Montréal this way

If it hadn’t been for my very late arrival at Montréal’s Pierre Elliot Trudeau Airport on Thursday night (see The Longest Night) I would have hoped to tell you about my sneaky cut price route from the airport to the city centre. Unfortunately I arrived too late to take advantage of the airport’s ’secret’ public transport option, but I’ll explain it anyway.

From Montréal’s only active passenger airport to the city centre, the car-less passenger has several options:

• Limousine (unnecessarily expensive and brash for such a modest city)
• Taxi ($35 to anywhere in the downtown core – see the map on the window of your cab for details, more to anywhere outside this zone)
• Aerobus (overpriced at $13 one way / $22.75 return for a ride in a refurbished city bus to the central bus station and Berri-UQAM métro)
• …or a disjointed connection by city bus and métro for the princely sum of $2.50

If you can manage your luggage and you can spare a bit more time, I strongly recommend the latter.

You can plan your connection from the airport to any métro station or bus in the city using the Tous Azimuts travel planner of the website of the STM, Montréal’s transit system. Otherwise:

• From outside arrivals, catch bus 204 (Cardinal) towards Dorval – there are two bus stops for east and west bound services, so make sure you get the east bound one for Dorval (in French it’s Vous êtes pour Dorval?). Buses leave every thirty minutes.
• Unless you have a pass or a pre-paid ticket, a single fare is $2.50. You need exact change, and the driver will give you a transfer ticket.
• It’s a short ride of a few minutes to Dorval station. Follow the other passengers with suitcases and bags (trust me, there are always people doing this route).
• From Dorval, take bus 211 or 221 towards the Lionel-Groulx métro. Again, check with the driver that you’re going in the right direction (again, that would be Vous êtes pour la centre-ville?) Show your transfer ticket but keep it.
• The bus runs non-stop to the métro station at Lionel-Groulx. Your transfer ticket goes in the lower slot of the ticket gate.

The orange and green métro lines cross at Lionel-Groulx. If you want to take another connecting bus from any métro station to your final destination, be sure to print a transfer ticket from the machines just inside the ticket gate at Lionel-Groulx. A métro transfer ticket is not valid on buses departing from that station, so you have to get it here, not at your destination métro station.

The longest night

Perhaps you know the pattern of internal emotions that you go through when waiting for a heavily delayed flight.

I was nice and early at London Heathrow terminal three yesterday morning, with more than three hours in hand for flight AC865, the daily 15h00 departure for Montréal. The previous week, hoardes of flightless masses grounded at Heathrow by dense fog had filled our television screens and newspaper cover stories. This time, however, the air was clear.

‘Landside’, Heathrow is almost always overwhelmed with queues as passengers wait to clear security. Once ‘airside’ of security, Heathrow is overwhelmed with duty free shopping. Terminal three is no different, with a large centralised holding lounge where passengers wait for their gates to be called. Every free meter of wall space has been punched through to create a retail or catering unit. Dozens of shops, including such high class units as Harrods and Chanel, all compete to distract you as you while away the now obligatory two hour wait. Windows do not provide rentable space, so the British Airport Authority does not encourage their use.

Abandon all hope, ye who enter. Sunlight became a distant memory, even more so as it became obvious that my flight was going to be delayed.

AC865 was some way down the list of departures when I arrived, and some way off from being assigned a gate. As preceding flights opened, boarded, closed and departed, AC865 gradually shunted up the departure screens. But then as the last sixty minutes began to tick away, it remained firmly unopen, and subsequent flights began to open, board, close and depart. AC865 remained stubbornly at the top of the screens, glued to the monitor with the same moronic largely useless:

Please Wait.

Two hours after the scheduled departure time, there was still no news of what was up, and only snippets of information were being circulated amongst passengers who had begun to recognise each other as the unlucky few who had still not left for Montréal. Eventually the waiting lounge grapevine reported that we had passed the magical three hour delay, and therefore food and drinks were being laid on for us (up to a value of £10, mind) at two concessions in the lounge. The sun had already set, and unusually for a westbound trans-Atlantic flight, this was going to be a flight in complete darkness.

