the train that binds Canada together

Toronto’s grand old station hotel, the Fairmont Royal York, is only a few steps from Union Station, but in January you enter the gap at your peril — the wind attacks like a furious polar bear. 

Heads down, my wife Camila and I hurry between these two gilded-age edifices set amid the glass and steel of the financial district. Eschewing modernity, including planes, we’re on a journey to Vancouver, checking in for Via Rail train no 1, The Canadian, the transcontinental anything-but-express.

In the waiting room, the train manager asks us which lunch sitting we’d like. Soon he’s leading us through a door to an atomic dream of a train, 13 silvery carriages featuring three dome cars over 15 feet high.

The smart set board first at the Prestige car, picture windows revealing individual cabins with leather sofas that convert into double beds. In the distance, behind two gigantic General Motors locomotives, is economy class. Those heading there will be sleeping in their seats.

We stop at Sleeper Plus, which offers a choice of couchettes (alcoves protected by thick curtains, with bench seats that convert into beds) and more expensive cabins for one to three occupants. We have a cabin, with a door that opens on two foldaway chairs facing a window. I take in the half-hexagon mirror over the sink, the stowed bunks, the hidden loo, the vague prison chic.

Holly, a train attendant, is at our side. “There’s a shower at the end of the corridor,” she says. “But when it goes below minus 25, it can freeze up.” Camila and I glance at each other. As we wend our way west, we’ll be spending four nights in this cabin, or others like it, since we’ll be breaking the journey twice en route.

At 9:55am, the big locomotives begin to pull and we head back through the train to one of the dome cars, gazing up at Toronto’s CN tower passing to the left.

Great train journeys

This is the third in a series on long-distance rail travel.
For the first and second, see: On board Amtrak’s new 47-hour Chicago-Miami sleeper and Last call for the slow train across Tanzania

CN stands for Canadian National, the company on whose rails we will run 4,466km west. Our route, through Sudbury, Winnipeg, Saskatoon and Edmonton, was finished in 1915, tracking north of rails owned by CN’s great competitor, Canadian Pacific (CP), which were completed in 1886 and are now solely for freight. 

That first line was the ribbon that wrapped the very idea of Canada together. In 1871, the colony of British Columbia agreed to join the new Canadian confederation’s eastern provinces on the understanding that a railway between them would be built. 

The idea appealed to John A Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister. Between BC and Ontario stood the prairies where veterans from the American civil war were encroaching, exterminating the bison, while destroying the First Nations tribes with smallpox and alcoholism.

According to Stephen R Bown’s 2023 history Dominion: The Railway and the Rise of Canada, Macdonald believed the US would send its cavalry north on the pretext of bringing order, quietly annexing the prairies, unless a railway “stymied the US dominance of North America by enabling Canada’s consolidation.”

Suburbs pass and the train kicks up a mist of snow. Hours tick over as pretty rural communities give way to the pine scrub of the Canadian Shield. It wasn’t the Rockies, but this bogland north of Lake Superior that nearly killed the railway building project. “Thousands of kilometres of unavoidable rock and muskeg,” writes Bown.

In winter, the forest passes in black and white. The Canadian runs twice weekly and is hugely popular in summer, with extra carriages full of tourists. January offers intimacy and better views through the leafless trees. I gaze out, imagining the lives of those who laid the first tracks. Outside the train’s protection, I’d be recreating the worst scenes from The Revenant.

A porter announces our lunch sitting. Tables for four are set on linen, in a dining car with glass partitions engraved with chickadees and magpies. It’s pot luck who you sit next to, but with an unreliable schedule and lack of WiFi, the Canadian seems to attract remarkable people.

We will meet writers and engineers, photographers and adventurers, but — first it’s Jo Buyske, president of the American Board of Surgery and her husband Marc. I ask her speciality. “I like the colon,” she replies. We look down at our excellent lamb, cooked from scratch onboard, and change the subject.

Afterwards I see people playing cards, reading or gazing out of the window. We pull up at a random distance marker and I see a man climb down to be greeted by other men waiting on snowmobiles. 

It turns out that the train, given sufficient notice, will stop wherever you want. In summer, people travel with kayaks so they can get out and paddle away along one of the many lakes. “Once a whole village of First Nations’ people got on carrying a coffin,” a staff member tells us. “They were taking it to the next village for burial.” This isn’t Belmond or the Rocky Mountaineer — it remains a working train pushing through a wild land.

We arrive in Winnipeg after 36 hours. Camila and I have decided to stop here and wait for the next westbound train. We put up at the Fort Garry, another grand old railway hotel, pausing on our way to our room for bison carpaccio and smoked goldeye, a much-loved local fish. 

It’s fair to say that Winnipeg wasn’t on my bucket list of cities to visit, but with four days there, we discover its many charms. Its museums evoke life in the northern prairies and its art gallery’s collection of Inuit work is worth the trip alone.

The city lies at the confluence of the Red and Assiniboine rivers, both so thick with ice that a four-kilometre skating track has been laid out. We take to it, using frames left for the inept. Afterwards we discover the Thermëa spa, where we simmer like Japanese macaques in its heated outdoor pools.

