All posts tagged train travel

Land Cruise: 7-9 September

7 September – Continuing my new, but very happy, Winnipeg tradition, I go walkabouts on departure morning. Once again, art comes my way as a result.

I cross the Red River to neighbouring St-Boniface and, just as I’m completing a loop through the neighbourhood, I find myself pulled into a parkette.

By this.

It is Joe Fafard‘s 2011 sculpture, Entre chien et loup — a tribute to the French saying, to this francophone quartier, and to the mystery and energy of transition zones.

By 10:30 pm I’m in the train station, ready to board, eager for our 11:30 departure and all the new sights that will come our way.

Except we don’t promptly board, and we don’t leave at 11:30 pm. Instead, we board at 3:30 am.

By then we are the walking dead. (Including the staff change coming on board with us — just as tired as we are but, unlike us, required to be up and active and even happy-faced just a few hours later.)

I don’t know when we finally leave Winnipeg. I’m asleep.

8 September – When I awake, we are somewhere just over the Ontario border. It’s about 7:30 am, and Groggy Self doesn’t understand why she is awake.

But it’s very pretty, isn’t it? And still very northern-looking.

I could show you lots more photos of boreal forest and lakes. But I won’t! By now you know what they look like. So, instead, imagine you’re with me as I enjoy those stunning views, all day long.

And sunset, near Hornpayne.

9 September – We’re just leaving Washago as I slide up my blind around 7 am, passing a CN work station and a cluster of workers. I’m happy to offer them this tribute: maintaining, scheduling, running trains is hard work. Thank you.

A rusty-but-sturdy little bridge, as we pass Sudbury…

first flashes of fall colour among the trees, here near MacTier…

and also near MacTier, one example of the rocky islands that stud glacial lakes throughout the region. Complete with cottages. (You can see a white one peeking out on the left-hand side of the middle island.)

We’re on the Shield! The glorious, hard-rock Canadian Shield — more than 1 billion years old, and covering a good 50% of Canada’s land mass. Oh, I love this rock. This particular example near Torrance.

We’re now well into the transition from boreal forest to more southern, more deciduous, forest mixtures. Also in transition to gentler, but still water-rich, vistas — creeks, rivulets, rivers, marshy or rock-bordered, and flanked by forest. This particular example, near Severn Bridge.

Solar panels near Washago (northern tip of Lake Couchiching)…

and farmland. We’re back to farmland. This barn, near Brechin (east of Lake Simcoe).

I’ve loved this segment of the trip, dropping us down through Muskoka, one of Ontario’s “cottage country” regions and one where I have many happy memories.

We continue south, and as we enter Toronto, I’m into another rich cache of happy memories.

The tracks here run alongside the east branch of the Don River (just south of Eglinton Avenue East). I clap my hands like a child, in delight. I’ve walked these trails, walked that foot-bridge, stepped across these train tracks. Ohhhh, just look.

The scenery goes on being familiar, and then, as we round into Union Station, I hit old + new.

New construction, new towers — but back there, its silhouette slivered in between the two left-hand buildings, back there is the CN Tower. No longer new, but still iconic: it opened in 1976 and, at 553 metres, reigned as the world’s tallest free-standing structure until 2007.

It’s still handsome. And it still says Toronto.

Here I am.

In Toronto. Land cruise ended, magic beyond belief.

Thank you, all of you, who have crossed the country with me. I’ve enjoyed your company.

Epilogue – I want you to know: by the time we reach Toronto, we have made up all that late-time in Winnipeg. These few passenger trains have so little control over their running time! They share over-burdened train tracks with a great many freight trains — all of which claim priority. When push has to come to shove, as it often does, it’s the passenger train that sits on the siding. This explains why passenger train departure times are meant to be honoured, but arrival times are fiction. “Fiction” in the sense they are not the straight running time; they always have padding built in. Siding-waits are as much part of the trip as every station along the way.

10 Comments
by icelandpenny on 9 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Architecture, City, Nature, photography, Toronto, Travel
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Posted by icelandpenny on 9 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/09/land-cruise-7-9-september/

Land Cruise: 5-6 September

5 September – Now I’m doubling back across the same terrain, this time south, Churchill to Winnipeg. It will surprise none of you that even though we’re travelling the same tracks, passing/stopping in the same places, the trip is entirely different. There’s the same train culture around me, but with different people. Perhaps because I’m slightly less obsessed with the landscape this time, I’m more aware of the people — who, because we’re still between tourist seasons, are again individuals rather than job-lot packages on tour. Such a range!

  • the trio who trained as nurses in Winnipeg long ago and as a result have been friends, and attending reunions and sharing other adventures, for more than 65 years
  • the young Parks Canada IT/AI specialist, who works summers based in Churchill and winters back in Winnipeg
  • the Australian couple (she originally from Ireland) who are this side of the world to attend a wedding in the Caribbean but decided, having come this far, to explore Canada while they’re at it
  • the deep-south American who “hates heat” and therefore does advance reconnaissance each year for the following summer’s travels in Canada with his wife (so far, Newfoundland is his hands-down favourite)
  • and… Origami Man. Oh, I’ll save him ’til later.

I think the other reason the reverse trip is different is precisely because it is in reverse. You approach from a different angle, you come at a different time and probably in different weather, and you yourself, even if only slightly, are already a different person. So, you notice differently.

For example, I notice the young man dis-embarking in Thompson, sporting the cap his wife found for him on the internet…

and the bilingual aisle signs in a Thompson grocery store.

Soon after Thompson, ’round about Mystery Lake, I come through the dining car and see Origami Man teaching the basics to two VIA staff with a rare moment free of obligations.

