Just back from a very enjoyable two-week family vacation to England and France. One of the many highlights on the trip was taking the Eurostar from London to Paris. Besides the fact that I hadn’t taken a passenger train in ages, the experience of high speed train travel was exhilarating.

Barry, our train’s engineer, was kind enough to take the photo of me (above) and we started taking about railfanning. He had never heard of Rapido, so I introduced him to their UK website and he seemed genuinely impressed that a Canadian company was producing British train models.

We left London St Pancras International train station (built in 1868) and 2 hours and 16 minutes later arrived in Paris at  the Gare du Nord.  Free wifi, great food and fantastic scenery (Chunnel included) and some very different railfanning…. what could be better?

All of this made me wonder if the Europeans have got it right. When was the last time that any of us really considered passenger rail travel as a viable transportation option? It might be time to hop on VIA to see if the Canadian experience measures up to what I experienced in Europe. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised.