TORONTO BY COMMUTER TRAIN

While visiting Toronto and Ontario we are staying well to the West at Milton Heights Campground between Toronto and Kitchener. Driving our big turbodiesel dually to downtown would be less fun and much more trouble than doing what many Torontonians do: take the Lakeshore commuter train. Here is Teri waiting for the train at the platform.The GO Trains actually have three levels, with a mezzanine at each end of the car. The big green bi-levels were engineered in Ontario and are built by Bombardier in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Each car has full Air Conditioning and flat panel TV screens with news and entertainment. You can hear the TV sound by tuning your portable FM radio to 88.1 FM in the train. They have four sets of sliding side doors and a door at either end so you can walk between cars, even when the train is moving. The side windows are tinted double-pane glass. Each car has a washroom.


These are really comfortable and quiet trains. You can read, chat with other passengers and relak as you travel along the shore of lake Ontario towards Union Station right in downtown Toronto.

One interesting thing we noticed among the passengers was the popularity of the Blackberry.Many passengers were either making or receiving calls, reading their e-mail, or updating their appointments or address books with it. It is made in Canada by Research In Motion (Ticker: RIM) in Waterloo, Ontario not too far from where we are staying. The new ones have Email and text messaging, media player, phone, browser, organizer, camera and mani other features. Some even have GPS, and BlackBerry® Maps functionality. They work together with BlackBerry Internet Service™. It links your Blackberry to to 10 supported business or personal email accounts, receive and send instant messages, and browse web content while on the go.

One of the first sights as you approach downtown on the train is the windmill. Canadians are much more into CO2 reduction and into fighting Global Warming than the US. We were listening to commercials on the radio telling the audience that they could switch their house to green electricity (presumably hydroelectric or nuclear), and telling people to upgrade their applicances and that their old ones would be picked-up for free at their door.

There is a lot of measurement of recycling intensity by community. It turns out that there is a Canadian city that recycles nearly 40% of its refuse accordiing to the radio.

Downtown is full of skyscrapers.

The CN tower, - 1,815 ft., 5 inches - is the World's Tallest Building, an important telecommunications hub, and a center of tourism in Toronto. Each year, approximately 2 million people visit the CN Tower. Its microwave antennas at 1,109 ft. and 1,815 ft., 5 inches allow people in the Toronto area to enjoy excellent communications and broadcasting. The tower has a number of restaurants and meeting rooms. 360 is their fine dining restaurant at 1,150 ft. and rotates once every 72 minutes.

The streets of downtown are different depending on the neighborhood. There are the typical commercial zones full of banks and businesses, and there are the ethnic areas full of restaurants and shops with food from Japan, Korea, China, India, and many other countries.

One interesting thing we learned about Canada is that it has the highest immigration per citizen ratio in the world. There seem to be a large number of immigrants from Asia and the Middle-East, as well as from Germany and other European couontries. This is most noticeable in Toronto.

We were surprised to see so many people on bikes in such a busy city.

There were commuter bikes parked at special tie posts for bikes all over the city.