ext_1466 ([identity profile] commodorified.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] thefourthvine 2005-07-06 06:37 pm (UTC)

Outside the Quebec-Windsor border, it is rapidly becoming a tourist industry, rather than a genuine form of transport.

When I was 5, we moved from Ontario to BC on the train Fraser and Ray are on -- The Canadian (Toronto-Vancouver). Moved: household goods, the car, people. Three days, three nights.

Now it's about 1000 CDN for a ticket, which is at least twice as much as a flight and it's an "experience."

*spits*

It USED to be a means of TRANSPORT.

Sometime around the election of the Mulroney government, they decided it needed to make a profit. Preferably without going to the trouble of removing it from the hands of the creeps and crooks running it and actually making the money go where it was needed.

In 1993 they closed over half of the stations in Canada. You can't take the train home for Christmas anymore, not if you live in a little town. If a line doesn't turn a profit, it's history.

And cargo rail? *trails off muttering incoherently* My grandfather was a Chessie System Engineer. My uncle, a conductor. We're a railroad family through and through, and what we've done to rail in this country makes me sick.

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