Top of the train

Wednesday 21/Thursday 22 May 2025

I've arrived in Vancouver at the tiny and a little bit shabby Air BnB in a tower block that I'm sharing with Toni and Lucy for the long weekend after two days on the Rocky Mountaineer train from Banff, where I've been waited on pretty much hand and foot and organised with great efficiency (paid through the nose for it, mind you!). They're both in bed early following early starts and time zone differences, whereas wobbly train legs notwithstanding, I am now accustomed to being several hours behind and so am catching up on the blog.

The Rocky Mountaineer train company appeares to employ a cast of thousands - the trains (there are several routes) are made up of double-decker "gold leaf" carriages with a top deck containing reclining wide leather seats beneath a glass-domed roof, with a dining car beneath and a vestibule/viewing deck large enough to hold about 12 people. The hoi-polloi, or those who have only bought the "silver leaf" package, are in ordinary single deck coaches where I assume they were served airline-style at their seats - not sure what size of viewing deck they had but was reliably informed it only held a couple of people at a time. Was it worth the extra £300 for the gold package? Hell yes. I've travelled first class on European trains in the past but none were quite so special as this, with a "cabin crew" of young women who couldn't do enough for us. "Can I get you anything to drink?" "Would you like a snack?" "Eggs scrambled? No problem". 

 

Photos show the dining car and one of the top-notch loos, and my Aperol spritz pre-lunch (I held out as the bar was open from 0930 - the glass on the right is apple juice along with addictive chocolate and peanut snack mix...)

Amazing food (best smoked salmon ever), quality wine, proper cutlery, crockery and glassware, and an incredible landscape which was at times so breathtaking I wanted to weep at its beauty (nearly lost it at Nicomen Creek and falls). Sadly I missed the occasional shouts of nearby wildlife "Bear to the left!" or "Moose to the right" as it always seemed to be on the other side of the carriage, but I did see a number of eagles and an osprey in the semi-arid valley of the Thompson river on day 2, where their nests are often gently moved by the telecoms companies to dummy utility poles to avoid electrocution when they settle on the real ones. At the highest point of the journey on day one, I rushed out to the vestibule with my camera to take pics of the sheer drop and rapids below, only for the battery to die on me and to curse the fact that my phone was in my handbag at my seat upstairs.

Much of the early part of the route (a total of about 600 miles, split in two by an overnight stop in the railway town of Kamloops which nestles in a valley surrounded by mountains and at the end of a plateau created by an enormous lake) is quite a feat of engineering, including the spiral tunnels carved beneath Mount Cathedral turning 220 degrees so that what's right when you enter is left when you emerge. we travelled alongside 7 rivers on the first day - Bow, Kicking Horse, Columbia, Beaver, Illecillewaet, Eagle and the South Thompson and a number of lakes. On day two, we were alongside the North Thompson which is clear and then it meets the Fraser which is muddy and the two run alongside each other for some distance with the obvious contrast - weird! 

An especially spectacular viewpoint on day two was at the Cisco crossing, where one railway bridge passes over another with the Fraser river beneath. Because of an early lack of co-operation, the Canadian Pacific and National railways built west and eastbound tracks on separate sides of the Fraser.

The Rockies are visible from space, running like "a giant scar" for 250km. Once they were one range with the Columbian mountains to the east, but the shifting of tectonic plates separated the two ranges. I didn't see any beavers (the raucous septuagenarian, rather annoying Australians in my coach couldn't resist lots of dirty jokes at the word beaver, which our lovely cabin crew pretended not to understand), but - fun fact - their teeth never stop growing (hence they need to gnaw everything), they live for 10 - 15 years, and they can hold their breath for up to 15 minutes under water. That's beavers of course, not the septuagnearian Aussies.

Incidentally, I felt quite the youngster on the trip with most people blowing their children's inheritance and heading for Alaskan cruises after Vancouver. But the Australians were in the elderly majority, and it all got a bit much when they actually started singing "Waltzing Matilda" as the trip drew to a close. I turned up my headphones at that point and swore FFS quietly. Other English and Scottish people in the coach also maintained a stiff upper lip. When dining at breakfast and lunch with my fellow travellers, they were friendly enough, but as on many occasions it seems a single woman travelling alone is a bit of an oddity ("Yes, just me for lunch") and I was given a pretty wide berth by all the heterosexual couples in my coach. The only other single person was a woman from Saudi - sadly her English wasn't great (I did try without much success to engage with her at breakfast), and far too much facial surgery and botox had given her a somewhat alarming appearance, so like me she was a bit isolated - but hey I had a double seat to myself!

For much of day one, our speed was quite slow - maybe around 40mph - for much of the route as it wound around acute angles and the vast lakes and foothills. Much of it was also single track, so occasionally we had to wait in sidings for interminable (200 trucks' worth) freight trains to pass through. A few interesting settlements along the way, and some sad stories like the town of Lytton in Fraser Canyon, destroyed in 15 minutes by wildfire some years ago, or the ghost town of Walhachin which was created in 1907 on the basis of false advertising and was then decimated by young men being called to fight in WW1 who never returned, so that only about 30 people live there today.

 Day two was generally faster as there were longer straight stretches of track in a quite different landscape in the semi-arid river valleys and through lots of woodland towards the end, with lakeside dwellings, farmland, small holdings and cows - and lots of stockyards which were not quite so breathtaking. The low point of the trip was the amount of time it took for the final leg where we seemed to spend forever in sidings in less pretty surroundings, taking over an hour to get to the transfer coaches from the outskirts of the city. Oh and the aforementioned train legs, which I am suffering from again tonight, hoping sleep will again cure. But what a trip - a budget buster but unforgettable, and I'm only sorry that my cheapie camera and poor technique doesn't accurately represent the true majesty of the landscapes.