It would be nice...if only the trains went faster. Cross country/province overnight trips are cool, but when you consider how painfully slow it takes to get anywhere on a VIA train it's hard to sell the whole uniqueness of overnight train trips to the consumer. Sure it's a nice experience - both the trips you are just looking to go to sleep and wake up in your destination and the multi-day voyages - but it's so damn slow you almost get a bit sick of it. It's an easier thing to sell in Europe because a lot of rail passengers are just travelling from A to B. In Canada, everything is so far apart that most people aren't going to want to sit on a train for 12, 24, 48+ hours unless it's the only option. So you have to find a way to make it marketable in Canada. That takes improving speed while also modernizing what a long distance journey on North American rail could be like.
If we had the ability to go faster and not get stuck on sidings because a billion kilometre long intermodal hotshot had priority then it could surely be possible to capitalize on the whole idea of trans-continental trains in 2024. To most of the people alive, the idea of named passenger trains is a thing of the past. Few remember names such as The Dominion, California Zephyr, Mainstreeter, Tamiami Champion and so on. They barely have a sense of the romanticism that it entailed. But if you could offer nice long trips that maybe take 2, 3 or 4 days and were sold as an experience rather than a cheap way to get somewhere then it could be possible to bring that romantic aspect back. You just have to ensure that the trans-continental experience you sell doesn't turn into crawling along a track through a forest, parking on a siding for 2 hours with nothing to see but a tree because some CN train hauling durable goods had the right of way so you fall asleep and wake up half way across Manitoba having missed all the views. That, unfortunately, is the hardest part to achieve.
Just do something like this...VIA. And make the coaches nice. The newest ones they added look fucking awful, like some sterile medical room or science fiction thing. They have zero soul. Fine if you're just going to be on it for 5-6 hours to get somewhere for the day but hardly something anyone would willingly pay money to "enjoy".
![[Image: xIo17ZW.jpeg]](https://i.imgur.com/xIo17ZW.jpeg)
If we had the ability to go faster and not get stuck on sidings because a billion kilometre long intermodal hotshot had priority then it could surely be possible to capitalize on the whole idea of trans-continental trains in 2024. To most of the people alive, the idea of named passenger trains is a thing of the past. Few remember names such as The Dominion, California Zephyr, Mainstreeter, Tamiami Champion and so on. They barely have a sense of the romanticism that it entailed. But if you could offer nice long trips that maybe take 2, 3 or 4 days and were sold as an experience rather than a cheap way to get somewhere then it could be possible to bring that romantic aspect back. You just have to ensure that the trans-continental experience you sell doesn't turn into crawling along a track through a forest, parking on a siding for 2 hours with nothing to see but a tree because some CN train hauling durable goods had the right of way so you fall asleep and wake up half way across Manitoba having missed all the views. That, unfortunately, is the hardest part to achieve.
Just do something like this...VIA. And make the coaches nice. The newest ones they added look fucking awful, like some sterile medical room or science fiction thing. They have zero soul. Fine if you're just going to be on it for 5-6 hours to get somewhere for the day but hardly something anyone would willingly pay money to "enjoy".