https://www.theleftchapter.com/oist/the-ms-alexandr-pushkin-and-the-montreal-leningrad-trans-atlantic-line
how students used to travel: trains and boats
MS Alexandr Pushkin, Baltic Steamship Company passenger ship, 1974. As this was the last ship leaving Canada for Europe before school started in October, it was full of graduate students disembarking in France, the UK, Germany and the Soviet Union. It was half the price of flying and you could take a trunk, which I did, shipping it by CPR from Nanaimo which at the time had a CPR rail ferry connecting Vancouver Island to the main CPR station in Vancouver. I took the train from Vancouver to Montreal, a five day trip. It was all so easy. It was all so slow. The Atlantic crossing was ten days. The trunk went by a CPR ship and got to London before me.
They say that one of the dislocating factors for soldiers returning from combat is that one day one is standing in the desert with sand in your boots, and the next day one is back home in Moose Jaw, or Sand Springs Iowa and you can’t cope. lt is too sudden. Returning soldiers in World War 1 and II were sent home by ship. My father came back on the Queen Mary troop-carrier, took the CPR from Halifax to Vancouver where he was demobbed, then took the CPR back to Calgary. This is a decompression aspect of travel inaccessible to us now. Perhaps the trip was not half the fun, but did look after half the adjustment. £
s white
59 on site review 46 :: travel
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