Toronto to Vancouver by Train

As Europe in the summer has become too packed, too expensive, and too hot, the plan was to go with the family to Vancouver Island, try and see some bears and some whales, and explore the Pacific Northwest rather than some oversubscribed Mediterranean oven. The train was an afterthought, but soon became the main event. The second longest railway in the world (behind the Trans Siberian), The Canadian whisks you from Toronto to Vancouver in 4 days, crossing the continent in the pre-jet-age comfort of 1950s streamliner cars with the iconic domed viewing carriages. How would the family—including my wife and 12- and 10-year old boys—cope with 4 days and nights cooped up on a train?

We flew into Toronto 36 hours before the train departed and ticked off a whistle-stop greatest hits tour. Niagara Falls isn’t easy by train and we didn’t want to hire a car—and, having seen it before, I knew it doesn’t take long (you need 30 mins, an hour tops), so we persuaded our Uber driver from the airport to run us out first thing the next morning. Awake early with jet lag, the whole family arrived at the falls by 9am, which is also when they’re at their least crowded. They were wowed by the power, the noise and the spray,  and were heading back to Toronto by 9:45.

That afternoon we took in a ball game at the Skydome, which set us back CAN$16 per seat (the obligatory baseball caps cost more), and saw the Blue Jays triumph over Kansas City en-route to their berth in last year’s Worlds Series. We stayed in the Fairmont Royal York, a classic Victorian railway hotel the size of an oil rig opposite the train station, so on Sunday morning we just had to walk across the road to Toronto’s Central Station to check in for the VIA RAIL 01, destination Vancouver.

The check-in process is a charming throwback, for those of us more accustomed to surly check-in machines, long lines and dignity-free belt and shoe removal. Here the pleasant staff helped us with paper luggage tags, dining car reservations (there are three seatings for each meal—always aim for the middle one, as the first one’s too early and the last one’s too late). When they saw that we had booked two adjoining cabins, they offered to open them both up by sliding the wall back, so we had one large room during the day.

At 9am, we boarded the stainless-steel carriage that was to be our hotel for the next four nights. There are three classes on board, starting with Economy, which are regular seats that have their own carriage and their own observation car. After that there’s Sleeper Plus, which is what we’d booked (for $2,500 pp)—it includes a private cabin with toilet and sink and bunks that fold away during the day, a shower in every carriage (so you’re sharing with around 5 other cabins), and your own dedicated observation car and dining car, with three meals a day included with the ticket. At the very back of the train is Prestige class, who get double beds, en-suite showers, and their own dome observation car at the rear of the train, and priority usage of the “Park” bar car that runs at the end of the train.

Each carriage is looked after by a purser, who makes up the beds every evening and stows them away during the day, leaving you with comfy reclining chairs you can turn round and face the window to watch the endlessly changing country pass you by. These are not modern business class seats that turn into beds; it’s a whole 1950s manual process. The bunks are comfy but far from luxurious, the cabin private but fairly basic. The Prestige cabins are more modern and a lot more luxurious, but also nearly three times the price. They do include all alcoholic drinks, but other than that it’s the same service as Sleeper Plus.

All meals are included in the cost of your ticket for Sleeper Plus and Prestige, and the dining car and meals quickly became the focal point of the days. The food—all prepared fresh in the train’s tiny kitchens—and the service were both excellent. With a large cooked breakfast and three courses for both lunch and dinner, and little ability to work it off, you could easily pile the pounds on while heading across the country.

Before we pulled out of Toronto, the purser came round each cabin to explain how things work and give us the safety talk. My 10-year-old asked for the WiFi code, and she had to explain there was no WiFi on board—that the cell phone signal disappears just outside Toronto, and wouldn’t return reliably until Winnipeg in 36 hours’ time. There was nothing else for it. We were going to have to talk to each other…

We headed up to the observation car (there are four on each train) and watched as we slid between the skyscrapers, passed the CN Tower, and out towards the wilds of rural Ontario. The observation cars give you amazing 360-degree views of the surrounding countryside, and they seat 24 with big, squishy seats, tray tables and the prime seats at the front, which seat four facing each other. Each club car (which has lounge space downstairs and the observation car upstairs) is run by a steward, who is part barman, part tour guide, part therapist, and part comedian. Both stewards were one of the trip’s highlights (you get two crews over the four days as they swap over in Winnipeg). Knowledgeable, funny, kind, and utterly helpful in an age of phoned-in service and people who couldn’t care less, all the staff on The Canadian went out of their way to make your trip enjoyable. And not in a White Lotus-style “pillow menu” type way. Just in a great old-fashioned service type way.

At this point I’d better point out this isn’t my first overnight train. I’ve done the Kaliningrad Express between Vilnius in Lithuania, across the Belarussian steppe to St Petersburg in Russia. That too had no cell phone reception, the purser had wooden teeth, and you brought your own food on board or bought it from babushkas on the platforms (if you liked dried fish)—the toilet was a hole in the floor and there was a gap between the carriages you had to hurdle if you wanted to go to the dining car for more beers (which you did, frequently). The train smelled of tuberculosis as you walked through it, the restaurant car had a group of men in leather jackets drinking Martell Cordon Bleu cognac who didn’t seem to welcome any interruptions from strangers, and the Belarussian border guard nearly threw me off the train, much to my traveling companion’s hilarity, because my papers were not in order (he wanted a bribe. I didn’t have any money since my last 1,000-ruble note was sitting in the restaurant car as my never-ending tab for the 2-ruble beers we were drinking).

