COLUMN ONE : A Train Whistle Is Fading : The fabled coast-to-coast Canadian is history, a victim of economics. But the fond memories of passengers live on.

ABOARD THE CANADIAN —  There was a time in this fair land

When the railroad did not run. . . .

--Gordon Lightfoot

The tape-recorded telephone message at the train station in Chapleau, Ontario, says the train to Vancouver will be in at 8:30 p.m. But the toll-free hot line to the railhead in Montreal says the train will leave Chapleau at 1:15 a.m. A passenger in Chapleau who heeds the hot line and goes to the station at 1 a.m. ends up waiting until the train heaves into view at 2--and it’s 23 degrees below zero, with the waiting room locked for the night.

So it goes on Canada’s fabled train, The Canadian, whose transcontinental exertions permit a traveler to roll from the Atlantic seaboard to Vancouver, covering nearly 4,000 miles--theoretically in four days--with connections in Montreal and Sudbury.

The Canadian is late, broken-down, chaotic--and splendid, for its 35-year-old berths are oversized and soft, the snail’s-pace rocking of its cars is soothing and the big-screen scenery taken in from its stainless-steel dome cars is like an endless backdrop for “Doctor Zhivago.”

This is the railroad whose construction was celebrated by singer Gordon Lightfoot in his 1960s ballad, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy.” It is the route that linked a newly confederated Canada from coast to coast in 1885 and staved off the pushy “manifest destiny” types from south of the 49th Parallel who wanted to absorb British Columbia.

It is the route that built the Canadian West, spawning a legion of staging posts that became towns with names like Medicine Hat, Moose Jaw, Salmon Arm and Field. The official guidebook calls it “the world’s most spectacular rail journey.” And after Sunday’s train arrives in Vancouver on Wednesday, it will be no more.

Like the United States, Canada has a massive budget deficit, and as part of the reduction effort the Transport Ministry is cutting more than half of the nation’s passenger rail routes. Officials say this will save the government hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies--and leave only a few thousand non-flying, non-driving Canadians stranded at home.

Angry travelers respond that the policy will leave the remaining routes inaccessible and unproductive and so heavily dependent on subsidies that the government will also have to wipe them off the map in a few years. By the turn of the century, some transportation experts say, Canada may become the world’s first industrialized country to have done away with intercity passenger trains altogether.

To ride The Canadian now, on a swan-song run, is to experience the grandeur of a vanished era: to eat decent roast chicken or grilled fish on china service in dining cars where the tables are divided by etched-glass panels, the ceilings painted blue with constellations of silver stars; to operate toilets that flush with water and not some nasty green chemical; to sleep in a steam-heated Pullman car, and wake to the hiss of billowing vapors when the train pulls into a station and the engineer opens all the valves.

To ride The Canadian now, in an age of hurry-up jet travel, is to forget what time--and even what day--it is, for the trains may run 12 hours late and even more.

But above all else, to board this rolling museum and trundle across the continent is to get to know a public on the outs with its conservative government and to watch a country trying to sort out a new set of national priorities in an era of exchequer scrimping.

Canadians, far more than their American neighbors, are accustomed to government health insurance plans, old-age pensions, baby bonuses, fine-arts subsidies, a national airline, even fruit and vegetable shipments into the frozen Arctic. Some such services may have deteriorated as the money has run out, but Canadians still consider their existence a sign that theirs is a nation more civilized than the dog-eat-dog jungle to the south.

Now that Ottawa is scaling back its budget, Canadians find it even more shocking than Americans did when Ronald Reagan turned David Stockman loose on Washington in the early 1980s.

“To think that we will no longer be able to get on the train is kind of traumatic, isn’t it?” says Lawrence Binkley, treasurer of the Old Timers’ Assn. in the trackside settlement of Maple Creek, Saskatchewan, population 2,800.

All along the railway are hamlets whose residents know that their places exist only because tracks lead through them--and who wonder now what will happen to them once the train is gone.

