A Euro-Style Rail Trip in North America

Quebec City to Montreal on Via Rail's High-Speed-Lite Train: A Review

// I was invited to a book festival in Quebec City this month, and, when the organizers asked me how I wanted to get there from Montreal, I said: By train, bien sûr!

The distance between the province of Quebec's two largest cities is 269 kilometers, or 167 miles. Driving takes three hours if you go by the (more attractive) highway on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, slightly less if you take the Trans-Canada Highway south of the river. The latter is a near featureless run through sprawl and a die-flat landscape. Soul-sucking, especially on a grey day in the Canadian spring. At least on the train you can kick back and get some work done (under-achieving Wi-Fi permitting, of course).

The night before my departure, I got an email about a change to my assigned seat, which I knew meant one thing: a change of equipment. My heart sank when I took the stairs down to the platform from downtown Montreal's Gare Centrale. I'd be riding in a LRC economy car, the ugly duckling of the Via Rail fleet.

Canada's national rail service boasts some comically antiquated passenger cars . Friends who have come from Europe, the continent of high-speed, are prone to lengthy exclamations, many of them sarcastic, about the clanking rattletraps that ride the Canadian rails. I'm actually quite happy when I'm assigned a seat on a stainless-steel, streamlined RDC-1 car (for "Rail Diesel Car"), or better yet, an Economy Class Car. Both were built by the Budd Car Company, and picked up second-hand from Amtrak; the former were built in the mid-1950s, while the latter goes back, believe it or not, to just after the end of World War II. I'm not exaggerating—some were built in 1946: you can check out the specs here. They are beyond retro. They are living fossils.