At eight o’clock (five hours late) a gate is announced and a weary crowd of recognisable faces tramps to the gate. Once processed and shuttled to a remote stand (number 593) we find out what was holding us up. Two computers that controlled one of the engines of the Airbus A330 had developed irrecoverable faults, and had to be replaced. Had this happened at almost any other airport, spares would have had to have been flown in. As it was, ours were luckily found in the warehouse of another airline at Heathow.

Just after nine o’clock in the evening (fifteen hours after I woke up to begin to journey to Heathrow) we rolled onto Heathrow’s runway 27R and shot off towards Canada. On the in-flight ‘air show’, a small icon representing our plane began to edge across a map of the Atlantic, one pixel every few minutes. The map was elegantly coloured in the blues and greens of a childhood atlas, but outside everything was shrouded in night.

We flew for almost seven hours and lost five more as we crossed the time zones heading west. The first lights of New Brunswick and then Québec caught my eye through the window, before we began our descent over a wintry Montréal. The city’s orange phosphorous lights were particularly bright that night, as they reflected off the fresh snowfall (the first of the season, notably late this year) and into the sky.

There did not appear to be any other flights arriving when we did: the vast customs hall was empty of passengers when I strode through, and only one baggage belt was operating. I stepped out of arrivals and into a taxi just after 23h30 (04h30 London time). We flew along the autoroute into the city, and I considered this seemingly endless night.

I woke the next morning at 06h00, which I counted as a lie in considering that my body clock was still on English time. The sun rose a little after 07h30, closing a traveller’s night that had followed me for a full nineteen hours. It’s a wonder that travel doesn’t make me jaundiced.

Every cloud has its silver lining

From the letters page of the Independent newspaper, Saturday 23 December 2006:

Sir: As part of the 51 per cent of the population who did not take a flight this year, I cannot help but find a beautiful irony in fog grounding hundreds of planes at Heathrow (“A sorry story that highlights the flaw in aviation policy”, 22 December).

How nice to see the climate wrecking flights for a change, rather than, as usually happens, flights wrecking the climate.

R. GEORGE, LONDON SW19

Just before Christmas we were treated the sights of hundreds of emotional travellers left stranded at London Heathrow, as thick fog stubbornly refused to shift from the two rather unsophisticated stretches of concrete that sandwich the central complex of terminals at the airport.

Television newsreaders and newspaper copy writers were excitedly describing it as ‘travel chaos’, or even with as ‘travel misery’. Airlines were already being marked down as ‘beleagured’ before the inclement weather had settled in – it has not been a good year for commercial aviation in Europe. The much vaunted double deck Airbus A380 – which was supposed to relieve so much congestion at hub airports such as Heathrow – has slipped behind schedule, and governments across Europe are finally waking up to the rather late realisation that it’s time to start taxing people who fly for the environmental damage that their flights are causing (although Gordon Brown’s extra £5 a flight is not going to be nearly enough).

In order to loosen some slack at the airport, British Airways cut all domestic routes in and out of Heathrow for the duration of the heavy fog. What astonished so many bystanders was the sheer number of domestic flights that we have flying in and out of Heathrow every day. For an island nation whose length can barely justify overnight sleeper trains, it was incredible that this meant one hundred and fifty fewer flights would be operating than on a normal day.

While it is getting more and more socially acceptable to harang someone over the dinner table for flying with Easyjet from London Stantsed to Newcastle (almost as acceptable, in fact, as haranging a smoker, in fact) the fog at Heathrow revealed a problem. The vast proportion of BA’s affected passengers who were trying to fly on domestic routes were those who had just arrived or who were trying to depart on international long-haul services. The low cost airlines may have sewn up Europe from your local airport, but for long haul BA is still one of the most competitive and popular airlines from throughout Great Britain. Their business strategy of not fighting with the lo-co airlines has paid off: BA is now doing very well off strong long haul business, and their European and domestic network is primarily a feeder into this.

