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.

• The beds were as narrow and hard as any prison bed.
• For two people, the coffee service in the room had only one cup.
• The pull-out table under the window was broken.
• Breakfast at McDonald's would have been an improvement over the cold meal presented to us. The train crew drank coffee while my wife and I had to serve ourselves. My wife both has diverticulitis and is lactose-intolerant, common conditions for someone in her 60s. Thus, she could not eat even half of the meal because of the presence of seeds or milk products. (On the Canadian, she at least had a menu from which to choose appropriate items.) The tables were not even large enough for the two of us to both have our breakfasts together.
• The shower-toilet combination was similar to that in our Amtrak compartment. However, on the Enterprise, the water had only two temperatures: hot or not at all. Also, floor in our bedroom was quite wet after I showered, something that did not occur on Amtrak.
• I could not find a control for the air-conditioning. We suffered the entire night with an arctic blast. I tried calling the car porter to have it adjusted, but he never answered the call button.
• When I went to wash my hands in our compartment after breakfast, the water came out of the faucet with such force that my shirt was soaked.

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:

• There is no electrical outlet in the bedroom itself.
• There is no provision (e.g., a shelf for the upper bed) for health equipment needed during sleeping.
• The light in the shower-toilet has no off switch.

Sincerely,
David E. Ross