James Wilt, Vice Canada - In late March, VIA Rail announced a staggeringly good deal to get a little corporate synergy behind Canada 150.
For only $150, anyone between the ages of 12 and 25 could buy an unlimited youth pass for July. In other words, for around the price of one-way flight from Toronto to Montreal, you could spend an entire month riding the train back and forth between Vancouver and Halifax, up to Churchill, down to Windsor, wherever you wanted providing there was room in economy class.
But the VIA Rail website was overloaded and crashed almost immediately. Young people were on the phone for hours; one woman apparently called VIA Rail almost 200 times. As it turned out, there were only 1,867 tickets — groan — and they were snapped up almost immediately. Comparisons to the golden ticket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory abounded.
VIA later responded to widespread outrage by bumping that number up to the far less symbolic figure of 4,000. But even that only represents less than 0.1 per cent of the 4.5 million people between the ages of 15 and 24 in this giant country.
As a Twitter user put it: "@VIA_Rail is definitely getting a taste of how deprived our generation is of affordable opportunities to explore our own country."
That's exactly it.... Read the rest of the article HERE.
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| Photo copyright High Speed Rail Canada |
But the VIA Rail website was overloaded and crashed almost immediately. Young people were on the phone for hours; one woman apparently called VIA Rail almost 200 times. As it turned out, there were only 1,867 tickets — groan — and they were snapped up almost immediately. Comparisons to the golden ticket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory abounded.
VIA later responded to widespread outrage by bumping that number up to the far less symbolic figure of 4,000. But even that only represents less than 0.1 per cent of the 4.5 million people between the ages of 15 and 24 in this giant country.
As a Twitter user put it: "@VIA_Rail is definitely getting a taste of how deprived our generation is of affordable opportunities to explore our own country."
That's exactly it.... Read the rest of the article HERE.
What an excellent article, that's spot on. It mentions that Justin Trudeau likes to draw a line between his Dad's reign and his own. First of all he'd do well to get passenger rail in Canada serving more of the same places that it did under his Father. At least when his Dad was PM you could catch a train to towns and cities such as Banff, Calgary, Thunder Bay, Downtown Sudbury, Regina, Sherbrooke, Megantic and Saint John (New Brunswick) etc.
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