Crossing the country by train is, in my opinion, like travelling back in time, but in the absolute best way possible. Not in the sense that the amenities are dated (though the cars were originally built by the Budd Company in 1955, so make of that what you will), but in the sense that you are returned to a version of yourself that existed before smartphones, before algorithms, before the twenty-minute meeting that could have been an email. You are returned to a version of human being that has nowhere to go, nothing to refresh, and no choice but to look out a window or talk to the person across the aisle.
Before ever stepping foot on the train, it's worth remembering what this experience actually represents. This mode of transportation, this crossing of our country, marks the promise of Canada's foundation. The first transcontinental railway wasn't just an engineering project; it was the political glue meant to hold together a vast, improbable, and frankly fragile country. When British Columbia agreed to join Confederation in 1871, it did so on a single condition: build us a railway, or we'll consider other options. And given that the United States of America had a rather enthusiastic appetite for manifesting destiny at the time, somewhat more relatable as a concern now than at any prior point in the last century, that condition carried real weight (as it unfortunately appears to do again today).
But American expansionism wasn't the only force driving the locomotive forward. The eastern provinces were locked in bitter political deadlock as they tried to form a functional parliament. Britain had begun hanging most of its colonies out to dry, making economic cooperation between the provinces not just desirable but existential. And, Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia had recently merged into a single colony after road-building projects created massive, crippling debt... The railway was proposed as the solution to all of it: a steel thread stitching together a country that existed more on paper than in practice.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed on November 7, 1885, when the famous "Last Spike" was driven at Craigellachie, British Columbia. The original CPR line ran from Montreal through Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary, and Banff before crossing the Rockies via the dramatically steep Kicking Horse Pass, a more difficult and southerly route chosen largely because the easier Yellowhead Pass was considered too close to American territory for comfort. The railway spanned roughly 4,900 kilometres of prairie, shield rock, and mountain, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do: it made Canada real.
Now, ironically, the train I rode, VIA Rail's The Canadian, does not actually follow the original CPR route. Not anymore. When VIA Rail assumed control of passenger services in 1978, The Canadian initially continued along its historic Canadian Pacific tracks through Calgary and Banff. But in January 1990, severe federal budget cuts forced VIA to consolidate its two transcontinental services into one. The surviving train kept the name "The Canadian" but was rerouted onto the former Canadian National line, the same tracks once used by CN's competing Super Continental. This more northerly route runs through Saskatoon and Edmonton instead of Regina and Calgary, crossing the Rockies at Jasper through the Yellowhead Pass rather than the Kicking Horse.
So when you ride The Canadian today, you are riding on CN tracks, in cars originally built for CP, on a train named after a CPR service, following a route that was CN's rival offering. It's the most Canadian thing imaginable: a compromise wrapped in a merger disguised as a tradition.
Alright, enough history. The moment to shine is now.
After a quick sleepover in Vancouver and a morning visit to the Bloedel Conservatory, where the humidity hits you like a warm, tropical slap and the parrots judge you with the smug confidence of creatures who know they will never have to file taxes, it was time to head for Pacific Central Station.
I'm travelling Sleeper Plus, specifically an upper berth, which means my bed folds down from the ceiling of the car and I sleep approximately three feet from the person below me, separated by a heavy curtain and the social contract. It's rather like sleeping in a very comfortable coffin that moves at 100 kilometres per hour, which I mean as a compliment. The berth is surprisingly spacious once you're actually in it, and the rocking of the train provides a quality of sleep that I can only describe as "passive cradling."
When you first board, there's a summer-camp quality to the experience. "Alright, so this is my seat, here are my neighbours, and these are my meal times." But wait, you get a choice of meal times. Three sittings for dinner, in fact, because it's the busiest meal of the day. Too many people sleeping in after talking all night. People like me. But don't worry, the berths are very quiet at night, with only the doors at either end of the sleeper cars making noise as crew occasionally pass through. The cars are surprisingly well sound insulated for being 70+ years old and the people up talking are several train cars away anyway.
The initial hesitation is about movement. You belong here, but it takes a moment to realize that you don't just belong in your assigned ultra wide bench seat (converts into a bed). This train, the entire train outside of the beds of others and maybe the kitchen and locomotive, is yours to explore. The other berth cars, the skyline cars, the dining car, the Park car at the rear; you can wander the length of this rolling village whenever you like. It's like being handed the keys to a very narrow, very long house that happens to be crossing a continent. Oh and you can go visit the short term passengers in economy heading to rural destinations without nearby airports- yes surprisingly the train is still providing an essential service, and if the southern route was still active, that service would easily more than double the economy passenger count.
