Fare info on VIA WWW pages (long)
Tom Box
It now provides fare information, with the fare page
being
http://www.viarail.ca/e31.html
Regular readers may recall that I was critical of VIA's
attempts to provide schedule information through their Web site.
I like the fare pages much better. They're not without bugs
and some other significant shortcomings, but I find them quite
useful.
As with the schedule pages, the fare pages ask one to input
an origin, destination, and date. For fares in the Quebec-
Windsor corridor, the date doesn't really matter. The system
will give you both the full fare and the advance-purchase
discount fare, even if you enter a date (Friday, Sunday, or
holiday) when the discount is not applicable. The system
reminds you of the restrictions on the discount fare, so I
don't see this as a shortcoming.
For routes outside the corridor, the system gives you only the
high-season fare if you enter a summer date, and gives both
the high and low-season rate if you enter an off-season date.
So if you don't know when you'll be travelling, or if you're
just playing with the system out of curiosity, it's better to
enter a low-season date. 95/11/01 seems to work well (the
system uses YY/MM/DD format for dates).
For Corridor travel, the system provides fare information
for almost all origins and destinations. Missing are Charny,
Prescott, Gananoque, Napanee, Trenton, Port Hope, and Watford.
I'm not sure why these were left out. They are among the
smaller places in the corridor, but other small towns such as
Maxville, Ingersoll, and Wyoming were included. When they
have almost complete coverage of the Corridor, it's odd that
they'd leave out these seven stations. (If you think I'm
piqued because one of these is my home town, you may be right.)
Perhaps a more serious omission is that the system doesn't
provide fare information if you give a suburban station as
your origin or destination. The user is expected to know that
he/she should enter Toronto instead of Guildwood, Montreal
instead of Dorval or St-Lambert, and Quebec instead of Sainte-Foy.
No information is provided to help the user in this respect.
This is an obvious shortcoming that could easily be fixed.
(I'm assuming here that fares to downtown and suburban stations
are the same. This didn't use to be the case. It used to
be a dollar or two cheaper to go to Guildwood instead of
Toronto, but I think it's the same fare now.)
The system's coverage is much more sparse outside the Corridor.
For example, it gives fare information for only 10 of the 29
destinations on the "Ocean" route between Montreal and Halifax.
As with the Corridor routes, the system doesn't accept suburban
stations; it wants you to input Halifax - Quebec if you're going
from Halifax to Levis. This is really dumb, IMO. Someone
loking for a Montreal - Sainte-Foy fare might well input
Montreal - Quebec after Montreal - Ste-Foy didn't work, since
the train to Ste-Foy continues on to Quebec. But the "Ocean" doesn't
even go to Quebec City, and I'm sure many users wouldn't think to
try Halifax - Quebec after Halifax - Levis didn't work.
The most surprising omission from the fare system's coverage is
Edmonton. You can get fares to various tiny spots in northern
Quebec (Parent, Lac-Edouard) or Manitoba (e.g. Pukatawagan, Ilford),
but not to the fifth-largest metropolitan area served by VIA.
When there's sleeping car service on a route, the system gives
the fares for this, as well as the coach fare. An oddity is
that it gives prices for triple bedrooms (drawing rooms) on
the Montreal-Senneterre and Winnipeg-Churchill trains, even though
these use E-series (4 section, 8 roomette, 4 double bedroom) sleepers,
with no drawing rooms.
The system is smart enough not to give a sleeping car prices
between, say, Halifax and Truro. It _does_ give sleeper fares
between Pointe-aux-Trembles and Montreal, though, even though
this trip takes less than an hour.
Unlike the schedule pages, the fare pages are able to cope with
connections. You can ask it for the fare from Halifax to Lynn
Lake (requiring changes of train in Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg,
and The Pas), and it will tell you it costs $466. For most
trips involving connections, the system only gives the high-season
coach fare. Since the different segments of a trip may have
different classes of service available, I can't fault the system
for not giving all the permutations.
An exception to the above is for service from, say, Halifax to
Toronto. In this case they system _does_ give you the different
combinations, of coach, berth, roomette, etc. from Halifax to
Montreal and coach or 1st class from Montreal to Toronto.
If you enter the name of a city which the system recognizes, but
for which it doesn't have any fare info (e.g. Edmonton, Levis,
Guildwood, Port Hope) it returns the same screen as if your
request had been successful, but without any fare information.
There's no diagnostic message.
If you enter a name which the system does _not_ recognize (either
because it's misspelled or it's not in the database), the system
offers you a choice of six alternative cities, its best guess at
what you really meant. You can choose one of these and resubmit
your request, but there's a bug here, as such a request never
works.
If you enter "The Pas", the system claims not to recognize this, and
offers six alternatives, the first of which is...The Pas! If you
then try to resubmit, you don't get any fare information.
If you enter "Saint-Hyacinthe", the system offers you a choice
of Sainte-Foy, Saint John (though VIA no longer goes there),
Saint Marys, Saint-Lambert (though fare requests for St-Lambert
don't work), Sarnia, and Saint Catharines.
