Type 2 travel: across Canada by train

Somewhere on the second leg of our rail journey from Vancouver to Toronto, a young American woman came up to me in the observation car, where I was (perhaps unforgivably) looking at a book. I knew she was American because she asked “Traveling somewhere?” and went on to tell me a large part of the story of her life, which she was on the road to figure out. Before the rail part of her journey, she had literally been on the road, biking much of the Pacific Northwest coast. She explained to me that there is “type 1 fun,” when you have fun at the time and also have fun remembering the fun later. Type 2 fun, like her bicycle journey, is more about doing it at the time, knowing that the fun will come later, in remembering. I think her train trip, in which she was on the second of three days, was turning into type 2 fun for her.

There are also two types of travel. One is when you have to get to a wedding, a meeting, or are just eager to see your family again. That kind of travel is primarily about getting where you want to go. You don’t particularly care how you get there, but you do want the trip to be over as quickly as possible. This is how I feel about airplanes. They may be the fastest type of travel, but they’re not pleasant, and if I experience delays with a flight then the whole point of it is gone.

The other type of travel is primarily what we have been doing: road trips, slow boats, and now a cross-Canada rail journey. Let me be the first to emphasize that trains in Canada are not fast, and this one in particular is notorious for not running on time, for reasons I’ll mention. If you expect a high-speed train like in Europe, you will be disappointed. And if you want to get from, say, Jasper to Edmonton, Alberta in the least amount of time, you are better off driving even compared with the on-time schedule of the train.

The Canadian, as this classic train is known, is not about getting somewhere fast or on time. It is definitely type 2 travel, where the journey is at least as important as the destination. Enjoying the Canadian depends on your expectations. If, like me, you are eager to feast your eyes on the changing landscape of Canada out a train window, without worrying about when you’ll reach the next station, then you’ll enjoy the journey.

The Canadian appears on the back of the $10 bill.

VIA Rail, the passenger service of Canada, alerts passengers on its home page to the likelihood of delays. The reason is that VIA does not own the tracks; they are owned by Canadian National, which today is a freight company. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from neoliberal economics, it’s that free movement of goods is important, whereas free movement of people is to be restricted. That is what happens on CN’s tracks. A lot of times (though, as we discovered, not always), when a miles-long freight train is passing through, the passenger train just has to wait on a siding. 

Every blog post, article, and TV show extolling the Canadian will also tell you to expect significant delays. And that there is no WiFi and, given the remote country the train is passing through, often no phone signal either. If you don’t know this in advance, you may feel miserably stuck on the train. If, on the other hand, you want a 1950s experience in classic ’50s train cars, you’re like me and will be happy to put your phone away.

Restaurant car

I have been wanting to cross Canada by train since I immigrated here in the year 2000. Back then, a sleeping compartment or berth on the Canadian cost between four and five hundred dollars, which was too much. As a result, I never did it. Today an economy class ticket (i.e., a reclining seat) costs that much. Guess how we’re traveling?

All those posts, articles, and shows I mentioned are also from the perspective of sleeper class. They make it sound like a cruise on rails: gourmet dinners, an attendant making up your berth, no doubt with a bilingual chocolate on the pillow. And maybe in sleeper class it is like that. But our cruise is over, and no one ever seems to blog about their trip on the Canadian in a seat, though that is how most people must travel (the sleeper tickets were sold out months in advance). So here I am, back online, to tell you what it’s like to cross five provinces and 4,467 km eastbound on VIA Rail #2. Here are my top tips:

1. As VIA Rail states, do not book onward travel or anything time-dependent on the day of arrival. Build an extra day into your schedule so you don’t stress. If you don’t have that kind of time or just want to get there, this is not the trip for you.
2. Get up in the dome car and enjoy the all-around views. Almost the whole route is scenic, and there’s no better way to appreciate the vastness and variety of the Canadian landscape.

   

   Fraser Valley, BC

3. Before you go, pack or download plenty of tunes if you like to listen to those, or books so you’ll have something to read. I didn’t end up reading much, but I did listen to my new Buffy Sainte-Marie albums and a lot of The Tragically Hip. k.d. lang kept popping up on the iPod, too.
4. The food on the Canadian, even in economy where it’s not included, is really good. I don’t know how s/he does it in a tiny galley, but there is a chef who cooks meals fresh to order. There is also a surprising selection of beer and wine, all domestic bien sûr.

Nonetheless, we packed plenty of snacks and took sandwiches, etc., especially for our third and longest leg between Saskatchewan and Ontario. The food is good value for money, but you will not want to depend on buying it all the time, and some of the stations have basically nothing to offer no matter what time you pass through them.

5. Let the WiFi go. Do you know the attention my guidebook attracted, with its paper maps and things I could look up, or had planned in advance? A frustrated guy who was getting to Edmonton later than expected took a picture of my map (with his useless phone, naturally). Other passengers spent short breaks in train stations trying frantically to get WiFi, which was often not good. They reminded me of one of my teammates on Kilimanjaro who seemed to spend the whole trek trying to get a phone signal. He even photobombed another hiker’s summit picture, holding his phone up to the sky. I know he missed his family, but did he not tell his wife he was going to climb a mountain?