The daily rhythm aboard The Canadian is one of the most unexpectedly pleasant things about the journey, and it takes about a day to fully surrender to it.
Breakfast begins early, and it is exceptional. We're not talking about a muffin in a cellophane wrapper tossed at you by a disinterested flight attendant. We're talking about eggs cooked to order, French toast, fresh fruit, bacon, sausage, and pancakes, served on actual plates with actual silverware at a table with a white tablecloth and a window looking out at whatever extraordinary landscape happens to be passing by. The tea or coffee or juice is bottomless and the orange juice is real. You eat slowly because there is absolutely nothing else you need to be doing, and you begin to suspect that this is how meals were always meant to be consumed.
Between meals, the train provides an endless supply of tea, fruit, and, crucially, Oreos. I cannot overstate the importance of the Oreo supply. At any hour of the day or night, you can walk to the service area and find Oreos waiting for you and your mischievous desire to eat fistfuls. Elizabeth May once said to me personally on this very VIA Rail route: "Isn't this civilized?"
Lunch is lighter but still several tiers above what any reasonable person would expect from a moving vehicle. Dinner, though, is the main event. Three courses. Assigned seating. If you're travelling alone, you are seated with three strangers, which means you get the honour of meeting three new people over a multi-course meal, three times a day. If you're travelling with a partner, congratulations; you'll probably have a series of double dates lined up whether you wanted them or not. Some people will be fascinating, others a little timid or weird, but all will be kind and happy to be there.
I'm told the wine list is respectable, though I am lifelong sober. The lamb is better than it has any right to be, as is the roast beef. The desserts are the kind of thing you eat while staring out at a frozen lake and wondering why you ever voluntarily spent money on airplane food. I'm not a culinary expert, but every meal on the Canadian, save maybe the overly fancy mint chocolate desserts, have been five stars for me and above what I've enjoyed at 90% of real restaurants. I've had $120 restaurant plates in 2021 dollars right before COVID-19 and The Canadian is competitive... And again, your food is included with your (Winter Sales --> $650-$1400 <-- high demand) train ticket and you get roughly 12 meals.
Within the city, you are greeted by the industrial ballet of rail yards, locomotive repair depots, ports and docks, rail bridges that quite literally rotate on massive pivots to accommodate both marine and rail traffic. If none of that sounds appealing, that's fine; luxury condos, dark blue rivers, white mountain peaks, and a winter sunset that sets the snow on fire all await you on day one.
The rails curve this way and that as they pass under bridges, SkyTrains, and motorways, and eventually under whole mountains. As an environmentalist, I am often appalled by how much trucking occurs on Vancouver Island, where every consumer good and industrial product arrives by ferry and then crawls up the highway on the back of a transport truck. But within the Lower Mainland of British Columbia, the priorities are straighter, with a genuinely respectable amount of rail freight infrastructure connecting the port to the interior.
The comparison is painful. Freight rail produces roughly 75% fewer greenhouse gas emissions per tonne-kilometre than trucking; some analyses put rail at three to four times more fuel-efficient, and others closer to seven times, depending on the cargo and distance. The Association of American Railroads estimates that shifting just 10% of long-haul truck freight to rail would eliminate over 17 million tonnes of CO₂ annually, equivalent to pulling 3.35 million cars off the road. A single freight train can replace hundreds of trucks. The economics are similarly lopsided: rail shipping can reduce per-tonne costs by 20 to 50% on long-haul routes compared to trucking.
And yet Vancouver Island, an island of nearly a million people with a 289-kilometre rail corridor running along its spine, connecting 80% of the population within 5 kilometres of the tracks, has let that corridor sit almost entirely dormant since 2011. The only active rail left is a truncated 16 km section around Nanaimo's Wellcox Yard, handling a fraction of what the corridor could carry. Provincial studies have estimated that a revitalized Island Rail Corridor could remove 10,000 to 25,000 truckloads from island roads annually. The freight analysis prepared for the Ministry of Transportation identified opportunities for 4,500 to 11,400 annual railcar loads in the near to medium term, with estimated greenhouse gas savings of 1,700 to 3,600 tonnes per year, and that's just the initial opportunity, before considering the Duke Point container terminal expansion and the rail-barge connection to the mainland via Seaspan, a mere 9 km of new track would be needed to connect the existing dock rail yards to the E&N.
