The blind goes up somewhere west of Edmonton and the window fills with fir trees running past at speed. Then the trees drop away and the eastern wall of the Rockies stands there in the early light, pink at the top, close enough to feel rude. Coffee in hand, half the dome car still asleep, nobody says anything for a while. That is the moment people pay for on VIA Rail‘s Canadian, and it arrives on the fourth morning, without warning, whether you were awake for it or not.
The train that delivers that view is about to change. On September 3, the Government of Canada announced more than $4.7 billion for VIA Rail to buy and maintain 313 new passenger cars from Alstom Canada, built in Thunder Bay, Ontario and La Pocatière, Québec. Combined with a $1.95 billion locomotive order announced in July, Ottawa has now committed more than $6.6 billion to replacing the long-distance fleet. Some of the equipment still rolling across the prairies is more than 70 years old. The new fleet will keep dome cars, full-service dining and lounge space, but the first car is not expected to be finished until 2031, with the rollout running years past that.
Which means the train you can ride right now is still the old one, and the old one is the reason to go.
The Canadian runs 4,466 kilometers, roughly 2,775 miles, from Toronto to Vancouver by way of Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Jasper and Kamloops. Four nights on board. Two departures a week in each direction, year-round. Westbound, train 1 leaves Toronto Union Station at 9:55 a.m. on Wednesdays and Sundays and pulls into Vancouver’s Pacific Central on the fifth morning. Eastbound, train 2 leaves Vancouver at 3 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays. Times are worth confirming against the current VIA timetable before you book anything, since the schedule shifts by season.
The cars themselves are the story. They are stainless steel Budd equipment built in 1954 and 1955 for Canadian Pacific’s original Canadian, rebuilt in the 1990s and running ever since. Sleeping cars carry names, not numbers. The Manor cars hold roomettes for one, bedrooms for two, and open sections with upper and lower berths that a porter converts at night behind heavy curtains. If you have seen Some Like It Hot, you have seen a section.
Want Luxury?
Three ways to ride. Economy is a reclining seat with a leg rest, a power outlet and access to a Skyline lounge car with an observation dome and a small counter selling coffee, beer, wine and snacks. Sleeper Plus puts you in a berth or a private room, includes every meal in the dining car, and opens up the Skyline dome and its complimentary coffee station. Prestige is a rebuilt Chateau car with a double bed, en suite shower, mini bar and first pick of dinner seatings.
Prestige is worth understanding before you dismiss it on price. The cars were gutted to the shell and rebuilt, and the rooms come with a double bed that converts to a corner sofa by day, a private toilet and hot shower, a flat-screen with a video library, a complimentary mini bar and a window noticeably larger than anything else on the train. Drinks are included rather than charged, which changes the arithmetic over four nights more than people expect. Two of the Prestige compartments and the wheelchair-accessible one sit inside the Park car itself, which means you sleep in the same car as the bar and the rear lounge.
That access is the real luxury. From late April to mid-October, Prestige passengers have the Park car to themselves from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m., and dome seats carry labels reserving them. Sleeper Plus passengers get in outside those hours. In winter the restrictions come off almost entirely, which is the argument for riding in February: for the price of a berth you get a nearly private dome and a bar car through the Rockies with snow on everything.
Fares run from about C$444 one way in Economy, C$1,109 for an upper berth, C$1,785 for a roomette or a bedroom shared by two, and C$4,655 in Prestige. Prices climb from June through October and fall off sharply from January to May and again in late autumn. Booking opens 331 days out and sleepers sell out first.
Meals Are Not an Afterthought
Meals are served at white tablecloths in a proper dining car, and Sleeper Plus and Prestige passengers eat included. Eastbound it runs breakfast, lunch and dinner. Westbound, at least in recent seasons, the middle of the day has been served as a single long brunch, with dinner split into two or three seatings. You reserve a dinner time at the table the crew sets up in the Toronto business lounge before boarding, or during the previous service once you are rolling. Ask for the earliest or latest seating if you want the dining car quiet.
The food is better than it has any business being out of a kitchen that size. The dining car seats four to a table, each one facing a picture window, with white cloths and real china. The chef is in the galley by five in the morning. Breakfast runs like a diner, four options including a chef’s choice omelette, and lunch stays light and fast: couscous salad, a pulled turkey wrap, shrimp and scallop skewers, ginger beef on rice.
Dinner is where the kitchen shows what it can do. A velvety squash soup to start and beef tenderloin under a mushroom sauce is the combination VIA’s own writer went home talking about, and red meat is cooked from scratch on board rather than reheated. The kitchen is honest that some items arrive pre-made, lasagna among them, which is the sensible tradeoff when you are feeding a full train from a galley the size of a walk-in closet. A vegetarian main runs on every dinner menu, and the standing rotation has included a bone-in pork chop, stuffed cheddar chicken and miso tofu. Dessert tends toward chocolate cake and ice cream, and nobody has ever complained about that at hour sixty.
