All aboard The Canadian “


Stunning landscapes, sumptuous food and lively company make for a memorable rail journey from Toronto to Edmonton, says Steve Hartridge


In Canada there’s a lake for every Canadian ever born and for every


Canadian that will ever be born,” enthuses a fellow passenger aboard The Canadian. It’s a dazzlingly bright spring morning and


STEVE HARTRIDGE Consulting Editor, Selling Canada


Northern Ontario, a vast wilderness region of seemingly endless lakes, streams, rivers and evergreen forest certainly offers nothing by way of a refute. For hour after hour we speed past a


landscape filled in by thick rows of Douglas firs, slim-line white-bark birch trees and huge expanses of shimmering water and, occasionally, fishing and hunting lodges. We glimpse conical-shaped beaver ‘huts’, see ducks and geese (I presume Canadian) and are told to keep an eye out for deer, moose and black bears. This is a region with some serious


history on its side: covered and preserevd by ice and snow for much of the year many of the pines are thought to be


12 SUMMER 2012 • Selling Canada


among the oldest on earth. The previous evening I had collected my


ticket on the main concourse of Toronto’s Union Station, a heritage building currently undergoing a major 'revitalisation', was directed into Via Rail’s spacious new Panorama lounge and given my ‘car’ and cabin numbers, dining times and other general information about the journey ahead. “One thing I can promise you, you'll


never go hungry on Via Rail, we’ve got tonnes of food onboard,” said our cheery check-in assistant, 'PJ', who we were to get to know well over the next three days. We were called to our platform half-an-


hour before our 22.00 departure, given a quick orientation of our ‘car’ and then welcomed to a champagne Bon Voyage reception, before we slipped out of Toronto under the cover of darkness. Once underway The Canadian quickly falls into a reassuring rhythm. It eats up


the 4,450 kilometres between Toronto and Vancouver on a mostly ‘fully-welded’ track, which means there’s no staccato ‘ga-doon, ga-doon’ noise to disrupt. I sleep well. The Canadian’s silver-and-blue stylish


stainless steel cars are a legacy from the steam-heated passenger locomotives that were the pride of Canada’s train companies in the 1950s. The three trains that ply the Toronto-Vancouver route, a service that runs three times a week, have all been given a multi-million-dollar makeover in recent years. If you stay on The Canadian for its entire


transcontinental journey, you spend four nights and three days on the train, passing through those placid waters of the east, the wheat fields of the prairies and the Rocky Mountains of the west – crossing five provinces and three time zones. Stops along the route include Winnipeg – where I signed up for a two-hour tour


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