Once a weary traveller returns home, somewhere in New South Wales, Australia they’ll be spinning tales about the train station left in the coastal rain forest outback.
VIA Rail, who probably field more telephone calls and answer more letters on this one issue than any other travel concern about Prince Rupert, will feel their ears burning as John Williams, an Australian tourist recounts his bemusement at the location of VIA’s Northwestern BC terminal…
( from the blog a town called podunk, click on the link below to see the entire article atowncalledpodunk.blogspot.com/2 … 0722278200 )-
Seriously, they just make people get off at Fairview now?? That’s just nuts, I used to take the train all the time to head back home for Christmas or vacations and the idea of being stuck out there instead of downtown is just stupid…I realise the terminal building isn’t in use but surely they could at least leave people somewhere a little closer to downtown??
All that money spent on the cruise ships and this is what the train tourists have to put up with??
It’s not about what’s convenient for customers. It’s about what’s convenient for VIA and CN. Jees.
No reason they couldn’t stop at both places. I’ve been on European trains that make multiple stops on approaches to cities – stop at the airport station, stop at the ferry terminal, stop at the bus terminal, stop at the downtown terminal. No inconvenience at all.
Comes off as incredibly backwards thinking-sure the trip down the Skeena is incredible and I’m sure that is the first thing the tourists will be telling their friends about and then they’ll mention the ass-backwards way they get treated in Rupert. I suppose this was something that was just started when they shut down the terminal building and the city had no input at the time?? Oy!
LOL, hmm, now that could be a positioning statement eh, if it’s backwards its’ here…
Seriously though, it is rather dumb to drop off the passengers in the western fringes and then take the empty train downtown.
At one time I think the city owned or at least had some kind of say in the old Via station as it has heritage status, there was I thought some kind of development plan for it to turn it into a trendy little enclave, restaurants and such, easy to tack along a train station you would think.
Also they missed an opportunity to fully take advantage of the cruise ship terminal when they built that and the Atlin thing, could have had the train travel there as well to let the passengers off in that area.
But as Mig said it’s not about the passengers…