Jennifer Drummond’s journey from Toronto back home to Smiths Falls should have been an easy one.
Instead, she says, she ended up on a “red-eye train” on Wednesday night, spending more than 12 hours stuck in one place on the tracks.
The train ride turned into an overnight venture on a train outside Brockville after, Via Rail said, an earlier train experienced a “mechanical issue” and disrupted two other Ottawa-bound trains coming behind it.
For 45 minutes after the train stopped in Brockville, Drummond said, there was no indication anything was wrong as passengers sat in the dark and waited for more information.
Then Via Rail staff announced resolving the delay “may take some time,” with no time estimate as to when their train would be in motion again.
“We were so kept in the dark,” Drummond said. “At the beginning, I started to cry because … I didn’t know what was going to happen. I literally had to crawl over people to beg for a Kleenex.”
Meanwhile, her father, Alan, was waiting in a parking lot at the Smiths Falls train station, unable to drive to Brockville due to worsening road conditions caused by the snowstorm.
Her father ended up waiting six hours at the Smiths Falls station, but he finally gave up shortly after 3 a.m.
As passengers began to find they now had Wednesday night plans in common, Drummond said people started getting to know each other. A conversation about different types of tea ensued at one point, she said, enrapturing people in nearby rows.
“In true Canadian spirit, there was some humour involved,” she said. “By the end, we just started to be delirious. There was some hearty laughter in there, but at the end the laughter was over and we just wanted to know what was going on.”
At some points, Drummond said, passengers would go three hours at a time without hearing any updates from Via Rail staff.
“I wish there was some transparency to say, ‘You know, this may take some time,’ meaning it’s going to take until the middle of the next day, so we can plan,” she said.
Instead, she said people hung onto whatever updates they could find, passing tidbits of information through adjacent rows in the train car.
Nearly five hours after the train stopped in Brockville, she said, passengers from the other train that had initially experienced the mechanical issues transferred over to Drummond’s train. She described the journey from train to train as treacherous, especially for vulnerable passengers.
Via Rail said passengers were transferred between three different trains while the issue was resolved.
“It was just unsafe,” she said. “I’d even find it difficult in my mid-30s.”
Via Rail confirmed that all passengers were transferred safely and without injury.
As the sun started to rise on Thursday, people started calling into work, letting their bosses know they wouldn’t be showing up to the offices that morning.
Via Rail said no buses were available in the region to provide alternate transportation, but all passengers would receive full refunds and travel credits.
Drummond said she eventually got off the train at 9:30 a.m. in Brockville. Via Rail announced passengers headed for Ottawa arrived at there shortly after 12 noon.
Via Rail said it was conducting a full review of the mechanical failure, “including the shutdown of the equipment involved, to understand what happened and to strengthen both our operations and our response.”
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