Tuesday 1 March Vancouver
Repacked into a little bag each for the train, checked out of the hotel and stored our luggage for collection later. A wet wet day so our plans to get all the way out to the Museum of Anthropology went by the wayside. Vancouver is renowned as a city of much rain and the annual rainfall is 116cm (46”). Instead we got our wet weather gear on, borrowed umbrellas from our most pleasant hotel and walked down and through Gastown. Even found a good coffee shop which served good coffee. The rain finally got to us so we caught the 1.30pm screening of THE LADY IN THE VAN, a film with Maggie Smith adapted for the screen by Alan Bennett from his story/play. Just a lovely film, with great performances (of course) from Dame Maggie and from Alex Jennings playing the two Alan Bennett’s (the writer and the man). Beautiful direction by Nicholas Hytner. Highly recommended.
It was a little drier when we got out of the cinema but still umbrella weather. We walked back to, and beyond, the hotel and parked ourselves at a table in an Italian restaurant in true tourist style at 4.30pm for dinner. Having ordered a single glass of wine each, we were advised that our orders would be taken once the kitchen opened at 5pm! With the cost of a second glass of wine each, we might have well have bought the bottle but as Cherrie reminds me so often, restraint is not a bad thing. I’m not sure I agree.
Whilst in Vancouver we had hoped to catch up with Cherrie’s niece Emma, who is working as a ski instructor in Whistler. However, Emma could not get time off to come into town, it’s the busy season!
Collected our luggage from the hotel and took a taxi to Central Pacific Station and ViaRail’s The Canadian. Boarded at 7pm and departed at 8.30pm. Four nights on board here, in a sleeper obviously, and our 5000km trans-continental journey to Toronto. We will travel 4,466 kms through five states – British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario. Our little cabin has a lovely big window, perfect for viewing the snow. We were surprised that there is no wi-fi on board, so we are out of touch until Saturday. It takes some time to get used to sleeping on the train…..hope we do better tomorrow night.

Wednesday 2 March Vancouver to Toronto
7am breakfast (because that’s our sitting). The dining car is pleasant and each table seats four. This morning we share with Kathy from Toronto who has been in Vancouver for the birth of her 4th grandchild. Kathy is very nice and we enjoy her company. We moved on to the lounge car which has an upper level dome roofed viewing car. It’s in the lounge car where you meet the characters. Sue and Nicola from north of Liverpool in England. They travel together a lot as Sue’s husband Chris is not a traveller. Sue is thrilled to be on the train and wants James Bond to smash his way through the window to solve Agatha Christie’s on-board murder. Or, at a pinch, David Suchet will do. And there’s the Drunk, we don’t know her name but it’s almost certainly slurred. She’s absolutely tiny and boy, does she like her chardonnay. She sways a lot, but then so does the train. Joy from Ontario who wears rollers in her hair most of the time, and Jane and Jake who used to live at Lake Tahoe in California but once they retired they resented having to pay state taxes so moved 20 minutes across the border to Reno. Nevada has no taxes. Jane is not sure how Nevada pays for anything without taxes but it offers all they want. They travel a lot – 96 countries over the 36 years they have been together and they have never checked baggage….they only take hand luggage. One must admire that, but then their dress sense leaves a little to be desired. There’s the Parasite, who latches onto everyone at some time and tries to flog her hand crocheted necklaces. Yes, folks, hand crocheted necklaces. We resisted a lot. My English is not good, Aboriginal being my first language. There’s the 40ish Minx travelling alone who has opened a tab in the diner and one at the bar and who chats up every lone traveller of the male variety, I reckon in the hope that she will never have to pick up her own tab.

The train took us through timber, oops lumbar, country with lots of mills and huge piles of plastic wrapped lumbar. We climbed mountains;saw rivers (some flowing but most frozen);

the spectacular frozen Pyramid Falls,one of the greatest sights in the BC Rockies and which can only been seen from the train;

frozen Moose Lake where men were drilling holes for ice fishing. They drill holes using a hand held auger and then put a hut over it to preserve the hole as well as themselves whilst fishing. Moose Lake is one of the deepest lakes in Canada, they say it is bottomless, and is apparently emerald green.

