Welcome aboard ACAB6!
That 94a should serve you well. It is one of the easier scanners to program by hand for both conventional and trunking, and is the only way since the "a" model doesn't appear to have the pc-interface. No matter!
To ease the confusion from the manual a bit, maybe take some smaller first steps to your railroad and PD quest. Here's what I suggest for a new scanner listener and 94 owner:
1) While researching your railroad and pd requirements, why not listen to something interesting by using the pre-determined service searches? (p.27) Just hit E and toggle it to listen to various services. Practice with the HOLD and up/down keys. Toggle delay on and off to your liking.
2) Learn how to program the custom limit-search (p.25). Since you want to listen to railroad, and there are no pre-defined services searches for railroad, this is ideal. Program in 159.810 as the lower limit, and 161.565 for the upper limit.
3) Learn how to program in conventional analog channels into the banks/channels for scanning. (as opposed to *searching* in steps 1 and 2). I did a search here on the message groups for "Ontario Railroad" and came up with a few messages and frequencies for your area.
4) Now tackle trunking. RR's database shows quite a few Motorola and Edacs trunking systems for Ontario. If they are digital P25, forget about it. But if they are analog trunking, no problem.
5) Have fun. But don't get frustrated if you don't get it all right away. Listen, learn, communicate - it's all part of the experience...