This Retro Train May Be the Least Stressful Way to Travel Canada

We’re somewhere east of Winnipeg when I realize I’ve lost all track of time. I’ve been swaying through the corridors back to my room, through what VIA Rail staff call the Activity Car, when Carol, a veterinarian from South Dakota, asks me if I’d like to sit down with her and Trinity, from Wisconsin, to play cards. They introduce me to the rules of a game called King in the Corner. Every once in a while, I look up from the cards to take in the scene outside: a trackside grain elevator scrolling by, a red fox trotting across a farmer’s field.

It’s not just that we’ve crossed the Continental Divide and two time zones. Part of the sense of timelessness comes from the slow sorcery of long-distance travel over land, aboard The Canadian, a train that still uses the same streamlined passenger cars that rolled across the country on its inaugural run on April 24, 1955. It’s also because, without Wi-Fi, and only fleeting cell service between big cities, the hundred or so passengers in our dozen-car train are cut off from the fire hose of news from the outside world. It’s as if everyone aboard has agreed not to spoil the atmosphere by bringing up current events.

And it turns out my timing is good because this train—at least in its present form—won’t be around for much longer. The luxuriously overbuilt passenger cars that have crossed and re-crossed Canada for decades are due to be retired.

Traveling back in time on The Canadian

The lack of Wi-Fi is a key point for passenger-car attendant Laura Watkins, who sets the tone when the train sways out of Vancouver, on the beginning of its 2,737-mile journey across Rockies, prairies, and muskeg, to Toronto. “I’m fourth-generation railroad,” she tells the two dozen passengers gathered on the upper deck of the Skyline Car, one of three glassed-in observation cars on the train. “My grandfather, Bill Watkins, used to drive this train. The Canadian runs the last complete sets of streamliners anywhere in the world. They’ve been in continual service for the last 70 years. If I have as many working parts when I’m 70, I’ll be a very happy woman.” She adds that the day VIA Rail, Canada’s national passenger rail service, introduces Wi-Fi on The Canadian will be her last.

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Because of its storied history, the train attracts rail aficionados from around the world, and one of them, a knowledgeable silver-haired man in a black beret, interjects: “The passenger cars were built in an old World War II airplane factory, in Pennsylvania, by the Budd Company. They’re all shot-welded stainless steel, which is why they’re so solid, and haven’t rusted.”

I’ve already noticed elegant details of the Silver Age of rail travel scattered through the train: porcelain sinks in the restrooms; ornate, harp-shaped mesh grills over the speakers that once piped music into the lounges; and Lucite hand-railings lit from within to guide passengers up twisting staircases to the upper-level domes. (My favorite relic: a safe-like cubby for shoes in the roomettes that open to the corridor, ready for a porter to polish overnight.)

It’s in the dining car, though, where I most feel like I’ve stepped into a mobile time machine. There are three sittings for lunch and dinner, at linen-covered tables set with china and silverware, between back-lit etched-glass partitions depicting magpies, kingfishers, and other birds of the north. Main courses, which change every night, include rack of lamb, pan-roasted cod loin, and a leek-crusted chicken served with sage, the latter devised by chef Joseph Shawana, one of Canada’s most celebrated Indigenous chefs.

My dining companions include Victor, a cyber-security expert from Uruguay, who is halfway through a ten-thousand-mile train voyage that will loop him back to Chicago, where his daughter is studying astrophysics. Farhan, who was born in Pakistan, rides till his next adventure, a nine-day trip across Russia on the Trans-Siberian. Dave is a former Canadian National Railway engineer, whose handheld scanner lets him eavesdrop on the engineers in the cab, giving him enough advance warning to position himself to photograph oncoming freight trains.

Dave becomes my favorite travel companion, bending my ear with stories about overheated brakes, avalanches, and close encounters with bears on far-flung subdivisions.

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Two trains in one

Gradually, I realize The Canadian is two trains in one: for economy passengers, it’s workaday transportation; for premium passengers, it’s an all-inclusive land cruise. On my first two nights, I sleep in berths—like the ones in the classic Marilyn Monroe film Some Like It Hot—which an attendant pulls down from the ceiling in the evening. Later, I move to a small private room, which comes with its own sink, toilet, and fold-down Murphy bed. All Sleeper Class reservations include free meals in the dining car, while Prestige Class, at the rear of the train, features large rooms with expansive windows, a dedicated attendant, and unlimited drinks. I start to think of the train as a hybrid, like a Greyhound bus lashed to a luxury ocean liner.

In the first two passenger cars, reserved for Economy Class, I chat with people traveling by train on shorter hops. An irrepressible Ojibwe grandmother on her way to Winnipeg to play golf at an indoor driving range tells me about her upcoming whale-watching trip to Vancouver Island. In the Economy Dome car, Cleason Bauman explains that he and his wife Esther have left their 18-year-old son in charge of his seven younger brothers and sisters on the family sheep farm in Austin, Manitoba. The congregation of Old Order Mennonites they belong to, Cleason explains, forbids driving and traveling in airplanes. He says he felt obliged to make the voyage to Foleyet, Ontario, where his younger brother had just had his first child. “I want to check to see if he’s telling the truth,” he tells me, with a chuckle.

Crossing the Canadian Shield, past outcroppings of some of the oldest and hardest rocks on the planet, the sense of timelessness only deepens. In the Rockies, we see eagles soaring across the sky and bighorn sheep bounding up sheer rock faces. On the prairies, moose, coyotes, and herds of domesticated bison roam. North of Lake Superior, though, we go for dozens of miles seeing no other sign of life except the occasional cabin, a thread of smoke rising from its squat chimney.

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Slow rolling and deep talk

As we roll along, a funny thing happens: casual conversations become deeper and more meaningful. Staring out over a tree-lined lake, a former freight conductor from Georgia reveals that this is a trip he’d hoped to make with his wife, who succumbed to cancer four years ago. In the Skyline Dome, beneath a full moon, the daughter of an Anglican minister from Almonte, Ontario, tells me how she’s found solace for her own losses in the meditation techniques of an Irish Benedictine monk. Hypnotized by the vastness of the landscape and undistracted by screens, people let their guard down and reveal something of themselves. I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve discussed life so freely with so many strangers. In an unexpected way, it is deeply calming.

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All good things come to an end, however, and the Budd cars are approaching the end of their working life. VIA Rail has announced a $107-million program to refurbish some of the vintage sleeper cars over the next five years. But the roll-out of an all-new long-distance fleet, including glass-domed observation cars, is set to begin in 2030. The Canadian will continue to follow the same route. But the old stainless-steel cars that give the train its timeless appeal will gradually be removed from service.

As we pull into Toronto’s Union Station, an hour ahead of schedule, I do a quick calculation. It’s taken us three days and 19 hours to cross five provinces, at an average speed of just under 30 miles an hour. Flying the same distance would take a little over four hours, which means one hour’s travel by jet is the equivalent of a full day on the train.

I wasn’t in a hurry—and that’s the whole point. I can barely remember what happened on my last flight, where I sat wedged next to other passengers, all of us staring at screens. But I’ll never forget my journey on The Canadian—nor Dave, Victor, Laura, and the other wayfarers I had the time to get to know.

Their stories, like the memory of my journey on this most storied of trains, will stay with me for the rest of my life.

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How to do it

Tickets on The Canadian from Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station to Toronto’s Union Station, a four-day trip, cost from about $369 USD in Economy Class, and about $635 for an upper berth, or $1,195 for a cabin for one, in Sleeper Plus Class.