There are several hip restaurants, but our favourite is Promenade Brasserie. Owner Jay Lekopoy hands me “fry bread smoked trout”, saying: “My grandma would have fish smoking out the back when I was growing up, and we’d cook bannock [a flatbread] over the fire.” He pauses. “It’s total comfort food, right?” 

Lekopoy is Métis, mixed-race First Nations and predominantly French. The Hudson Bay Company’s fur-trapping operations around Winnipeg gave birth to these people and in 1885, they rebelled against the authorities. At the time the railway construction was on the brink of bankruptcy but the violence galvanised the wider Canadian public into funding its swift competition.

I have been tracking the next westbound train online as it trundles towards us and, as night falls on the fourth day, we walk over to meet it. We settle into the now familiar cabin, then head for the cocktail bar in the rear carriage, bumping into a group of train buffs. One of them, John Ryan, tells me about the train. 

His description is legion, but essentially this: two “very reliable” F40PH locomotives are pulling us; there are three dome cars; six Sleeper Plus carriages; one each for economy and prestige; and the dining car “with its seven staff”. Finally, there’s the car where we’re sitting, which curves to an elegant point offering 180 degrees views. “Can I call it a caboose?” I ask. “No,” says Ryan.

Newer rolling stock might mean fewer maintenance headaches,’ says train buff John Ryan. ‘But it certainly will not have the charm or the history’

Camila and I may have been initially taken aback by the age of our cabin, but it turns out to be one of the main draws. This rolling stock will be 70 years old next year. At the beginning of the 1960s, these carriages used to run daily on the CP line, reaching Vancouver in 70 hours. The trip was targeted at business travellers, but cheap air travel put paid to that. Now the journey is timetabled to take 97 hours — outside Russia, the world’s longest passenger train journey by duration — though it often ends up longer.

The operator, Via Rail, recently announced that the carriages will be replaced in the next decade, which makes Ryan sad. “Newer stock might mean fewer maintenance headaches,” he says. “But it certainly will not have the charm or the history.”

The next day the train pulls into Melville, a small town in Saskatchewan, and we’re allowed off to stretch our legs for 15 minutes. A bowser pulls up to refuel the engines, just as the old steam engines would have refilled with water and coal.

Our engineers climb down and hand over to colleagues, one of 11 such changeovers as we cross the continent. These drivers still possess the pioneer spirit. We make frequent stops to let more profitable freight trains pass and I sometimes see them climbing down to fix problems, in deep snow, a hundred kilometres from help.

We travel slowly, occasionally hitting 130kmh but averaging only 45kmh. It doesn’t matter. Animals appear in the wide prairie lands: deer, coyote, fox, owl, even a bobcat. I walk up the train and meet a family of Mennonite farmers off to visit friends. “We could have taken the bus but we might as well enjoy it,” Noah Martin tells me, as his wife unpacks a picnic.

In the dining car, I chat with Wahiba Chebbi, one of the staff. She’s from Grenoble but lives in Vancouver. “We work for six days but then I get 10 days off,” she says. “It’s intense but completely worth it.”

Just after a town called Hinton in Alberta, the prairie gives way to rolling hills. Lakes of crystal ice appear, swept clear of snow by the wind. Valhalla cliffs rise up into the blue sky ahead. We’re in the Rockies.

The sun is setting as we pull into Jasper. Camila and I might have spent longer here but this perfect national park town was devastated by fire last July, and more than a third of the properties were destroyed. Instead, seven hours down the rails, we step down in Kamloops, at the heart of a high, arid valley full of hoodoos, spindly rock formations shaped by erosion.

We are going skiing. Half an hour in a taxi takes us to Sun Peaks, Canada’s second-largest resort, where the gables are topped with three feet of perfect snow. Despite its 144 runs, the resort feels intimate and well organised, and wild enough on the pistes that a fox crosses in front of me. Camila tours the woods on a dog sled while I go ice-fishing with Campbell Bryk, a guide who doubles as the town’s fire captain. 

After a couple of days, we return to Kamloops, a largely industrial town where the CN and CP lines come together, trains calling mournfully to each other through the night. We take in an ice-hockey game, as authentic a Canadian experience as it’s possible to have.

Our third and final westbound train picks us up at 2am. Camila says getting back onboard feels “like home”, and she means it. We’ve come to love our cabins, with their warm duvets. We gaze out of the window at the moonlit mountains. The train buffs had told me that they only travel around the time of the full moon, and I can see why.

The sun rises while we’re still high in the Fraser River canyon, approaching the mighty river’s narrowest point, Hell’s Gate. Our rails run along a cut in the cliff as the waters below churn, the walls slick with ice. The old CP line is on the opposite side, and a freight train chugs uphill.

Finally we arrive in Vancouver, our train an insignificant eight hours late. Yards full of lumber give way to bridges, and then we reverse into the city’s Pacific Central Station. The last of our old railway hotels is the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver, its old-school dignity perfectly completing our trip. 

Over oysters, trout and martinis, Camila asks if I’d seen our fellow passengers saying goodbye at the station. “They were hugging,” she says. “At first they seemed unsure, but then they said their goodbyes like old friends.” The rails are still drawing Canada together.

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