Beer on Trains

There are some daft laws about. This was demonstrated (if needed) by an article on the BBC website this week. Interestingly the article has now been amended to take out some urban-myth type ones such as the one about it being legal to Scotchmen in York if you use a bow and arrow. That one annoyingly crops up from time to time in various places. People should check their facts before repeating any old crap.

It's annoying because it's not true :-)

But enough of the preamble.

We accidentally broke a law in Canada. The law was this: "It is illegal to drink your own beer on trains in Canada" - and this includes beer you have purchased from shops as well as beer you have brewed yourself.

Often on UK trains I like to have a can or two of warm lager to while away the time. Like a sensible person I buy it from the shops in the station as they are half the price of the shop on the train. We figured Foreign would be the same and so we bought a few cans of Grolsch (my fave Canadian beer) from Montreal train station.

Incidentally, this is the bit where we were travelling from Montreal to Quebec by train.

Once the journey was under way, we started happily drinking them but then the beer-selling man came along and told us we weren't supposed to drink beer we'd not bought on board. How were we supposed to know this? There were no signs. He didn't say "illegal" though. He said he'd let us off this time but don't do it again. I suspect he meant we should finish the cans we'd already opened rather than the whole six pack but never mind.

Towards Quebec the conductor (a different man) came by and said the same thing but also specifically said it was against the law. Darn. I wouldn't have been surprised if there had been armed machine gun mounties waiting for us on the platform. There weren't though. That would have been an over-reaction. We were in Canada not the USA.

But anyway, I said sorry to the man (even though I wasn't sorry at all) and tried to look a bit sheepish. Then I finished the beer.

And that's how I became a criminal in Canada.

It's quite likely that he was exaggerating and that what we did wasn't actually against the law. I can't be arsed to check the Canadian statue books to check and so I'm just blindly repeating unchecked facts here on the internet.