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my letterhead: name, E-mail address, Oak Park

5 September 2003

Mr. Jean Pelletier, Chairman
VIA Rail Canada
3 Place Ville-Marie, Suite 500
Montréal, Québec H3B 2C9
Canada

Mr. Pelletier:

Last month, my wife and I traveled from Vancouver to Montréal on VIA Rail, with a one-week stopover in Saskatoon to visit our daughter (who is a permanent resident of Canada). Since we began our trip in the U.S. on Amtrak (also with a stopover), we bought a two-person, 30-day North American rail pass and then paid for first-class upgrades to compartments (bedrooms) on sleeper cars for the various segments of our trip.

On the Canadian from Vancouver to Saskatoon and again from Saskatoon to Toronto, we felt we indeed had first-class service and accommodations, superior to what we experienced with Amtrak. On the Enterprise from Toronto to Montréal, however, neither the service nor accommodations are what I consider first-class.

A combination of deficiencies was uncovered by the fact that I have sleep apnea, which causes me to stop breathing while I sleep. I must sleep with a machine — a continuous, positive air-pressure (CPAP) device — that forces me to breathe. On the Canadian, my wife slept on the lower bed because she is quite afraid of ladders. The upper bed had a shelf where I could place my CPAP, and there was an electrical outlet in the room for the plug. On the Enterprise, however, there was no such shelf. I had to take the lower bed so that I could place the CPAP on the floor. Then I had to struggle to help my wife into the upper bed; getting her down the ladder in the morning was a worse struggle. For the CPAP, I had to use the outlet in the shower-toilet. This meant that the shower-toilet door could not be latched, which in turn meant that the light in the shower-toilet would be shining on us as we tried to sleep (there being no switch to shut off the light). To keep the shower-toilet door from banging back and forth all night and to reduce the glare of the light, I had to prop the door almost shut with a bag of laundry. To summarize:

Sincerely,
David E. Ross

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