Assiniboine Valley Railway is taking reservations for their dinner train

The Assiniboine Valley Railway is holding their popular Fall Dinner Train Weekend for the first time in three years.  It will be held on Saturday, September 19 & Sunday, September 20.  

Participants will eat on the train, 2 people to a car, up to 16 people per train.  Family groups can reserve a full train.  The meal lasts four loops around the track. The meal starts with refreshments (coffee, tea, soft drink or water), snacks and a fresh tossed salad for the first loop around the track. The main course is a deluxe hamburger platter (or a hot dog platter for kids), which will be eaten over 2 loops.  Dessert is pie with ice cream or whipped cream or a dish of ice cream for the fourth loop. Each meal lasts about an hour.

     The cost is $15 for adults & $12 for kids.  Reservations must be made for the specific times listed below, and must be prepaid to confirm.  Payment is preferably by credit card, but special arrangements can be made to pay by cheque or cash.  

To make a reservation, phone Len LaRue at (204) 832-3448.  Messages can be left on Voice Mail, but please just leave a name & return phone number and be prepared with your Credit Card in hand.  Reservations are first come first served. This is a very popular event, so please make your reservations as soon as possible!

Dinner train times are as follows:

Saturday, September 19:  12:00, 1:30, 3:00, 4:30 (Members only:  6:00, 7:30, BYOB)
Sunday, September 20:  1:00, 2:30, 4:00 (Members only:  5:30, BYOB).

For more information about the Assiniboine Valley Railway, please click here. 

Churchill by rail: Part 10 - Back to Winnipeg!

 Our train makes a stop in beautiful downtown Kamsack, Saskatchewan.

By Paul Ullrich

After breakfast, we went back to the dome car, where I assumed my role as the unofficial conductor. I like to know where I am at all times, and that's not easy to do in the endless boreal forest of northern Manitoba. But I was armed with my Via Rail timetable, the Canadian Rail Travel Guide by Daryl Adair (that name sounds familiar) and my 1985 edition of Bill Coo's Scenic Rail Guide to Western Canada.

Bill Coo's Scenic Rail Guide to Western Canada is still a valuable resource for the rail traveler, but it has been out of print for 30 years, and it's a bit dated. For instance, it states that between mile 1214 and Gillam, you should watch for Indians carrying their children in moss bags.

Yeah, right. These days they're using baby carriers that the bought from The Northern Store like everyone else.

Using the mileposts with the two books and the timetable, I was able to calculate exactly where we were, and if we were on time or not. My fellow passengers, who also wanted to know where we were, helped me along, spotting mileposts along the way. We arrived late in Thompson, with barely enough time to leave the train and stretch our legs before we departed.

Via Rail had supplied the train with a lovely park car, but not with a park car attendant, so we were on our own in the back of the train with nothing but a carafe of coffee that the staff had left us.  But we discovered that the park car had untapped resources that made the trip a bit more tolerable. One of the staff opened up one of the cabinets in the park car and found some more coffee cup lids! A case of cookies was also discovered in another cabinet.

I went to be in my unshaded lower berth again, but this time I had a sleep mask, which was graciously given to me by one of the other passengers in our car. I woke up shortly after midnight to find that we were in The Pas, right on time. I woke up a few hours later to discover that we were still in The Pas. I woke up a bit after six, and we were still in The Pas!

I washed up and shaved in the bathroom, still in The Pas. The light wasn't working, and the air conditioner was on full blast. As the train wasn't in motion, I was able to fill up the sink almost to the brim. When the train was moving, the best you could do was a couple of inches of water. Any more than that and the movement of the train caused the water to spill. 

We went for breakfast, still in The Pas. As we ate, the train from Winnipeg rolled in, six hour late. This is why our train was held up in The Pas for so long. We finally got moving around 8:00.

There was much excitement in the Park car when we reached Saskatchewan, and the first field of canola was spotted. After several days of boreal forest, muskeg and The Barrens, it was a welcome sight. But if you're the type that gets excited over seeing a field of canola, then you've been in the prairies way too long!

We started out 5 1/2 hours late leaving The Pas. As we trundled through the prairies, we lost more and more time. I became the constant bearer of bad news as the rest of our group asked me how we were doing. When we had lunch, we found that the menu selection had become even smaller. We were back paralleling the highway again, and automobiles continued to zip past us.

We weren't supposed to have dinner on the train, as it was supposed to have arrived in Winnipeg at 4:45 PM. But the crew managed to rustle us up a meal. There were only two selections on the menu, but we were just grateful to be fed. We arrived in Dauphin seven hours late, but the train stayed there long enough for us to go outside for the first time since we left Thompson.

It was announced that we wouldn't arrive in Winnipeg until 1:00 AM, eight hours and 15 minutes late. But the railfans didn't mind, because that meant more time on the train!

We made the best of it by holding a little reception in the park for our two gracious and hard working tour guides, Robert and Deborah. We watched a beautiful, lingering sunset as the sun dipped near Riding Mountain National Park. We watched the moon rise and the stars come out as we approached Gladstone. The lights of Portage La Prairie were a welcoming sight, as it meant that we were almost home!

We pulled into Winnipeg exactly at 1:00 AM. Robert called for cabs as soon as we arrived, and when we exited the station there were about a dozen taxis waiting for us to take us home.

We arrived home safe and sound, but then we came down with colds, and so did a few others from our group. A friend of mine who lived in Thompson explained that we all must've contacted a "northern bug", and now that we've had it, we'd be now be immune.

A friend of mine took the train to Churchill last week. Her train was exactly 28 minutes late arriving in Churchill. The trip back was without incident. She even had warm, sunny weather and she didn't catch a cold!

Some people have all the luck!

Passengers take a much needed 20 minute break in Dauphin.

There's nothing more beautiful than a prairie sunset. This one was taken at Glenella.

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?