You are here

VIA scorecard

I took a total of 6 trains on this trip:

- Windsor to London
- London to Toronto
- Toronto to Ottawa
- Ottawa to Toronto
- Toronto to Kitchener
- Kitchener to Windsor

Of those, the last was the only one I noticed being at all late (and it only by 20 minutes). The connections were all easy.

Part of the attraction was that the last VIA train I'd taken had working network and power at each seat, so I figured I could get some serious work done on travel days.

That didn't work out so well.

The network was only actually usable on one of six legs, and then only barely (latency nearly a second, and tons of packet drops). On four of the other legs I couldn't even get an ip address, and on one dhcp worked but the network was barely good enough to get me past the initial login page.

Four legs had outlets at the seat. Power was actually working on three of those. The newer trains with the outlets also happened to have less legroom and less comfortable seats.

The Amtrak trains all have separate café/lounge cars, which in practice is the only place I've gotten real work done, since when they're not busy I can take a table and spread out a bit.

In any case, I was probably too tired to do much anyway. So, conclusion: I should probably give up on the idea that I'm going to get anything more than reading done while traveling.

I didn't find the scenery as interesting as I have on Amtrak. Partly that may be just the lack of a second-floor observation car.

Overall VIA seemed OK (above all, it beat Amtrak in the basic getting-me-there-on-time category), but not fantastic.