29-31 August 2025 – You’ve had the tease, and my friend Larry correctly guessed: I was about to start an epic VIA Rail adventure. Another friend Blane plaintively asked, “Why not farther east?” and the answer is: I would’ve if I could’ve.

• Plan A (back in the dreaming stage, in January): coast to coast! Vcr-Tor; visit friends; then back on VIA for Tor-Montreal and on again Montreal-Halifax.

• Plan B (after time with a patient VIA rep in Pacific Central Station, still January): coast to coast to coast!!! Hop off in Winnipeg for the side-jaunt Wpg-Churchill-return, which would put me on the shores of Hudson Bay; then carry on, as in Plan A.

• Plan C (after searching train availability with that patient rep across three months): the reality plan. Not possible to book sleeper-cabin on all legs of any one trip. Time to choose — Arctic or Atlantic? Arctic wins.

These first days get me to Winnipeg: 2 days + 5 hours of travel, over 2,485 km.

Just look at it. This trip, as my friends & family already know, is not about visiting cities. It is about seeing again friends farther east, and — given the mode of transport — it is hugely about once again travelling through great chunks of this astounding land. The literal land. By train, which has so shaped this country, and which has featured in many of my own earlier travels in this country, various segments at various times.

I am hungry to see it again, to cherish my own memories, and honour the land. And to be reminded of its complexity, its variety — so easily forgotten or not known, as we live each in our own local world.

But! All of this belongs to all of us. Is part of all of us.

29 August – we pull out at 3 pm Pacific time; I’ll be asleep before we arrive in Kamloops, late at night.

Last bustle on the Pac Central platform…

a train’s eye view of the bridge across the Fraser River at New Westminster…

and then, as that first map shows you, we follow the Fraser north-east.

Into the mountains where, past Yale and close to Spuzzum, I notice not just the craggy heights, but the power lines that top them.

I think about that, too — the trinity of river/railroad/power lines, our historic and present pathways through the country, the ways we connect our small settlements of people across such vast sweeps of land.

Farther along again, fading light, well into the Fraser Canyon and a deceptively calm-looking stretch of the river far below.

Deceptive, because we are just short of Hell’s Gate, where an abrupt narrowing of the river creates churning white water.

And then… and then it’s dark, and I chat a bit with others…

and then I’m asleep. Somewhere in there, passengers come and go in Kamloops, and the train carries on.

30 August – I’m up by 7 am, in the dome car by 7:30. Mountains tower above us and all around.

We clatter along, on through Jasper National Park, the train lines clinging to the cliffs, power lines ditto, with tunnels where necessary.

None of this stunning feat of engineering deletes (or even dilutes) the human cost involved — lives lost not only through the honest limitations of 19th-c safety measures, but also through sheer disdain for some of the people living those lives. (Chinese workers, for e.g., were primarily the explosive crews.) We must acknowledge all that. We can also acknowledge the achievement as well. Life is both/and, not either/or. (In other words, cancel nothing, Acknowledge it all.)

This is a long train — still the full 21 cars of high season.

Two engines, baggage car, crew car, some other utility car whose title I forget, and car after car of all of us passengers: mostly older, but not all; predominantly Canadian and (despite everything) American, but not all, and with a major presence of Aussies; train nerds among us; cruise-goers ditto, ticking their lists of Been There, Done That; and a whole range of people with other motives, from family reunions to curiosity to hikers giving their legs a break to Europeans with some Canadian connection offering themselves a nostalgic return.

We pull into Jasper…

and how telling it is that I’m showing you the rail yard, not a picture-postcard view of the town! (Maybe I’m becoming a train nerd myself…)

With 45 minutes free time in town, we scatter. I get away from the tourist-trap main streets as quickly as I can, walk a loop in-behind, stop to admire a cougar (or something) never seen in the wild…

and climb back on board.

And then, and then, after a while, we’re in Alberta. The land changes, and the uses of the land we can see from our train track also change.

Cattle!

And wheat! And nodding donkeys!

That is, the pump jacks that bring crude oil to the surface, whose rhythmic up-and-down inspired the nickname. You see them tucked into all kinds of locations. (I remember, when new to the west, being stunned to see some within the grounds of the Calgary airport — well away from runways, you understand.)

Sunset from the dome car, nearing Stony Plain…

and deep night by the time we pull into Edmonton.

Which is all I know about 30 August.

31 August – When I awake, we’re just leaving Saskatoon. (On to that second map, ‘way up above.)

Again, the changing land.

And, oh, the big sky.

Alberta carries on about being big-sky country but, old Alberta girl that I am, I have to confess that for me that sky is at its most glorious across the prairies. (The prairie landscape, period, is glorious. I had forgotten its beauty.)

Right. Back to the sky.

Straight up through the dome…

over harvested fields, near Kelliher…

over a bison ranch, near St-Denis…

over the Young (near Watrous) grain elevator (possibly superseded by now, but its architecture iconic and worth our attention)…

even over a potash mine (this one near Yarbo).

Herewith a nerdy aside about potash. Canada is the world’s largest producer and exporter of potash (some 33% of total world production), and all 11 of our active mines are in Saskatchewan. Yes, there is a lot more to this province than wheat.

And that’s all I can show you for 31 August.

I feel mildly, but only mildly, apologetic. I also spend time talking to people, and eating (very well), and just looking, endlessly looking, out across the land. In fact, maybe I should own up to reverse pride in the fact that, for long stretches of time, I put down the damn camera and just fall into the land.

There is one more fact of note: somewhat after 9 pm Central Time, we pull into Winnipeg, and I get off the train.

For a changing-gears day and a half in Winnipeg. Before the next leg of the train trip.