Contrast that with a trip on the Belmond Royal Scotsman, courtesy of Matt Hranek of this parish, where you dressed for dinner, had a double bed with en-suite, there was a pianist, a spa car, and, being part of the LVMH family, the food and drink offerings were out of this world. We pootled around the highlands for a couple of days, stopping only for Succession-style jaunts in fleets of matching Land Rovers to shoot, fish and taste whisky in a Scottish castle.

The Canadian is nothing like either of these trips. It feels like an old-fashioned liner rather than a modern pleasure cruise (or a forced evacuation in the case of the Russian train). The train itself is comfortable, clean, old fashioned, but honest. The food isn’t going to win any awards for originality or luxury, but there wasn’t a single duff meal on the trip. The beer and wine were mostly Canadian and the kids soon became big fans of Canada Dry.

The days pass moving between your cabin, which by day is set up with comfy chairs and trips to the club car where there’s an endless supply of tea, coffee and snacks, and regular talks, wine and beer tastings and quizzes organised by the stewards. But the best spots are the domed observation cars atop the club car, where you can sit, talk, drink tea, play cards and just watch as Canada in all her glory is paraded in front of you.

The trip falls into three main sections: the first day and a half you’re travelling through Ontario and passing by and over thousands upon thousands of lakes, past lake houses and little jetties, past farmsteads and red barns. The vistas become more rugged, it becomes bedrock and trees and water, old railway towns pass by as you follow the trail of broken and sagging old telegraph poles through the Canadian Shield.

After Winnipeg, where the train stops for three hours so you can stop and stretch your legs, you enter the flatlands of the prairies. Our first crew, who changed over at Winnipeg, had said that the highlight of the trip was watching the sun rise over the prairie on the second morning. With the train time zone going back an hour every night, getting up at 5 wasn’t difficult, so it was that I and one hardy Australian found ourselves with a coffee at 5am sitting at the front of the observation car in the dark as the first light appeared in the sky whilst the train roared over the prairies making up time. Unfortunately for us it was the one cloudy morning of the trip, so I’ll have to take the steward’s word on its beauty.

The train regularly has to stop in a siding to let 100-car, 20,000-ton freight trains carrying iron ore, potash or crude oil pass. These leviathans are the kings of the rails (the railways are owned by the freight carriers) and take precedence over the passenger services, so at times you feel like you’re massively behind the schedule—but these delays are usually caught up as they build lots of slack into the timetable. Day 3 was the day we were making up some of the time, and the giant train sped through the Edward Hopper-esque landscapes, past grain elevators and farms, through fields of sunflowers as the thunderheads menaced the plains and the sun cast rainbows over the flat horizons.

On the evening of Day 3 you pull into Edmonton Alberta, Canada’s oil capital, before waking up to the beauty of the Rockies. The trip through the Rockies begins as you wake up in Jasper and an hour’s stop where you can go and grab a decent coffee and walk off one of the pancake breakfasts. Then it’s back on the train and out into the most bite-the-back-of-your-hand beautiful scenery of the whole trip. The train snakes between peaks, over passes, past turquoise lakes and awe-inspiring vistas whilst we all kept an eye out for bears, wolves and eagles. The guides were invaluable in keeping us posted on what to look out for, giving everyone plenty of time to prepare for the highlight of the day, passing by Pyramid Creek Falls, a massive waterfall that’s almost impossible to see from anywhere but the train. As the day progresses and you pass by hillsides still scarred from recent fires, the scenery changes again and you spend your last meal on the train watching the rolling hills of the arid high country, full of sagebrush and cacti and cut by deep river canyons.

We woke early on the last morning as the train shunted and jolted into Vancouver station, exactly on schedule. We went on to more adventures in the city and on up to Vancouver Island—and, after spending 4 days on a train reading Moby Dick, my quest to see the whale (spoiler alert: we saw one, though he was grey, not white).

The Trans Canadian was a truly magical trip, one the family will talk about for a long time. We felt like we’d been on a proper adventure at the end of it, not merely getting from A to B. We saw coyotes, beavers building dams, eagles soaring over the Rockies and a large stuffed bear at Jasper station, who will have to do for our ursine tick box. We crossed a continent—over 4,400 kilometers—and hold the record for the most peppermint teas consumed by one family on the VIA rail network. I’d recommend it for anyone who worries that travel is getting too fast and too generic. And no Wi-Fi or cell was the feature, not the bug: you were forced to disconnect (don’t worry, you won’t miss anything) and watch the world go by whilst reading a great book. Would I do it again? Yes, I’d love to do it in fall or in the depths of winter, see the leaves and the snow on the Rockies. Our kids (10 and 12) loved it, but I wouldn’t recommend it for people with much younger kids. The other passengers were an interesting mix of ages and nationalities, and you could be as private or as outgoing as you fancied. As a group of four, our dining table was always just us but smaller groups sat together and moved round for each meal. The residing memory, other than the incredible views and scenery, was the service, which made the long trip fly by.