Jon Searles' photos with the keyword: Canada

The conclusing of my story is at least somewhat amusing. Air Canada made me three days late, but Amtrak was 9 minutes early into Utica, at least according to the conductor. One way or another, it took about 7 hours as opposed to two days.

Buffalo Depew has one of the worst reputations of any Amtrak station, being an "Amshack" wedged under a group of highway bridges. However, on this trip it appeared to be in reasonably good shape.

Rome station is minor enough so that even though Amtrak don't run many proper expresses outside of the Northeast Corridor anymore, many trains skip it. The Maple Leaf, however, does not. That clock you can just barely see on the left is new, but the station is from the 1910's, if I'm not mistaken. I don't have my books with me, and as usual the internet isn't much use for finding the date.

Back in the 1990's, this integrated transport station opened near Carousel Mall in Syracuse, incorporating Amtrak, long-distance buses, and for a time OnTrack rail transit services. Now OnTrack is gone, but Amtrak and the buses remain. It's one of the newest large stations in New York.

The current Rochester station is another Amshack, although in good shape. Given Amtrak's funding difficulties, the good condition of most of the trains and facilities that I saw on this trip seemed better than I remember.

Here's a sticker advertising the Wi-Fi. This marked the first ever time that I had used Wi-Fi on the train, although in reality Wi-Fi service has been used on trains almost from its beginnings, as it's far cheaper and less technically challenging than many other communications technologies like railphones, for example. The railyard in the background is the international railyard on the U.S. side in Niagara Falls, and we weren't far from the immigration center. The locomotives switching the yard were old EMD Geeps that had been upgraded to run driverless.

The ceiling and luggage racks were in good condition, and mostly original. Digital destination boards had been added, though.

Introduced in 1976, most Amfleet coaches and cafes still in service are from the first series, the Amfleet I series, which had vestibules at both ends. However, most of these have been rebuilt and repainted several times, and have been used in far more roles than they were originally intended. Today, they're used throughout Amtrak's routes in the Northeast and Midwest U.S., and Eastern Canada. They were even the standard on Amtrak's Metroliner services from the early 1980's until the introduction of Acela Express services. When I boarded this one, I noticed that the upholstery had been redone, that the electrical outlets were still there, and that Wi-Fi had been added. These new seats appear to be fatter than the originals, without the uncomfortable center armrest that plagued the original Amfleet I coaches.

I took a photo of this arch just because I liked it.

The modern-day entrance to the tracks is underground, accessed via the portal between the two ticket kiosks. The kiosk on the right, in the foreground, was the one operating on this day. I arrived very early, around 0630, before they opened, so I had to wait.

This shot is another departure board on the 22nd, but continuing with my story.... the problems didn't end on on the 22nd, but dragged into the 23rd. I had to pay for the second night in the hotel, as the line for vouchers stretched through the airport. For that matter, my flight was cancelled twice, first the original one from Toronto to Syracuse, then the replacement for it (as Air Georgia cancelled everything for two days), which wasn't really a replacement. This was because passengers from the cancelled flights were crammed onto later flights that were already scheduled, which resulted in most being bumped off. At no time did I receive any notification of the cancelled flights, as the airline told my family instead of me, and my family called me. By the time I was bumped to the third flight, I gave up, as it was scheduled to fly a day before Christmas Eve, with three days' worth of passengers scheduled to fly on one 19-seat Beechcraft 1900.

Here's another shot of Toronto Union Station, showing the flag display. From the look of it, all of them are Canada-related, rather than international. The words above them are cities througout Canada.

My solution to the air travel fiasco was to take the "Maple Leaf" from Toronto to Utica. The Maple Leaf is an international train operated jointly by VIA Rail Canada, Canada's national passenger train operator, and Amtrak, VIA's American equivalent. The schedule is 7 hours, 9 minutes long, which is mostly due to a great deal of padding for the Niagara Falls stop, where the border control is. This rather elaborate station is Toronto Union Station, the busiest train station in Canada, hosting 200,000 passengers a day. Although it was opened in 1927, it's full of World War I memorials and references.

I offered to briefly describe my ordeal in Toronto earlier, but I'm so sick of talking about it that I'm not going to get into much detail here. Basically, as you can see, the vast majority of cancellations during the December 2013 ice storm were Air Canada flights (note that Jazz is an Air Canada brand, and that Air Georgia is an Air Canada contractor). The ice storm brought down trees around Ontario (if you haven't seen an ice storm, the ice attaches to trees and powerlines, and the weight brings them down), and the roads were dangerous for the first night. The airport continued to operate quite smoothly given everything....if you weren't an Air Canada passenger. Not only did Air Canada fail to fly many of their flights, opting for cancellations rather than delays, but no replacements were offered, at least to me, whether air, rail, or bus. We were able to get a free hotel the first night (the 21st-22nd), but the second night was another story.