Travelogue: A Transportation Engineer Retraces Journey to Chicago, 50 Years Later
Vijay Balakrishnan is a retired engineer who worked for many years designing railway systems across North America. He now lives in Barrie, Ontario.
Anjali chortled with delight when I told her, “I’ll see you tonight!” I could be projecting a little but that does not diminish my joy of being a grandfather for the first time. Jyoti, my exhausted daughter, lives far away, in Chicago. She’s keen to have a few extra hands around, even if they are mildly arthritic and more accustomed to turning book pages than changing diapers.
I’ve been retired for a decade now. Despite my engineering degree from Northwestern University in Chicago and working across Canada and the United States on transportation projects, I am only now retracing the overland journey between my Toronto home and the Midwestern metropolis—all it took was a granddaughter!
Over the past 50 years, travelling by car has admittedly gotten much worse. The incrementalist thinking of just adding another few lanes made driving around Toronto an expensive and time-consuming proposition: extortionary congestion charges south of the 401, mind-numbing two-hour wait times at the Canada-U.S. border, and even more waiting for an available spot at public charging stations.
Meanwhile, travel by rail has transformed. Thanks to two solid decades of reinvestment in passenger rail—and the sweat and tears of all those clifugees participating in the government’s green jobs program—it is now faster, cheaper, and more reliable to travel by intercity rail than by car. Once this rail service was in place across North America, the U.S. and Canadian governments began banning short-haul flights, boosting the ridership and quality of the passenger rail system. The commuter rail system was also revamped, with high-speed rail extending well beyond Toronto’s Greenbelt to offer a much more pleasant and reliable alternative than being twice daily stuck in traffic.
My journey begins at Toronto’s perpetually expanding Union Station. The Station buzzes with the energy of the thousands of commuters from across the Golden Horseshoe and thousands of newcomers to Canada. Most of the newcomers are migrants from the southern and western U.S. and Latin America, fleeing inhospitable conditions and hoping to find opportunity in Canada. During the most recent pandemic, the federal government converted half a dozen empty office towers around Union Station into welcome centres that provide crucial housing, health care, and training for these courageous and desperate travellers. While most Canadians welcome them, there are some who feel these immigrants are taking precious resources away from Canadian citizens going through hard times. As for me, my family wouldn’t even be here without Canada’s generous immigration system.
I seamlessly walk through U.S. border control as machines scan our biometrics and direct us to the platforms with Amtrak’s Peregrine-class bullet trains. Toronto’s Union Station is once again connected to most major cities in the American Midwest and Northeast. My business class ticket affords me good food and wine, a private compartment, and access to a glass-roofed observation car.
However, not all the train carriages are this comfortable. As the waves of migrations grew, more and more people once again sought to use the rails to come to Canada to start a new life. Many of these folks lacked the means to pay for even economy class tickets. So the U.S. government paid for one-way fares to Canada and built very rudimentary carriages, with barred windows and no seating—as if these people were to blame for their predicament.
Just like when I was a boy, I go straight to the observation car. As the suburbs and exurbs of Toronto fly past, the train accelerates, racing past the agricultural lands of Southwestern Ontario – former tobacco fields that now produce biofuels specifically for long-distance air travel, though many of the switchgrass fields from the 2030s’ push for a biofuel-based economy have transitioned back to producing food. With the demise of Californian agriculture, these fields are key to feeding Canada.
The train makes its only stop in Detroit’s fabled Michigan Central Station. The MCS fell into ruins after Amtrak closed their service in 1988. Ironically, Ford Motor Company bought the station in 2018 and redesigned much of the interior. But when Ford failed to make the switch to shared, electric vehicles, and the storied automaker went bankrupt, the MCS fell once again into disrepair. In 2035, Amtrak beautifully restored the MCS to service its rapidly expanding passenger rail system.
In rural Michigan, the train car’s display reaches 450 kilometres per hour as we fly past the endless fields of lentils that generate so many credits for soil carbon sequestration and so much protein for a world moving beyond meat. At this speed, the Toronto-Chicago journey only takes 2 hours—longer than it used to take to drive to Toronto’s Pearson Airport and get through security.
Past Kalamazoo and onto the shores of Lake Michigan, I see thousands of offshore wind turbines spinning furiously. The lake has only gotten windier these days, but the gales are great news for our energy systems that use wind turbines to create electricity or recharge the massive battery that the Great Lakes have now become, thanks to a Canada-US treaty on pumped hydro.
As the train rolls into Chicago’s Union Station, I can’t help but think of how different the world is from when I was a young man. Undoubtedly, our impact on the planet is far less severe and our cities are more resilient. We grow more of our own food locally and build more of the products we use in North America. Yet we are also facing a world that is much more hostile. Back then, bomb cyclones, derechos, or atmospheric rivers weren’t part of kitchen table talk. And now, Anjali has been born into a world with far greater instability, where no country is immune to the climate crisis. Certainly, the world has gotten smaller, partly from technology that makes everything feel more familiar and closer, but also in the opposite sense because we can’t travel as freely as we could in my youth after the end of the Cold War.
But I try to be optimistic. My daughter needs the encouragement now more than ever.
In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed the transformation of how people move from place to place and seen how most countries rallied around and actually achieved their emission reduction goals despite all those who said, “slow down”. I’m proud to have played my part.
As I don my mask and step off the train and into Union Station’s Great Hall, I’m greeted by Jyoti and Anjali. Tears run down my cheeks, full of all sorts of emotions. Mostly the good kind.
Vijay Balakrishnan