Thank you for signing up—and I mean that. This is a special message for you, because you've taken the time to share your email, making you a passenger aboard the HIGH SPEED newsletter.
I should introduce myself. I'm Taras Grescoe, the author of eight non-fiction books (and counting), and a professional journalist with a lifelong interest in transportation. In my book Straphanger I visited 14 cities around the world looking at transit, bicycles, active transport, and alternatives to the car; that said, I've got a special and vast soft spot for trains, funiculars, trams, and anything that runs on rails. I suspect that it goes back to the time my family and I migrated from Toronto to Vancouver on Via Rail's The Canadian. I was a small child, but I still remember the multi-day voyage as my introduction to the beauty, romance, and controlled sense of freedom and adventure that comes with rail travel.
This year, I've pledged to ride every passenger train in Canada, from the White Pass & Yukon out of Carcross to The Ocean, calling at Halifax, for a book to be published by House of Anansi, tentatively subtitled "Twelve Trains that Explain Canada." I'm about 60 percent of the way there, with the Tshiuetin to Schefferville, the train to Churchill, the Algoma Central, and a few others still left to ride. The trouble is, my advance covered about two months of living expenses, and this is an awfully big country. If you're a free subscriber, please consider upgrading: as a Railpass Holder ($7 a month, or $70 a year), you'll get every dispatch in full, the run of the archives, and a seat in the comments; as a Founding Member ($10 a month, or $100 a year), you'll also see your name—along with my eternal gratitude—in the book's acknowledgements. If just 100 of you upgrade, I can reach the end of steel. (Curious? Click here for the whole story.) All aboard—en voiture!
Also: you fare-payers have got my deepest gratitude! Not just saying that. I've worked in journalism since I was in my twenties, when I roamed the world for National Geographic and The New York Times; it's never been harder than it is now to make a living at this rewarding but challenging trade. Very few media outlets pay the expenses that allow freelancers like myself to get our boots on the ground, and our feet on the gangways. The small but steady income I get from HIGH SPEED allows me to keep going out in the world, and reporting on the ill-understood, and shamefully under-covered, realm of steel-wheels-on-steel-rails.
So, once again, thank you: you are, in a very real way, keeping this train going.