Deep ice fishing will yield the perfect trout apparently, whilst the shallower waters under ice will give perch and pike. Kathy’s husband is an ice fisherman so we learned a little about it from her.

We passed Mount Robson which is the highest peak in the Rockies at 3,954 metres.

Around 4pm we pulled into Jasper

where we had an hour and got off the train and pottered the main street. Everyone is saying what a mild winter it has been – from Alaskans to Washingtonians to British Columbians. Winter hasn’t really visited, just spring. Nonetheless we Aussies were rugged up in our duck down, wind jackets, gloves and hats (Cherrie’s Harris Tweed which she bought in Covent Garden, Christine in something that Mrs Khrushchev might have worn).

Jasper is, of course, one of the tourist towns of the Rockies renowned for its skiing, hiking and outdoor sports and has beautiful scenery. It’s in Jasper that we saw our first wildlife – there were elk on the track. This is apparently a common sight, and depending on who you listen to – Rose our wonderful steward or Joy of the hair rollers – they come in for the grain which spills off the train (Rose) or the salt which is spread onto the tracks to prevent ice build-up (Joy). Likely a bit of both, but this is a whole elk family comprising grandad, mum, dad and several kids.

The passenger trains in Canada are obliged to give way to the freight trains, which are very much longer, often too long for the side tracks, and so the schedules are always a bit fluid. Sometimes we can be stopped on the siding for up to an hour, waiting a very long freight train. The passenger trains are limited to a speed of 79kms per hour, and their speeds are monitored by satellite. A driver who exceeds the speed limit is summarily stood down without pay. So, if we are delayed by freight, then the driver really tries to catch up but only within the limit. We can really feel the train go! That’s when we are grateful for the VERY narrow corridors in the carriages, so that we are thrown around a little less. The only certainty is the departure time from the station, so had we arrived in Jasper 50 minutes late then we would only have had 10 minutes there. However, had we arrived 20 minutes early, then we would have had an hour and 20 minutes. The Canadian is renowned for not sticking to its schedule and all passengers are advised not to have connecting travel at journey’s end as the chance of missing it is high. So far we are pretty well on schedule.

At dinner we sat with Stanley, a 90 year old widower from Pennsylvania. He is extremely slow on his feet and his waistband is up around his chest but he is sharp of mind indeed. Used to be a lawyer, father of four children, all of whom are highly accomplished in the fields of law, medicine or academia, as are their children in the same fields. The great-grandchildren will also excel I’m sure. Stanley loves train travel “men have their hobbies – hunting, golfing, fishing, cars…..mine is trains”. He particularly loves The Canadian – indeed this is his 10th trip! We were amused to see the Drunk try to make a runner from dinner without paying but it didn’t take the steward long to catch her – chardonnay can slow one down so. We moved to the bar post dinner and there was the Minx chatting up poor charming Stanley who is probably gentlemanly enough to ensure she didn’t pay for her own drinks.

A better sleep tonight…we are acclimatising to the train.

Thursday 3 March
No breakfast served today but brunch instead. This appears to be a hangover from the summer period when there are many more passengers on board, indeed up to 3 dining cars (we only have one) and they can’t manage three meals a day before the big (scheduled) stop at 8.45 tonight in Winnipeg. This is where there is a crew and food change and it’s a big turnover for them. So, we slept in a bit but were showered and dressed for our (scheduled) 25 minutes stop at Saskatoon at 9am. We actually pulled in at 8.25am, so had an hour there, to keep us on schedule! We had to stay just on the platform but nice to stretch the legs, even though it was -10◦C.
The fine dusting of snow on the trees is particularly pretty in this area.