Meanwhile, Vancouver Island's on-road transportation accounts for a staggering share of community emissions. Nanaimo alone reports that 63% of its community-wide greenhouse gas emissions come from on-road transport. The island needs to be leveraging freight rail not marginally more, but by at least twenty times what it currently does. Every truck climbing the Malahat on a dark, rainy night, and anyone who has driven that highway in winter knows exactly the white-knuckle experience I'm describing, represents a failure of infrastructure priorities. The corridor exists. The tracks, while degraded, are there. The Wellcox Yard still connects to the North American rail network via rail barge. What's missing is the political will and the minuscule investment to restore what previous generations built and our generation allowed to rot. We're spending $13.6B CAD on transportation- mainly new highways, this year, and for $1B CAD the island could go from 1 degraded mainline at 60 km/h with the ruined Port Alberni segment attached mid-island, to a twin mainline at 100 km/h- so no stopping in either direction or pulling over and waiting for passengers... And faster than taking a car or truck.
Tragic. But I digress. Back to the view!
As the sun sets on day one, you should take a walk to the rear of the train, to what will soon be retired with the new trainsets being ordered: the Park car AKA the rear observation car. This is where normally dark steel turns reflective as the sun dances a glimmer along the rails stretching out behind the train to the west. It's a beautiful time of day, and by now you should have been treated to your first marvellous dinner.
It's too bad that the Thompson River canyon is so rarely witnessed on this train route. The ride past Lytton, Kamloops, and all the way to Valemount occurs largely under the cover of night. The Canadian is not a high-speed train; it ambles along at a comfortable 80 to 120 km/h, and so the timing means you trade the Thompson River for both mountain ranges in daylight. It's a fair bargain, even if you didn't agree to it.
At Jasper, you're allowed to exit and stretch your legs for the first major scheduled stop. The mountains preceding Jasper excite everyone on the train. The train slows in certain sections specifically to maximise camera time, which is either a lovely gesture by the crew or a shrewd understanding that 300 people pressing their faces against glass and gasping is good for business. Either way, by the time you reach the station, you're surrounded by nothing but mountains and smiles.
Jasper gives you a chance to spend too much on tourist-trap products, buy an overpriced "sandwich" (the quotation marks are doing heavy lifting here), take photos of the town, and maybe grab something from the grocery store if the unlimited Oreos and fruit don't appeal to you between the exceptional breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. I did all of the above, and tried my luck taking exceptional photos with a Nikon Z7 I barely know how to use.
The keen among you may notice that the majority of my photos are woefully blurry, except, naturally, for the one with the power line. SMH ...These are the sorts of consequences you face when learning to drive on a highway. So long as you don't crash, everything's alright, and in this case I never once dropped the camera.
In winter, Jasper wears its mountains differently. The snow softens every edge, fills every valley with a blue-white silence, and turns the town into something that looks like it was designed by a greeting card company staffed entirely by people who have actually been outdoors (aka rural Canadians). The air at the platform is so cold it feels like drinking ice water through your lungs. It's magnificent, and refreshing after being in a tin can for 17 hours straight, even if you slept for a solid 7 to 9 hours of those.
As you roll out of the Rockies, your need for clear weather basically diminishes. The view can only be enhanced by the beauty of a storm swirling around you, snow streaming horizontally past the dome car windows, clouds sitting so low they seem to rest on the rails themselves. By the end of day two, you're in the prime time to settle in for exceptional conversations.
The main visual attractions are behind you. Internet connectivity is well behind you, too, abandoned somewhere around Jasper. Your fellow riders have either figured out how to safely walk along a moving train without ricocheting off the walls like a ping pong ball, or they've resigned themselves to walking as little as possible and now desire to do anything, anything, but spend what feels like an eternity watching the same 30 seconds of prairie video loop outside their window while they wonder if Saskatchewan has an end.
I say all of this with great affection, because the prairies in winter are their own kind of beautiful. There's a severity to the flatness, a loneliness so vast it becomes almost companionable. You watch the sun set across a horizon so unbroken that you can see the curvature of the earth, and you think, "There is no building, no hill, no tree between me and that sunset," and something in your chest opens a little. Or if you live on Vancouver Island, you already have a superior version of this called "the Pacific Ocean" and you're disappointed when Saskatchewan's horizon doesn't move or shimmer like the ocean does.