And here’s the rub. Door to door, from the centre of London to the centre of Newcastle, the train still edges it, as it does between London and Manchester, Glasgow, Paris and Brussels. But our skies are still going to be clogged with this insane volume of domestic routes for as long as our airports and rail networks exist independently of one another, each operated by independent (and increasingly private) organisations. If we’re serious about cutting aeroplane emissions, we need a whole new level of joined up thinking.

Next time you find yourself at Amsterdam Schipol airport (one of the world’s finest international hubs) have a look in the basement of the landside terminal. It’s one of the biggest railway stations you’ve even seen in an airport. And there are trains to every corner of the Netherlands twenty four hours a day. London’s airports at Heathrow, Gatwick, Stansted, and City all boast about their integrated railway stations, but until airports are plugged into a national network of intercity railway routes that operate in and out of the airports before the first and after the last flights, we’re going to be playing a second rate game. And a dense cloud of fog could foul up everyones’ Christmas all over again.

Connecting at Ely

“This must be the coldest place on earth,” says the businessman in the heavy and expensive looking duffel coat. He is stirring sugar into his cup of coffee at the small platform counter of the L.A. Wild Bean coffee shop at Ely railway station.

I attempt to engage in some polite and mildly witty conversation, suggesting that actually the coldest place on earth is about two metres to his right, where I’m sitting on a steel and wicker garden chair, optimistically provided by the café management for al fresco caffeine consumption in comfort. But the businessman does not hear me. The pretty young woman of non-descript Eastern European origin who is making his coffee hads evidently distracted him, although somewhat pleasingly, he isn’t having any luck starting a conversation with her either.

Ely, and its famous cathedral, is built on a small hill in the middle of the Cambridgeshire fens, once a vast area of marsh and coastal inlets that has been reclaimed over the course of a few centuries. Ely railway station sits on the edge of this low protrusion from the fins, and from the platform waiting passengers peer out into the vast landscape of intensively cultivated fields. Not only is it very cold today (barely above zero celius at midday), but there is thick fog blanketing the countryside for miles around us. It appears increasingly unlikely that the sun will burn it away before descending beneath the horizon again. On the island platform across the tracks from me, lonely passengers wait for trains to London King’s Cross and Stansted Airport against a pitch white backdrop of white. To my left, at one end of the station, a busy road passes underneath the northbound railway lines. A strip of tall, bare trees line on side of this road as it stretches away from us into the mist. Each tree is markedly less visible than the one before it: half an avenue vanishes into the fog.

The road passes under a low bridge, so any vehicle taller than a Transit van has to climb a sharp incline parallel to the road and cross the railway lines via a level crossing next to the bridge. Unfortunately for the long line of trucks, lorries and vans, Ely is a relatively important junction between north-south and east-west railway lines, and the gates of the crossing sometimes stay down for fifteen minutes or more, as successive freight and passenger trains pass by. In this jolly country of the privatised railway, every identical three car diesel sprinter that comes by has been dressed up in a different set of colours for a different commercial operator. One green and white train belongs to the singularly mis-named and uncapitalised ‘one railway’, as does another which has yet to be re-liveried from the colours of ‘Anglia Railways’. A green train belonging to ‘Central’ rumbles in, burbles for a few minutes, and then rumbles off again, back in the same direction that it came from. Then a sleek and mildly whining red, white and blue train glides in, carrying passengers on a fast service to London.

Two noisy freight trains pass in quick succession, and finally the level crossing gates go up. A flurry of heavy goods vehicles shoot across the line, knowing that they could be help up for another quarter of an hour if they’re not quick about it.

My toes are cold, and my train is still fifteen minutes away.

First published on jamesbrownontheroad.wordpress.com