My morning commute begins at Dufferin Station, in the sooty, claustrophobic bowels of the subway. Trains often arrive at the eastbound platform, full to bursting, and screech away as they came, having disgorged no one, having picked up no one, studded with ugly rivets, screeching metallically, groaning infernally.

This is before I’ve had coffee.

When I emerge from the dank warren of Union Station at the end of my trip and walk down to Lake Shore Blvd., I think to myself, over the din of car horns, “At least I didn’t drive.”

It’s the hoariest cliché in this city’s water-cooler repertory: getting to and from work is miserable. The streetcars are slow, the subways are packed, and the roads are paved with heartburn.

Should we all just stay at home? Is the commuter doomed to a life of unremitting awfulness? I used to think so.

But then, walking the last leg of my trip to the office between Bay and Yonge Sts., I often look over my shoulder and see something beautiful. There’s a panorama of towers — the Royal Bank Plaza with its 14,000 gold windows, the Royal York’s limestone bulk, the TD Centre in stark black steel. And underneath it all, a pretty green-and-white ribbon gliding to a stop on an elevated track: the GO train.

There’s something undeniably cheerful about the appearance of these machines, with their trapezoidal cars and jaunty colour scheme. They look like those electric monorails at Disney World that glide from Cinderella’s castle to the Epcot globe.

To my downtowner’s mind, there’s another, separate world of associations that orbit around the commuter train. Civilized, even suave, they seem to offer the promise of camel-coloured trench coats, reading the newspaper, and men who wear hats. Characters in John Cheever stories are always taking the train into and out of Manhattan, to places that sound placid and comfortable: South Orange, Greenwich, Westchester.

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By Toronto standards, the GO train is also a marvel of efficacy. Its seven lines fan out from Union Station to the far corners of the GTA. The trains have two storeys, quiet zones, and bathrooms. Some 93 per cent of rush-hour trips are on time, and when they’re more than 15 minutes late for reasons within the agency’s control, passengers can get their money back.

Customer satisfaction is at 84 per cent, according to a rider survey by Metrolinx, the provincial agency that runs GO.

How many big services in this city are popular with eight out of 10 people who use them? TCHC buildings are literally crumbling, the TTC is always breaking down, and scandals sprout from the TDSB like toadstools. Then there’s the GO train: popular, modern, sleek — and it works!

At least, that was my vague impression. Until recently, I had taken the GO train a grand total of once in my 24-year-old life, nearly all of which I have spent in Toronto.

As a committed downtown chauvinist, I never saw much reason to visit Malton or Markham or any of the other suburban destinations on the GO’s impressive breadth of routes.

My love of the commuter train was a feat of romantic projection. I knew all the stats, and I had a mental image of that hopeful-looking, primary-coloured caterpillar crawling languidly to a stop beneath the city’s forest of skyscrapers.

It was a fantasy.

On a recent Thursday, I submitted my fantasy to the rigorous test of experience. I rode a GO train at rush hour. It was glorious.

Despite a recent increase in service, most passengers still have to catch certain trains or be stranded. That can be stressful. But many regulars will tell you the GO schedule has a pleasant way of folding up the corners of the day — giving it a tidy, predictable shape.

“I have to catch my train,” people say, foreclosing the possibility of a prolonged meeting or a second pint.

Of course, you can continue working on the GO train, but few people seem to. Many prefer to nap.

It’s an understandable temptation. My train was the 5 o’clock Lakeshore West to Hamilton GO Centre — a classic, on one of the service’s busiest routes. The only sounds on the car’s lower level — ostensibly the noisy part — were a single whispered conversation, a man pecking away at his keyboard, and the gentle clatter of train on track. Ahead of me, a woman read The Economist. Most people gazed into their phones. It was soporifically quiet.

The loudest voice was that of Alistair, our Customer Service Ambassador. He was the one making announcements over the P.A.

Alistair is a real person. His soothing Edinburgh brogue was a major improvement over the grating robot voice piped into TTC subways. My eyelids drooped pleasantly every time he said “station stop.”

Andy Cummins, on his way home to Oakville, conceded that “this happens to be a really civilized train” — his trip isn’t always so sedate.

Sometimes there are oblivious phone talkers. Other times there are GO gangs. Those are groups of people who otherwise don’t know each other but take the same train every day and become friends — a phenomenon that is unimaginable on the subway, and hard not to find adorable.

My early-morning ride in from Hamilton, where I spent the night with relatives, was even more peaceful than the previous afternoon. The train was virtually empty. I sat in the second level, officially designated as a quiet zone, and read in the Hamilton Spectator a well-researched but unintentionally hilarious story about the city’s runaway housing market, where detached brick Victorians are selling for — gasp! — $300,000. It felt faintly regal to be sitting that high up, a cut above the world, in total, serene silence, moving steadily towards the city.

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And it was oddly exhilarating when Toronto loomed into view. You’re looking out the window at golf courses and strip malls and then suddenly there’s Grenadier Pond, and then the streetcars on Roncesvalles, and finally the skyscrapers, celebrities of the skyline.

If the whole experience sounds a little lofty, a little deluxe, well, it is.

GO train riders are generally well-off. Some 87 per cent of them have some post-secondary education; their average household income is $107,702.

And while regulars get a discount using a Presto card, most commuters still spend thousands of dollars a year on GO fares. (The word “commuter,” coined in 19th-century America, originally meant someone who rode the train so often that they received reduced, or commuted, fares.)

My trip to Hamilton cost $11.50 each way. That would add up to about $4,400 a year if I took the same route every weekday.

The ticket price isn’t the only thing that makes GO trains feel like the Bugattis of Toronto transit. Premier Kathleen Wynne recently announced $13.5 billion in new funding for GO rail, to the likely exclusion of other regional transit priorities.

All this despite the fact that commuting by train is relatively cheap for suburbanites, all things considered. Metrolinx estimates that taking GO Transit costs 38 per cent of what the average driver spends on parking, gas, tires and maintenance.

That may be why about 200,000 people decide it’s worth their money to ride the GO train on an average weekday.

C.J. Smith is among the GO train’s biggest boosters and also one of its harshest critics. She operates a blog called ThisCrazyTrain.com, which doubles as a kind of running group therapy session for her readers. They send her photos and news tips about surly drivers, brutish passengers and gaps in service, all of which plague GO like any other transit agency.

But Smith, who lives in Courtice and rides the Lakeshore East line to Oshawa, realizes how lucky she is to take the train — how relatively functional the GO is, and how basically pleasant her commute.

“It is definitely an oasis,” she said.

Knowing that I’m stuck riding the red rocket, Smith twisted the knife a little. “It’s still way better than the TTC. It’s wayyy better.”

That is, except for Fridays and weekends, she added, when concert-going rowdies and sad, drunken Leafs fans make the GO train something it rarely is — uncomfortable.

“They act like they’re on public transit,” she said, voice dripping with contempt.

For all its frills, the GO train is public transit, I pointed out.

“Yeah,” Smith said, “but it’s different.”

She had me there.

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