… that I wasn’t able to blog last night as much of what I would have written would have been unprintable. I was already in a bad mood due to a lack of sleep – some guy and his ladyfriend returned from somewhere at about 03:50, making a lot of noise as they returned, but that noise was nothing what was to follow.
I made a suggestion about what he could do about that but he was clearly far too preoccupied to take any notice of me, and I couldn’t even applaud the finale because that just isn’t something that you can do with just one hand.
So eventually it was dawn and after breakfast I set off to Exporail, the railway museum about 20 miles from Montreal on the site of the old ALCO locomotive works.
17 dollars to get in to see the largest collection of railway locomotives in North America (I only wanted to see them not buy them!) and after spending about 3 hours in building 1 I went over to building 5.
This is where the more interesting locomotives are to be found – the ones that have been salvaged from scrapyards, industrial plants and so on and have yet to be brought up to exhibition standard
But all the doors were locked
“That room is closed for the season”
“What?”
“Well, there’s no heating in it …..”
Heating? This is Canada. what does heating have to do with anything?
So no advance warning, no reduction of the admission price, no nothing. And no interesting locomotives either.
And so they got a piece of my mind. I won’t have any left at this rate if we carry on like this. But no heating. How about sending all of the “workers” to do a spell at a museum in Labrador City? And then they’ll find out what it’s like to be without heating.
And talking of heating, they aren’t kidding about Ottawa being the second-coldest capital city in the world behind Ulan Bator in Mongolia.
Driving up off the Plain of St Lawrence onto the Canadian Shelf the temperature suddenly dropped 5 degrees and from a fairly sunny 5 degrees in Montreal we had a cloudy zero and flurries of snow.
It’s a good job that Exporail isn’t situated there. It would all be closed, and permanently too.