“This town, demographically, is a town of aging people,” says retired conductor Mansel Robinson, resplendent in a bright red cardigan and matching knit cap as he sits down to lunch at the Plaza Restaurant and Pizzeria in Chapleau, population 3,200. Residents of this pine-girdled railway stop have decorated their main street with a totem pole and a marooned steam locomotive.

“Most of the young people, once they graduate from the universities, go south and move away,” says Ken Russell, the reeve, or mayor. “In the old days, the railroad used to be the biggest employer here. They had a shop with 350 people in it. That obviously closed down.”

“That was when the diesels came in,” adds 84-year-old Zita Evans. Her father came to Chapleau in 1884, to hack the railbed out of pine forest and blueberry bogs for room, board and $5 a month.

“Once the steam engines went out and the shop closed, then the predominant employer became the lumber mills,” Russell says.

“If the mills close, we’re all done,” says Robinson, ordering a hot turkey sandwich.

“We’ll have to pick blueberries in the summer and hunt in the winter,” says Evans, nodding in agreement.

Until 1871, when the first transcontinental railway feasibility study was done, the entire population of the Canadian prairie provinces, a realm embracing hundreds of thousands of square miles, was perhaps 2,500, less than the population of present-day Chapleau or Maple Creek.

“Out there, they say, the eye can feast upon acres and acres of tiger lilies and bluebells, stretching to the horizon as if a vast Oriental carpet had been thrown across the plains,” popular historian Pierre Berton wrote, summing up the folkloric conception of the Canadian West of a century ago, when there were no roads or rails and few white men had ventured about. “And there are exquisite lakes, speckled with geese and swans, broad meadows where the whooping cranes stalk about in pairs, and everywhere the ultimate spectacle of the buffalo, moving in dark rivers through a tawny ocean of waist-high grass. . . .”

A century and a quarter later, after billions of dollars, many thousand tons of steel and countless feats of engineering, it’s hard to know how much of that romantic image was ever true. Today the prairie, seen from the windows of the passing train in winter, is still a tawny ocean, but the grass is a withered stubble and the vast open spaces are marked off with barns, grain elevators and clumps of trees coated with frost. There are no buffalo, cranes or lilies, but antelope still bound in herds across the undulating grasslands, and one trackside farmer in Saskatchewan has erected a life-sized statue of a giraffe in his front yard.

Can Be a White Hell’

“In the winter, when the blizzard strikes and the heavens are blotted out, it can be a white hell,” Berton added. And indeed, within hours of The Canadian’s departure from Toronto, snow starts slanting down outside and blowing through cracks in the doorways of the train. Latches have long since broken off, and no one has bothered to replace them. Doors rattle open and shut. There is no weather-stripping. Riders trying to walk from car to swaying car slip and skid on the ice and snow heaped up in the passageways.

“They used to keep this thing shipshape,” grouses a conductor, swiping at the piles of snow with a broom. “Now there’s no maintenance done at all. Our government, they’re so arrogant, they don’t listen to nobody.”

Up in the cab, engineer Rolly Stortini slows the train to 20 m.p.h. so as not to press his luck on sections of cracked rail.

At one junction, the train stops, sits a while, backs up, bounces as though it had hit a spring, stops, then grinds forward again. This is how The Canadian must change directions, a conductor explains, at points where management hasn’t wanted to install modern switching hardware.

During an unscheduled five-hour stop in Winnipeg, blue-jeaned legs protrude from beneath the coaches. Workmen are lying flat on the frosty rails, hammering at hunks of rime the size of watermelons that have built up on the bottoms of the cars.

“This panel, right here, it’s all for electric heat,” says second engineer Jerry Godin, pointing at an array of dials and switches behind his seat. “None of them has ever been turned on. The new locomotive has a diesel generator, but the coaches still use steam heat. So the locomotive also tows a steam generator, behind the diesel.”

Stortini toots the whistle at a farmhouse where each day the homemaker comes to her window to wave. The train cuts through tunnels blasted out of solid granite, hugs the rock walls hanging over the foggy reaches of Lake Superior. It rolls on toward the gray grain elevators of Thunder Bay. And then it stops.