Wine and beer cost extra in Sleeper Plus and are included in Prestige, which is worth a line on the calculator over four nights. Dietary restrictions are handled well but not spontaneously. Sleeper Plus passengers arrange adapted meals by phone at least 72 hours out, and allergy accommodations want more notice than that, so call when you book rather than when you board.
Economy passengers do not get the dining car, and that changes the trip more than the seat does. The Skyline counter up front sells coffee, tea, beer, Canadian wine by the glass, spirits, snacks and microwaved hot meals, which is exactly what it sounds like. The move is to pack a real cooler bag before Toronto, treat the Skyline as the bar rather than the restaurant, and use the long service stops to resupply. Winnipeg gives you roughly two hours and Jasper about three when the train is on time, both long enough to walk into town for something that did not come out of a microwave. You are also allowed to bring your own bottle for your cabin, which regulars in Sleeper Plus have been doing quietly for decades.
The far end of the train is the Park car, eighteen of which were built in the mid-fifties and named for Canadian national parks. It has a bar under a dome and, at the very back, a rounded lounge with windows looking straight down the track you just covered. From late April into mid-October, Prestige passengers have it to themselves from 6 a.m. to 4 p.m. In winter the rules loosen and everyone gets a shot at it.
Let’s Discuss Sleepers
A few things regular riders know that the booking page will not tell you. Every Manor sleeper has six bedrooms lettered A through F, and bedroom F is larger than the rest, a holdover from Canadian Pacific days when it was sold as a higher grade of room. VIA charges the same for it now, but you cannot request it online. Book by phone or at a station counter and ask. The partitions between adjacent bedrooms also come out, so A and B connect, C and D connect, and E and F connect, which turns two rooms into a family suite at no premium.
Sleeper Plus and Prestige passengers check in at the VIA business lounge inside Toronto Union rather than at a gate, and the dining car crew sets up a table in that lounge to take dinner reservations before anyone boards. Take the early or late seating rather than the middle one. In summer the 7 p.m. sitting is the first to fill because Prestige passengers choose first. Every sleeping car has a hot shower with towels, soap and shampoo provided, which surprises people who booked a berth expecting to rough it. Sections have no power outlets, so if you are in an upper or lower berth, plan to charge at the tables in the Skyline car.
What Sights to Enjoy
The ride divides into three acts. Two days of the Canadian Shield out of Toronto, lake after lake after lake through rock and spruce, more beautiful than anyone warns you. Then the prairies from Winnipeg west, wheat and sky and the occasional grain elevator, plus the Fabyan Trestle over the Battle River, 59 meters up and 845 meters long, opened in 1909. Then the Rockies, which start before Jasper and do not quit until dark somewhere past Kamloops. Pyramid Falls gets an announcement and a slowdown. Mount Robson shows itself on the right heading west, though the better view is looking backward from a dome or from the rear lounge as it passes.
Timing the dome matters more than anything else you will do on board. Seats are first-come and nobody reserves them, and the one stretch that fills is the departure from Jasper into the Rockies westbound. Claim a seat before the train pulls out of that stop and you have the whole day. The crew washes the dome glass at Jasper for exactly this reason. Later, after Kamloops, the train runs the shore of Kamloops Lake into sunset and then follows the Thompson into the Fraser canyon in the dark, which is the quietest and best hour in the bullet lounge at the very back, with the track unspooling behind you and a complimentary coffee station a few steps away.
Small things give this train its character. The sleeping cars carry names rather than numbers, all of them Manors. The eighteen Park cars were named for Canadian national parks. The Skyline runs occasional talks on the landscape and wildlife and the odd wine or beer tasting, which sounds like cruise-ship filler and turns out to be how strangers at neighboring tables end up eating dinner together on the second night.
A few things to know before you commit. There is no Wi-Fi, and cell service comes and goes for hours at a stretch. The train shares track with freight and can run late by hours rather than minutes, so leave a full day of daylight between arrival and any onward flight. Checked bags go in the baggage car and you will not see them until the end, so pack a small bag for the cabin. Sections have no power outlets, though the Skyline tables do. And the train crosses four time zones, with announcements telling you when to reset your watch.
Stopovers Are an Adventure
Stopovers are allowed and they change the trip. Winnipeg gets about two hours on the scheduled stop, Jasper about three, both long enough to walk the platform and stretch. Book a separate leg and you can spend three days in Jasper National Park or a night in Winnipeg and catch the next train through. Westbound is the better direction if you only do it once. You get the Shield, then the prairies, then the mountains, in the order the country was crossed.
Four nights is a long time to spend looking out a window. That is the whole proposition. There is nothing to do but read, eat, talk to strangers from six countries and watch a continent go by at track speed, and by the second morning most people stop reaching for their phones. The Man in Seat 61 keeps the most thorough independent guide to the route, down to car layouts and 360-degree photos of the rooms, and it is worth an hour before you book.
The 1955 cars have maybe five more years before their replacements start arriving. If riding a train that Canadian Pacific put on the rails during the Eisenhower administration sounds like something you would like to have done, the window is open and it has a date on it now.
Read about an American Luxury Rail.
