Train Trip
All aboard! I last wrote from just before getting on the train in Edmonton for a two-day ride back to Toronto. Although I’ve been back for a while, I’ve just now had a chance to post some pictures from the journey, which are available in this gallery. The trip was very enjoyable. It was a very different way of travelling. Normally on a trip, your travelling to get somewhere, and the transportation is just in the way: no one flies commercial airlines for fun, you fly them to get somewhere. But this was different: the train ride was the journey.
Lounge at the end of the dome car For our journey, we were in the last car of the train, a dome car with a lounge, observation lounge, and a few bedrooms. From Edmonton, it’s not long until you’re in the middle of Alberta at night, with darkness all around. I enjoyed sitting in the dome car at night with complete darkness. We had a nice dinner and then tried to fall asleep while the train bustled along. I slept the whole night, but my mom found it a bit distracting.
A lonely flagstop: Malachi, Ontario The second day of the trip was a cloudy, rainy day. We slept through all of Saskatchewan and awoke in Manitoba (perhaps a good way to see Saskatchewan?) but the scenery was still like the farmland of southeastern Alberta. We stopped briefly in Winnipeg and continued on into northern Ontario.
A stand of birch trees in northern Ontario Northern Ontario is big. I don’t think I’d realized quite so big until I noticed that we went to sleep one night, woke up the next morning, and were still in northern Ontario. But I loved the Canadian Shield landscape and the changing leaves. The third day was sunny and clear, so it made for some great picture taking.
Marsh in the Canadian Shield Northern Ontario is filled with birch, pine, and tamarck trees, and countless little lakes that flirt behind the trees while passing by on the train. The route the train takes is very isolated, quite a distance from the Trans-Canada highway for most of the way through northern Ontario, so towns were few, far between, and miniscule. 
Autumn colours in northern Ontario We stopped for about 30 minutes in Capreol, our last service station and a chance to walk around, then continued through Sudbury (a bleak landscape) and made our way down through cottage country to Toronto. I hope I’ll get to do the trip again sometime, all the way through the Rockies and through British Columbia to Vancouver, though it will probably be a while until I have the time and money or points to do it properly. Sadly, rail is a fading way of travel, but it’s what built Canada and an amazing journey across the country; I hope it will be with us for many years.
