Thank you, Chair and members of this committee.
My name is Cédryk Coderre. I was a passenger on train 622. I was in car number 2. This is my recollection of what happened.
When the train first stopped, we were told that this was a mechanical issue. The first stop lasted, I would say, about an hour, and then we heard an announcement that they had fixed the issue and we would be able to move again, but at a slower pace. We started moving for, I would say, about 30 minutes, and then we stopped again. They made another announcement about this, saying that there was another mechanical issue.
The first time, the staff provided us drinks and pretzels. Unfortunately, after we stopped again, I remember that the staff told us that if we needed anything, we could go to the galley, so I went there. We got chocolate and alcohol. I asked if they had anything else other than pretzels. They told us there were no more cookies or anything else. I would say that was about three hours into the train ride.
We received pretty frequent communication about what was going on. Eventually, we were told that train 24 was coming to the rescue. They were supposed to eventually push us to the station. At the time I was browsing the subreddit of Via Rail. There was a passenger actually on that train who had recorded what the train conductor had said. It sounded like it was his first time doing this, which was a bit worrying to me.
Later on, that really didn't end up working, so they decided to pull us to the side track to let the freight train pass.
While they were trying to connect the train, the power went out pretty frequently, which meant that the bathrooms did not work. People still went in there, but that got pretty smelly at one point.
Eventually, one of the updates we got was that they currently had no plans and they were trying to come up with one. In my opinion, that's pretty worrying when you have to go somewhere and you're being told that they have no plan.
Despite this, the staff in our car were pretty awesome. They kept coming through with the water, the pretzels and the chocolate whenever we needed it. About an hour or so later, the passengers in my car started to feel a bit restless, I'd say. Some of them were trying to look into getting an Uber out of there. Some were looking at the emergency exit.
There were rumours that there had been a fight on car 1. I'm not sure if it was related to the video that some of you might have seen in the media, but the police eventually came in. They escorted one guy off with his scooter.
I do remember catching the discussion of some staff members and some of the passengers. It sounded like the staff had it rough with some of the passengers in the other cars.
About an hour later, the staff eventually disappeared from our car for about 30 minutes. There was nobody to be found. Personally, I assumed that they had a meeting with some of the other staff in a different car, so it didn't really bother me.
Train 26 eventually came by, and the firefighters came on board and started securing the area to eventually transfer us to train 26. At that time, we also got pizzas. They were pretty generous with pizzas in my car. I think I got four slices, so that was good.