This is prairie country (prairie, a French word meaning meadow….see we learn something every day….).  Lots of graveyards here

In the Lounge Car we meet Alan, a fascinating if pompous man from Saskatchewan, who boarded the train at 11.30 last night in Edmonton. A former teacher, who then spent some years with an international IT company, he has now retired to a small town in the south of the province 20 minutes from the USA border. He is the mayor the town of 900 and is on his way to Ottawa to meet with Government Ministers to beg for an exemption to the law forbidding them to dig for their own water. They currently get the town water from the river but that has now been declared unfit for human consumption due to the chemical run off from farming. Their standby clean dam was rendered empty by huge winds at the end of last year and the town was without water altogether for 2 days. This has turned out to be an advantage for their government negotiations and Alan is hopeful that his trip will bear fruit. He is a font of all knowledge and from him we learned a little of the history of this train and the trans-continental route.
The original railways in Canada were privately owned and it was Canadian Pacific Railway who built the first east-west rail connection. It was a runaway success and lots of other rail companies wanted a piece of the action and competition was fierce with the building of other east-west routes. Lots of companies went by the wayside as a result and the government was eventually forced to step in and combine the survivors into Canadian National Railways, in direct competition with CPR. But then the airlines got in the way in the ‘60s and the railways started to suffer. So in the late ‘70s the Canadian government formed VIA Rail Canada to operate passenger trains on both CP and CN lines, as well as the freight trains. And then in the ‘90’s (I think) Prime Minister Joe Clark, whose home was in the north, insisted that the southern and northern routes be separated, the south going to freight exclusively and the north to be shared between freight and passenger. This makes no sense, since 93% of the population lives in the south and apparently that is by far the prettier route. Via Rail vehemently objected to the move but they were overruled by government. Everyone in the lounge car, including Kathy, Stanley, Jane and Jake, Joy with her rollers, the Parasite (the Drunk who was still sleeping it off and the Minx was probably opening a tab elsewhere) agreed with Alan on this point and all lament the move of The Canadian from the south to the north. To add insult to injury, Joe Clark was dispatched from office within 12 months and the railway was privatised.

We passed lots and lots of potash mines. Saskatchewan is the biggest producer of potash in the world, by a long shot. We continued across the uninspiring prairies and grain country, evident from the many silos and mills. Cattle and horses are the only animals we saw today. The cattle feed on rolls of hay but the horses seem to subsist on snow. We assume there are stable for them at night, with decent feed.  We did see some bee hives on the prairies, protected by huts.

Following dinner we stopped for an hour in Winnipeg. We got off the train and strolled through the most beautiful railway station, as so many North American train stations are.

We ventured down the street a little, watched folk ice skating on the (frozen) river but it was cold, and dark.  Well, it was 9pm.  So back to the train for us where we heard stories about life in Winnipeg. The most delightful of which is that it is quicker for so many kids to walk to school in winter than summer, or indeed for others to get places, because they just walk across the river or the lake rather than around it!
Dave, the retired airman, has joined our little group along with some others. We feel a bit cheated having to induct new people. Haven’t sighted the Drunk all day…perhaps she got off the train earlier in the day. Perhaps she had reached her destination, or she forgot to get back on the train. Who knows?

Friday 4 March
Not a good night’s sleep for either of us. No water in the car this morning. The stewards don’t know why and can’t fix it. We are without water until the end now.  We reckon we have a good idea why there’s no water – this is taken from the platform this afternoon during one of our little exercise stops (and there are very few of those) and is directly under our carriage

Totally different terrain today. We’re out of prairie country and into the rivers and lakes, all forested. These are the waterways which feed into the Great Lakes of USA…we’re not far from the border. Crossed into Ontario this morning and moved our clocks forward another hour – that’s three hours since BC. Our final time change for a while. The scenery is truly beautiful and this is real summer holiday country. Lots and lots of cabins by the lake, all covered in feet of snow and all the huge lakes frozen solid. It must be spectacular in summer but it’s pretty beautiful now to these Australian eyes. This is bear country but they’re snoozing for winter so we won’t see any.

The Drunk reappeared at lunch today so all is well!

Saturday 5 March

As we roll into Toronto this morning, only 2 hours behind schedule, we pass lots of barns.

A couple of days in Toronto now.

Cheers to all. C&C