looked as if they were aimed at PMC boomers who'd already done the Norwegian fjord cruise 5 times. Core petit boug shit. It's fucking heartbreaking to learn how much they've cut their service, what that did, and that all that's left is feelgood kitsch for upper class ghouls who want to burn a ton of money to sit in a double decker dining car all day while gawking at Canadian mountain ranges.
Exactly, it's annoyingly obvious where VIA's priorities lay, given that their only recent improvements to that section of rail has been adding glass domed passenger cars rather than meaningfully improving speed, reliability, or frequency.
I want to have an early dinner in Boston, and a few hours later, buy MDMA from a bouncer at a strip club in Montreal. Is that so much to ask for?
In the states, the problem with Amtrak is that not only has austerity ruined any chance of a meaningful country-wide rail network, we're too busy subsidizing failed airline companies instead. Why not dump billions of dollars on a failing industry that mostly provides services to wealthy PMCs than a transportation network that the public would actually use if it were funded properly.
Erm, seems like there is only one river to cross, the clusterfuck of lakes start to east from The Pas, and Prince Albert is to the west, following the Saskatchewan river
Newfoundland also used to have a small railway but they took it away 😢
Amtrak is even sadder, barely covering most states at all. (https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-1018.pdf). Only the lines in red are actual rail, the green is express buses. And very little of it is high speed, none of it maglev, even in the wealthier Northeast. Moreover, it's slow enough that for any interstate travel (especially in the west), you'll want a sleeper, which are very limited, and hundreds of dollars. No wifi on the longer-distance trains either, and it runs through a lot of places without cellular signal.
Apparently most of Canada's population lives relatively close to the US border, below the 49th parallel http://metrocosm.com/canada-population-map/ https://brilliantmaps.com/half-canada/ https://www.vox.com/2016/5/5/11584064/canada-population-map