Rear view from the dome car

I did actually turn my phone on at one point during each leg of our journey: to show my ticket. We hadn’t gotten around to finding a printer, so I had the e-mails on my old BlackBerry, the phone I barely use but which is not cool enough for anybody to steal. Remember how cell phones originally started out as huge bricks, then became smaller and smaller, and are now giant again? “I miss those little BlackBerrys,” the conductor said—but note, she could scan my ticket fine on the small screen. Here’s tip #6 for free: Don’t update or upgrade anything as long as the old thing works. Saves SO much money.

Oh, and #7. Take a comfortable change of clothes on the overnight train. An alternate pair of sandals or shoes you can slip on and off is great (you can’t walk around the train without shoes for safety reasons). Also, layers! Have a sweatshirt or something to slip on for extra warmth, because the temperature varies from car to car. Have another fleece or something to use as a pillow. Basically, carry on whatever you need to be comfortable on the train, as well as if you get off the train at stops (Canada can be cold).

Front view from dome car

Does this sound like hard work? Why have I been dreaming about this journey longer than any other adventure we’ve been on in the past two (or for me, 18) years? I love Canada. Falling in love is not rational and, unlike what I believed growing up, loving a country does not mean believing it’s objectively superior to all other countries. It is just the way that I feel. Loving a country other than the one I was born in is not like bigamy; it is more, as Chaim Potok put it, like loving both a mother and a father. I became a landed immigrant and threw myself into my new country, and it was a success. I love snow, classic Canadian rock, even hockey. I love the way people talk and the fact that they don’t, always. Even some of the annoying things are endearing to me. That is love.

So I didn’t just want to see the west of Canada, which I'd never gotten around to before. I wanted to stop along the way and explore it. One, because it would have been a shame to ride through, for example, the Canadian Rockies without taking time to go out and see them. And two, because the train is scheduled to take five days between Vancouver and Toronto. Although we were prepared to spend four nights on a train, we did not want to spend four in a row!

Rocky Mountains, BC/Alberta border

I’ve spent nights on trains several times before. It used to be possible to get a sleeper train from Toronto to Montréal, and T. and I also traveled to Montréal aboard the Ocean, VIA Rail’s overnight train that rolls from Halifax, Nova Scotia through New Brunswick and Québec. From those journeys and our berths on a Thai train, I did not remember sleeping on a train being significantly more comfortable lying down than in a reclining seat. I kept waking up anyway, and the seats on trains are far more comfortable and roomy than on a bus (which, in turn, is much better than a plane). So I was happy to book seats in economy, again, with the expectation that we could be hours late getting into our first stop, Jasper.

We stopped off for a week in Jasper and that deserves a post of its own. We spread the five-day train journey over two weeks. Just to say here, it was a good way to do the trip. There were people on each train who were going all the way through but I think it would have had diminishing returns, at least in economy class.

Oil derrick, Alberta

I do recommend economy, though, if you want to see a different side of Canada. There’s a whole other Canada beyond the cities, obviously, and you not only see it from the train windows, but you can meet it, too. I had supposed the Canadian was largely a tourist train but that’s probably only true of sleeper class. Canadians joined our train along the way, from a university kid who regularly takes the train to Winnipeg, to a hunting party and a couple of railroad workers who took over the dome car in Ontario for a while. Talking to them was interesting. They’re from Ontario, yet a thousand kilometers from anywhere I’d been. Toronto, for them, was an overnight trip.

So take the Canadian, but take it slowly and in stages. It crosses five provinces and four time zones, with four distinct landscapes. Eastbound, from following the Fraser River in British Columbia to the mountainous border with Alberta, the tracks wind through the prairies by the second day. On the third morning you’ll reach the boreal forest of northwest Ontario, and by the last day you’ll wake up on the Canadian Shield, a billion-year-old expanse of exposed bedrock that covers much of North America, from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay.

Train distances still use miles, from the original mileposts.

We planned a week in Jasper, getting off the train one Saturday and leaving the next. Wouldn’t you know, we were early! The train from Vancouver didn’t seem to experience any freight-related delays at all. I woke up on Saturday morning, looked out the window (it wasn’t very light yet), and saw that were arriving in a town. I don’t know what there was to see just west of Jasper, because we were already there.

And that’s my 8th tip, for the train journey if not for life. Sometimes, surprises are pleasant ones. Sometimes you’re all prepared to take your time and be comfortable, and you wake up already in the Rockies. So be prepared for your expectations to be exceeded too. Alberta certainly exceeded mine.

Spoiler alert: After all the adventures on this and the two subsequent legs of our train journey, let it be known that the Canadian arrived into Toronto only 42 minutes behind schedule. "Not too bad," as they say around here.