Most users would probably conclude the system doesn't have
information on Saint-Hyacinthe. The trick here is that the
system is looking for "Sainte-Hyacinthe". Hyacinthe is a
masculine name, so "Saint" is right and "Sainte" wrong, but
only the incorrect spelling will work.
This is not VIA's only spelling error. The fares page says that
prices are in "canadian dollars". The author is evidently
unaware that English and French have different conventions for
capitalization, and that adjectives of nationality are capitalized
in English.
The first version of the WWW schedule pages had some real howlers.
My favorite was "Brandtford." Most of these have been cleaned up.
A recent paper brochure from VIA has a route map including "Armherst",
Nova Scotia (in both the English and French versions). The current
paper timetable mentions "Saint John, NF" in the index, then mentions
a ferry from "St. John's" to Digby on p. 13. I'm not sure if this
indicates a weakness in spelling or in geography.
The latest version of the schedule pages incorporates one improvement.
They now show the date of arrival, as well as the time. So the unwary
will no longer be misled into thinking it's an overnight trip from
Toronto to Vancouver.
Most of the other shortcomings of the schedule pages, which I've
noted previously, have not been fixed. I really dislike the way
it gives schedules for one day only. Given that they want to
provide point-to-point schedules, I think the approach taken by
Canadian Airlines is much better than VIA's. They show all the
flights between two given points, and say on what days of the
week they operate. You don't have to click through a series of
pages to get an overview of the service, the way you do with the
VIA pages.
What's more, the VIA system doesn't really give a timetable for
a specific date. I think it converts the date to a day of the
week, then gives the timetable for a typical Tuesday (say).
If you ask it for the Montreal-Toronto schedule for 95/12/25, it
shows the regular weekday schedule of 6 trains, including the
summertime slack to allow for MoW work. It's not really the
Christmas schedule at all.
The system still sorts trains by their number, instead of by
departure time. This looks really sloppy.
The same "Sainte-Hyacinthe" spelling error as mentioned above
also exists for the schedule pages. There's also a bug in the
schedules for Matapedia, as the system claims there are never any
trains to/from there.
Playing with the fare pages has allowed me to discover some
oddities in VIA pricing (I'm assuming these are real anomalies
in the fares, not just mistakes by the WWW system). For example,
a VIA 1 ticket from Coteau to Cobourg (373 km) costs $93. From
Cornwall to Oshawa (377 km) it's $95. But from Coteau to Oshawa
(425 km) is $89. So a Coteau-Cobourg or Cornwall-Oshawa passenger
should buy a Coteau-Oshawa ticket and "waste" part of it.
I haven't found any real perversities in the coach fares, but
they're not a monotonic function of distance, even on a given
route. For example, Toronto-Kingston costs slightly more than
Kingston-Montreal, even though the former is a shorter distance.
No doubt this reflects a difference in demand, and is quite
reasonable.
The system will generally not give a 1st class fare for very
short corridor trips to or from a terminus (e.g. St-Hyacinthe -
Montreal, Oshawa - Toronto, Chatham - Windsor). But it will
quote a 1st class fare between two closely spaced intermediate
points. For example, for $39 you can travel 1st class the 14 km
between Ingersoll and Woodstock.
The system will also quote you fares between Maxville and Casselman.
Now, not only are these towns only 23 km apart, there's no train that
stops at both places. Going from Maxville to Casselman would
require 1 h 23 min, including a 49 min layover in Alexandria.
The return trip would take 14 h 15 min, including a night in
Alexandria. One could also go via Ottawa, but that's even slower.
One thing that really struck me when examining VIA's fares was
just how expensive is the "Silver & Blue" sleeping car service on
the "Canadian". Coach fares on the "Canadian" are not out of line
with those on the rest of the VIA system. For example, here are
some high-season coach fares for a number of overnight trips:
Moncton-Montreal (Ocean) 1048 km $120
Gaspe-Montreal (Chaleur) 1053 km $116
Montreal-Senneterre (Abitibi) 703 km $ 87
Winnipeg-Thompson (Hudson Bay) 1149 km $137
Jasper-Prince Rupert (Skeena) 1160 km $122
Jasper-Vancouver (Canadian) 852 km $137
The "Canadian" is significantly more expensive when
considered on a per km basis, but it's not all that different
from the others.
Now let's look at the additional cost of a roomette, over and above
the coach fare:
Moncton-Montreal (Ocean) 1048 km $ 84
Gaspe-Montreal (Chaleur) 1053 km $ 84
Montreal-Senneterre (Abitibi) 703 km $ 64
Winnipeg-Thompson (Hudson Bay) 1149 km $ 84
Jasper-Prince Rupert (Skeena) 1160 km $ 84
Jasper-Vancouver (Canadian) 852 km $370
It's true that this price includes meals on the "Canadian",
but not on the other trains (two meals between Jasper and
Vancouver). Still, that's an amazing difference in price.
I'm not criticizing; if VIA can sell places at this price
(and it seems they can), more power to them.
Tom Box
b...@strato.meteo.mcgill.ca