“Our boilers have just quit now,” Godin reports. “There’s no heat on the train.”

He can’t walk back to check the steam equipment without stopping the train and climbing down, because the functionless diesel generator is blocking the way. So he opens the door and disappears down a ladder.

The government says such foibles only prove its point: There is no money to repair the old rolling stock. Even if money were at hand, authorities add, there is no reason to think costly modernizations would attract more passengers and yield higher returns.

Since 1977, when the national network was reorganized into a state enterprise, Via Rail, the government has lavished about $5 billion Canadian--the equivalent of $4.25 billion at current exchange rates--on passenger service. It bought new locomotives and refurbished some coaches. Just the same, ridership fell 20% from 1981 to 1988. Today, only 3% of Canada’s intercity travelers take a train. Some routes run at dismal occupancy rates of 7%, though The Canadian boasts a robust 70%.

Subsidy Per Passenger

Revenues for the system cover only about 30% of its costs. Thus, for every passenger who boards the train--about 6.4 million did in 1988--the government must kick in a subsidy of $85.

Passengers and rail lovers argue that if the government has no money for repairs, it is the government’s own fault for driving passengers and profits away with shabby service.

“It appears to us that over the years, they have deliberately tried to run down the train so far that people would say, ‘The hell with it--I’m going to drive,’ ” says former conductor Robinson in Chapleau.

Consider the experience of Jack and Lydia Migowski of Maple Creek in Saskatchewan.

“We bought tickets to go to Winnipeg for Christmas, and we bought them 10 days in advance, like you’re supposed to,” says Lydia Migowski. “We went down to the station to get on, and when the train came into sight we were talking and saying, ‘Hey! It looks like it’s going to go by us, because that green light isn’t changing.’ And it just went--zoom!”

“Blew right by them,” says her son, Duane, editor of the local paper, who had accompanied his parents to the station. “Mum was yelling, ‘Jack, do something!’ and he was yelling back, ‘What do you want me to do? Run after the train and stop it?’ ”

Then there is the remarkable difficulty of finding out when to catch The Canadian as it passes through town. Via Rail is flush with timetables, toll-free numbers, answering machines that play “The Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy”--but there never seems to be anyone around who can say where the train is or when it will appear in any given station.

In Moose Jaw, for instance, the phone book gives two toll-free numbers; an operator on one of them says from afar that the scheduled 5:15 a.m. train will in fact leave at 9:30. But when a traveler goes to the station at 9:15, the local agent, who knows more or less where the train is, but whose number isn’t listed, says the train will really leave at 11:45. In the end, The Canadian slogs into the station at 1:05 p.m.

Yet the train is packed with people. Many take it because it’s cheap. A disproportionate number of riders are college students and older people on discounted tickets and railroad pensioners and spouses who ride free. Even at full fare, passengers can go from Montreal to Vancouver for $271--as long as they’re not picky about sleeping in their seats. Berths and rooms cost more. By comparison, an economy air ticket costs $561.

Others figure that no matter how chaotic the train may be, it’s still less nerve-wracking than flying. Figure-skating coach Michelle Fetzko says she was once on a flight from Vancouver when the pilot came on the public-address system to announce that an engine had failed and a part of the tail had fallen off.

Still others ride for adventure, or for the scenery, or because they are burned out by life and want to move slowly. There’s 67-year-old Ed Olson: First his wife ran off with a door-to-door Mormon missionary, he says, and then he was evicted from his bachelor apartment because the building superintendent wanted the place for a girlfriend.

“I’ve got a sister in Nanaimo, but I don’t know if she’s dead or alive,” says Olson, adding that she once sent him a postcard with her address on it, but he lost the card. Now he’s taking his chances on finding her, and he has chosen the train.

“I’m not in any hurry,” he says, ordering bacon and eggs in the dining car.

CROSSING A CONTINENT BY RAIL

Train route streaks across Canada, from Atlantic coast to Vancouver Main leg from Montreal west, is traveled by the Canadian.