However, the sun and the moon each graced us on this particular journey, and in the dome car I stayed up well past midnight to admire the stars. The prairies at night, seen from a glass dome, are staggering. The Milky Way stretches overhead with a clarity that city dwellers forget is possible and I'm distinctly reminded of Vancouver Island's vast mountain peaks with exceptional nighttime sky coverage. The fact that you don't have to sleep on a beach or a summit to get the field of view that the prairies have is indeed a nice touch in a dome car. The train rocks gently beneath you. The only sounds are the steady clack of the rails, the occasional murmur from a fellow insomniac two rows back, and the vast, breathing silence of a continent asleep under snow. If you're fortunate, you may see wild animals such as mountain goats in British Columbia, or in this region bison. To my surprise, Alberta actually has a higher population of bison than Saskatchewan, though I was unaware up until writing this blog post...
In the evening silence on the prairie is where the psychology of the journey becomes most interesting, and I want to dwell on it because I think it explains why train travel produces a quality of human connection that no other mode of transport can match.
The Canadian places you in what I think of as a state of comfortable isolation. You are, in practical terms, unreachable. Your phone doesn't work for long stretches. You can't leave. You can't meaningfully distract yourself with the usual digital sedatives. But, and this is the crucial difference from being stranded, you are supremely comfortable. You are fed. You are warm. You are safe. You are watching some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet slide past your window. There is no emergency, no urgency, no agenda. You are simply here, in the most literal and present-tense meaning of that word.
This combination, genuine isolation paired with genuine comfort, does something remarkable to people. It lowers every social defence mechanism that modern life has taught us to keep raised. The two-minute elevator, the thirty-minute bus, the two-to-sixteen-hour flight: these are all environments where human beings have collectively agreed to pretend the other people don't exist. The durations are too short for investment, the environments too loud or uncomfortable for conversation, and the implicit social contract is one of aggressive mutual non-acknowledgement. I'm not saying you can't have a great conversation on a plane, I'm just saying that the murderous coffee breath of my neighbour, the tinnitus increasing flight noises, the inches of leg room, occasionally shocking turbulence, and myriad of other social turn offs just don't make it very conducive.
But five days? Five days on a comfortable, spacious, quiet ride with exceptional food and the same population of 120 to 350 people? The calculus changes entirely. The population is large enough that you never need to speak to the same person twice if you don't want to, but small enough that groups of friends form organically by day three. You share one thing with every other person aboard: the choice to ride the train. That alone is a conversation starter, because in an era of cheap flights and fast highways, choosing to spend five days crossing a country by rail is, in itself, a statement about the kind of experience you're looking for.
If you're a nerd interested in a wide variety of subjects, as I am, you may find that people come to you for conversation after enough group dinners and dome car sessions. The meals are the great social accelerator. Each sitting, you're placed with different people. By the second day, you've shared a table with a dozen strangers, and by the third, those strangers have started to overlap, cross-reference, and form the loose social web of a village.
And even if you're feeling anti-social at first, time and boredom are unlike any social persuasion I've ever encountered, though it may help to note that I am lifelong sober, so I can't speak to the lubricating effects of the bar in the Park car. But I can say this: I don't enjoy gossip, drama, or idle gabbing. What I enjoy is conversation in the right setting. And the train is the right setting. How could anyone not find the right conversation partner with their pick of a hundred different minds, all sharing the same slow journey through the same enormous country?
On this particular journey, I met over 40 people. I held large debates with groups of spectators. I learned about farming from someone in Abbotsford and could explain seed choices and growing times like it was her and her partner's lifelong passion. I received help from an electrician to solve an actual electrical problem I'd been puzzling over for weeks. I challenged a strong believer in God to put more store in their emotions using philosophy, and we parted as close friends. I debated a British government employee on their anti-abortion and anti-MAiD views with enough mutual respect that he came back to me repeatedly with new topics. I formed a business connection with a fellow Canadian that I expect to maintain long after the train has stopped.
I met Australians, Americans, Brits, Canadians (obviously), Dutch, Danes, French, Germans, and New Zealanders. The social chemistry of The Canadian tends to produce groups of four to six people who gather in the dome car or the Park car and hold the kind of wide-ranging, unstructured conversations that used to happen at dinner parties before everyone started checking their phones between courses. People share poetry. People give impromptu speeches about subjects they're passionate about. Retired politicians explain the machinery of government with the candour of people who no longer need to be diplomatic. Musicians play; the train has actual entertainment, but the best performances are the spontaneous ones.
