Churchill by rail: Part 9 - A troubled journey through The Barrens and beyond

 There's a whole lot of nothing in The Barrens, just south of Churchill.

By Paul Ullrich

We were all in a celebratory mood as we left Churchill. Our group held another get together in the park car, reminiscing about all the good time we had as we traveled through The Barrens.

The Barrens is perhaps the bleakest part of the country I've ever seen. The land is so flat that it makes southeastern Saskatchewan look like the Rocky Mountains. There's nothing but arctic moss, stunted trees and shallow ponds spreading beyond the horizon.
  
There's a well known Canadian book by Farley Mowat called Lost in The Barrens, which was made into a motion picture in 1990. Now that I've been through The Barrens, I don't see how anyone could get lost there! Remember the old joke about the prairies (which was used in the opening theme for Corner Gas) where they say that if your dog runs away you can watch him go for three days? If that happened in The Barrens, you could watch him run for a month!

Those stunted trees don't look like much, but they're very, very old. Things grow slow in permafrost, and those tiny pines are somewhere around 50 to 100 years old! I have a guide book that says that The Barrens goes on for only 40 miles, but there's not much of a transition in scenery when you finally leave it.

We bedded down for the night, still traveling through The Barrens. That's when we received the first signs of a troubled journey.

Our sleeping car attendant handed us our towel bags, then asked us to ration our towels, as they were such short supply that we wouldn't be getting another towel bag like we usually would get on our  second day. I reached up to pull down the window shade on my lower berth, and discovered that it was missing. This meant that I was going to be awoken by the dawn's early light whether I wanted or not for the next two nights.

I awoke well past Gillam, once again in the familiar boreal forest. After we had breakfast, I ordered a coffee to go. When the server brought me the cup, she said, "You might want to hold on to the lid. It's the last one we got. Everything's in short supply on this train!"

Oh, boy!

I took her advice and held onto that lid for dear life until we reached Winnipeg. Had I wanted to, I might've been able to sell it for five bucks on that train!

Things went from bad to worse after that. The sleeper next to us had no hot water, which meant that we had to share the shower. Another sleeper's septic tanks were completely full, which left the car with a very unpleasant door. The attendant kept spraying air freshener throughout the car, which helped for about ten minutes.

I knew that the Churchill train is not one of Via's crack trains, and that I shouldn't expect the same level of service that they have on their other two trains with sleepers, The Canadian and The Ocean.  The Canadian has tablecloths. The Churchill train does not. The Canadian doesn't serve coffee in paper cups.  The Canadian has a new menu ever day. On the Churchill train, we joked that everyone had memorized the menu after the first day, as the selection was always the same.  But setting out with a shortage of supplies, and hot water in one car and a full septic tank in another, especially when you are literally in the middle of nowhere, is not only inexcusable, but a bit frightening.

          An interesting bit of equipment on a siding in The Barrens. Anyone know what it is?

Churchill by rail - Part two: Stranded in Thompson

     Our train arrive late in Thompson, and stays there for a very long time.

By Paul Ullrich 

We awoke to a steady rain just outside of Cormorant Lake, north of The Pas. It had been raining all night, and it continued to rain until just before we reached Thompson Junction.

This was the land of no roads, no communities, no cell phone transmitters and certainly no wi-fi. We crossed highway 6 outside of Ponton, Manitoba, crossed highway 373 to Norway House north of Dunlop, and we ran parallel with highway 6 from Dunlop to Wabowden, but after that we were on our own in the wilderness of Manitoba's boreal forest. We passed Thicket Portage, which is where the Franklin expedition once stayed (not a good sign of things to come).

We were going a lot slower since we left The Pas. From the dome car you could see each car rise and fall as it rolled over the uneven roadbed. We reached Thompson Junction, confident that we'd cover the 30 miles from there to Thompson in no time.

No so! It took us 2 1/2 hours to get there, which means that we were hurtling down the track at a breakneck speed of 12 miles an hour! On the plus side, we were going slow enough to get some great shots of the Wintering River and the Grass River as we crossed over them.

The Via timetable lists Thompson as a five hour stop. I was wondering what we were going to do there for such a long time. But the train was several hours late arriving, so I thought that our stay would be brief.

So I thought.

The train from Churchill was waiting for us on the wye. When we pulled into the station, that train backed up behind us. Much to our surprise, we found three cars from the states waiting for our train. They had licence plates from Minnesota, Iowa, and California. The had obviously drove up from Winnipeg on highway 6 to meet the train at Thompson.

It's an eight hour drive from Winnipeg to Thompson. By train, it's 24 hours, assuming that it's on time. Highway 6 is a direct route through the Interlake. The Churchill train meanders through Saskatchewan, as Churchill is a grain port, and Saskatchewan is were the trains get the grain.

It would make perfect sense for anyone to drive to Thompson, then take the train the rest of the way to Churchill.  It would make perfect sense to anyone except for a railfan. After all, that's 24 hours less spent on a train!

We were told that we'd be facing a delay due to a mandatory rest period for the crew, and that we'd be leaving Thompson at 1 AM.  A few of us decided to walk to Thompson for a snack run. Just outside of Wal-Mart, a native man and his family leaving the store noticed our name tags and stopped us.

"I guess you're stuck here for a while because of the washout, right?" He asked.

Huh?

He was telling the truth. When we got back to the train, it was confirmed that there was indeed a washout north on the line. Due to the heavy rains, a beaver dam had been breeched, which washed out part of the track. We were then told that we'd be staying on the train in Thompson overnight, and that we'd be flown out to Churchill the next morning.

Damn those pesky Canadian rodents, and their shoddy construction techniques.

The crew also told us that they'd be going into town for some supplies for the next day. Despite the news about the delay, we were all in good spirits, and we even had a get-together in the observation car that evening. Being in Thompson also meant that folks carrying cell phones could once again get a signal. That's when we found that the story of our washout made the news!

We went to bed that night on the train, looking forward to a better night's sleep after rocking and rolling through the bush the previous night. We slept peacefully, fully confident that Via Rail would take care of all of our troubles and get us to Churchill swiftly.

Boy, were we ever in for a surprise!

 Hey, sign painter - you had one job! Couldn't you face that "N" the right way?

 Uh, there is track under that train, right? Exactly how long has that train been at that siding?

                        Thompson station - our home away from home for the next 24 hours.