VIA Train 72

There’s something about the rhythm of a train that seems older than the engine itself—something that hums in the rail lines and echoes in the bones. As the train pulled out of Windsor and began its slow glide east toward Toronto, I settled into the motion like one settles into memory. There are other ways to travel, of course—faster, cheaper, louder—but none that stir the imagination the way a train does.

Aboard the train, I’m not the driver. I’m not the pilot. I’m simply a passenger. But in that surrender is a certain kind of freedom. The windows become portals. A marsh blurs into a steel yard, a town into a forest, all folding one into the next like scenes in a dream you don’t want to wake from. The rails, iron-straight and humming, sing softly of industry and empire, of migration and memory. But for me, they mostly sing of my grandfather.

It never fails—any time I board a train, I’m seven again. Back in his basement, knees pressed into the carpet, eyes wide as the Lionel rounded the corner. He had built an entire world down there, a miniature town with a butcher, a church, even a hobo camp tucked behind a trestle bridge. The train would whistle, the lights would flicker on, and we’d sit there—me utterly spellbound, him with that quiet smile of someone who already knew the joy I was just discovering.

He taught me how to work the switches, how to couple and uncouple the cars, how to slow just before the bend so the boxcars wouldn’t derail. He told me stories—not just about trains, but about the places they took people. And somehow, even if we never left that basement, I believed him. Trains, he said, were magic. They could take you anywhere, if you let them.

And now here I am, all grown up and still letting them.

The VIA train isn’t sleek or showy. It doesn’t fly. It glides. It ambles. It offers time—time to think, to look, to breathe. In the lull between towns, I watched the trees lean into the wind and thought about all the people who’ve made this trip before me. Immigrants. Dreamers. Lovers. Workers returning home. Grandparents going to meet their grandchildren. Everyone with a reason, everyone with a story, everyone temporarily united by the shared momentum of steel wheels and forward motion.

The train will get me to Toronto soon enough. But what I’ll remember is this: the sound of the tracks like a lullaby beneath me, the way the world slips by without urgency, and the way a grown man can still, on a certain kind of journey, be a boy again with his grandpa, running the rails of a world built just for two.

That’s the real destination, I think. And the train—well, the train always knows the way.