The demographic aboard is, I should note, not representative of the world. It skews older, whiter, and wealthier than I'd like. It's unfortunate but unsurprising: the train is affordable for international travellers given the right sale and time of year, but the demographic is missing lower-income countries and the two other most-spoken languages in the Americas, Spanish and Portuguese. It's honestly astounding to me, because for a Canadian resident, the cost of this journey was just $650 CAD for four nights, twelve meals, infinite views, and some of the best conversations of my entire life. At that price, the train is not a luxury; it's a bargain. It's the conversations, not the scenery, that keep me coming back. This was my third crossing. But even with the cheap flights to Mexico, Cuba, and the like, it seems the cumulative cost is way too high for most latin Americans especially to head north and enjoy the train. Nevermind the extreme circumstances our southerns neighbours have to endure, natural disasters, cartels, the USA deciding it wants to manifest more destiny... Ahem*
The thing about The Canadian is that you never feel trapped or isolated, even when you objectively are. And because of that comfortable isolation, you are persuaded inevitably, by someone, from some walk of life, from some corner of the world, to enter into conversation.
This isn't the cramped, performative social interaction of modern transit, condominium neighbourhoods, or even work life. This is what happens when you remove every escape route that doesn't involve a massive break or jumping into snow, provide every comfort besides a TV or internet, and let human beings do what human beings have done for two hundred thousand years: talk.
There is something profound about the train's ability to collapse social barriers. It is, I think, one of the last truly democratic spaces in travel, not in the sense of price, but in the sense of experience. Everyone sees the same mountains. Everyone eats in the same dining car. Everyone watches the same sunset from the same dome. The retired politician and the chemical engineer and the cattle rancher and the IT guy from Vancouver Island all share the same narrow corridor, the same meals, the same arrested momentum. And in that shared experience, the usual hierarchies of daily life quietly dissolve.
The train makes philosophers of everyone. Not in the academic sense, but in the original Greek sense: lovers of wisdom, people who ask questions and sit with the answers. Maybe it's the rhythm of the rails, which sounds like nothing more than a very slow heartbeat. Maybe it's the landscape, which changes so gradually that you start to notice things you'd normally miss; the way light moves across a frozen lake, the way a single farmhouse looks against an infinite horizon, the way the snow catches in the branches of a spruce tree and holds on for hundreds of kilometres.
Or maybe it's just this: on the train, you have time. And time, it turns out, is the one thing that every good conversation requires and every modern invention conspires to destroy.
The train arrives in Toronto, eventually. It's usually late; VIA runs on CN freight tracks, and freight takes priority, which means The Canadian regularly pulls onto sidings to let cargo trains pass. This can add hours or even a full day to the journey, which bothers people who are trying to get somewhere and delights people who understand that the journey is the somewhere.
You step off the train at Union Station and the city hits you like a wall of noise and urgency. People are walking fast. Phones are buzzing. Screens are everywhere. And for a disorienting moment, standing on the platform with your bag, you feel a pang of something very close to grief. Not because the trip is over, but because you've just spent five days living proof that another pace of life is possible, and now you have to pretend it isn't.
I stood on the platform and thought about Vancouver Island. About the 289 kilometres of rail corridor sitting dormant while trucks grind up and down the highway. About the 80% of the island's population living within reach of those tracks. About what it would mean, not just for emissions, not just for freight, but for the texture of daily life, if people could step onto a train in Victoria and step off in Courtenay, the way people did for a hundred years before we decided that progress meant everyone driving alone in a car.
The Canadian Pacific Railway was built to make a country real. It succeeded. It's not romantic nostalgia to suggest that rail could do the same thing for Vancouver Island; it's engineering, economics, psychology, sociology, and common sense. The corridor is there. The need is there. The money is even there. The only thing missing is the will.
But that's a fight for another day. Today, standing on the platform, I'm just grateful. Grateful for five days of slow travel through an impossibly beautiful country. Grateful for 100+ conversations that reminded me what human beings are capable of when you take away their distractions. Grateful for the Oreos- enough to take a few for the walk across to the next train north.
I'll be back on the train. I always come back.
Triston Line is a Solutions Architect, amateur philosopher, citizen scientist, political strategist, and three-time transcontinental rail passenger. He lives on Vancouver Island and advocates loudly for the restoration of the Island Rail Corridor. His photography is improving. Slowly. All photos are CC BY-SA by Triston Line, XKCD comics naturally belong to XKCD and are directly linked to his site.
