Introduction

Hi there!

Welcome to "Tim's Train Travels". This is my blog about riding trains, mostly (for now!) in Canada, but who knows where I could end up over the years.

First off, a little background: I've loved trains (especially passenger trains) for as long as I can remember, and I've been riding trains regularly since I headed off to university in 2007. If I can get where I need to go by train, there's a good chance that's where you'll find me.

I've made more trips than I can count on VIA Rail's Ocean between Halifax and Montreal, many trips throughout the Quebec City-Windsor Corridor, and most recently a trip from coast to coast. I've also tried to ride as many commuter and other trains as I can find during my travels.

I've always enjoyed writing up trip reports after the fact to share my experience with others. In the past I typically posted these on railfan groups (Yahoo groups and other forums), with a very targeted audience.

After my recent cross-Canada rail adventure, I had a bunch of people asking me about my trip and wondering if I'd be putting together some sort of report that they could read through. Though I had planned to do this on my typical railfan groups anyway, many of the people asking were not within that circle (i.e. family, coworkers, people I met on the train). So I figured that maybe it was time to launch a more public platform that I could share with people far and wide who might be interested in hearing about my travels.

So that's what this will be. My plan is to start by documenting my recent cross-Canada rail adventure. It was a sort of spur-of-the-moment cards-just-fell-into-place kind of trip, and took me from Halifax to Vancouver over the course of 6 days. It was an incredible trip, and an extremely fitting way to celebrate the country's 150th.

I look forward to sharing my account of this trip with you, and if this platform seems to work well, I'll plan to document my future trips on here too (the next of which is in...just over 2 weeks in fact!). Maybe I'll even go back and dig up some old trip reports from the railfan groups and re-post them here. Who knows!


-Tim Hayman