It’s another day before I learn he and his wife (she knits, while he folds) are from Detroit, and have their own deep Canadian memories, including ferry travel some 17 years ago down the north shore of the St. Lawrence River east of Quebec City.

We roll into The Pas at 10:30 pm. This time, I’m awake. I raise my blind a smidge…

take in the sliver of train station, and decide our steward is right. The location means there’s nowhere interesting to walk, especially this time of night. I pull down my blind once again.

6 September – I meet Calgary Alex going into the dining car, also with breakfast on his mind. He tells me he saw a deer, when he looked out his window shortly after dawn. I saw no deer — but now, in the dining car, we both see cranes.

Origami Man strikes again!

Talking with him later, I learn that, maybe predictably, his career was in the spatially precise world of engineering, and that this skill has become his passe-partout worldwide. “I start folding paper wherever I am. People gather. I spent a whole afternoon with kids in Mongolia.”

I’m startled when, at about 7:30 am, our cabin attendant announces we’ll soon roll into Kenora for a 10-minute stop. I smack the side of my head. Kenora? We’re in Ontario? She smiles, sorts me out: “Cee-ay-nora. Canora. Not Kay-ee.”

At the station, the display caboose and its signage complete the story.

No, a comment from fellow passenger Sue completes the story.

She is from the other one, from Kenora, and she explains that its name is also an acronym. In their case, for local communities & history: KE – Keewatin; NO – Norman; RA – Rat Portage. I tell her I want to visit Rat Portage; she says it’s now Kenora. Kenora was called Rat Portage until Maple Leaf Milling Company said they wouldn’t build a mill there if it meant putting the word “rat” on their flour.

Back to Canora-with-a-C. The town has an historic main street…

and a this-minute communications tower.

Approaching Dauphin, early afternoon, I don’t have to gawp at the 1912 train station — I’ve done that already. I’m free to notice brightly-graffiti’d box cars…

and the RR-themed parkette, with its plaque-bearing benches.

The arrival of the first train in 1896, says the plaque, “sparked the binding of over 550 communities across Canada, and forever changed the landscape of immigration, settlement, agriculture and commerce.”

{While all this 2025 train travel is going on, Origami Man is teaching Parks Canada AI Man some serious skills. The young man bends his head to the task. There is much laughter and an accumulation of geometric, and beyond-geometry, shapes.}

And then, pouf!, we’re in Winnipeg.

By 5:30 pm, I’m physically out on the street….

but mentally/emotionally…

I’m still back there with the birch and the black spruce.


7 Comments
by icelandpenny on 7 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Nature, photography, street art, Travel
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Posted by icelandpenny on 7 September 2025

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Land Cruise: 2-3 September

2 September – The train doesn’t depart until 12:05 pm, so I have time for a morning walk on Winnipeg’s “Cool Streets”…

before obediently turning up at Union Station by 11 am.

I just see people. I don’t yet know, for example, that the Calgary couple in the cluster on the left are delighted to see some distant relatives will also be on our train, albeit only part way. Or that the young people over there on the right belong to two separate post-grad teams, one from France and one Québécois (Université Laval), travelling north to research climate change on ice structure and on permafrost, respectively. (Even later, I learn the French project was originally planned for Siberia, but world politics got in the way, and they had to find themselves a new home.)

Into my cabin, and a quick study of our trip map.

I am excited. Once, so many decades ago, I returned to Winnipeg from Churchill by train, but I’ve lost almost all memory of the trip. Here I am, about to do it again. Both ways! We’ve been told there’ll be quite frequent stops, in many very small communities as well as the larger ones. This train run is still an important communications link — and, indeed, beyond Thompson, the only land route to Churchill.

Farms, harvested fields…

as we roll past Portage la Prairie, the land still looks a lot like Saskatchewan. Still very southern.

How could I have forgotten the imposing train station in Dauphin?

A CN station, built in 1912, when train travel was a very big deal indeed.

The next stop will be The Pas, but I’m long asleep by then. I don’t even notice our brief swing across the Saskatchewan border and back again.

3 September – Sunrise somewhere near Wekusko, and it’s a different world.

Becoming boreal, it really is. I think some of those lacy silhouettes are tamarack, also some white spruce? I’m not an expert, don’t quote me, but at least I can tell we’re moving into a different world.

Colder, too. Hoar frost rims every leaf, needle and blade…

and here I can name a few things with reasonable certainty. That tall skinny guy in the back row is black spruce, there’s at least one white birch (later I see whole groves of them) and the deciduous trees there on the right look like trembling aspen — all these species part of the boreal mixture.

As the sun rises, mist also rises…

from ponds, lakes and this pretty creek.

Usually this run has a dome car, but what should have been our dome car is in the repair shop, so the dining car is our everything car. It becomes our hangout, for much more than food.

Families wave to cars at the road crossings…

the students bend over the data on their laptops, prepping for their projects…

and I have my own little spread of resources, quite frivolous by comparison.

Notepad, map, coffee, grapes (I swapped one of my Gemini apples for some of the attendant’s grapes), and — and how appropriate is this? — Agatha Christie’s 1930s The Mystery of the Blue Train. (My copy is in French — snapped up from the Take/Donate bin on my previous train.)

We make brief stops in small communities. Fresh air and a look at daily life for us; vital on- and off-loading for them. Wabowden, for example…

and Thicket Portage, where the Quebec students are chatting next to that ubiquitous vehicle of the north, the fat-wheeled buggy.

Back on board, and in passing I meet Conductor Ted Thompson.

(So there, Paddington Bear! We have Ted.)

I see my first beaver lodge of the trip…

that knob at 11 o’clock in the pond, but I almost miss it, so many leaves cover the distinctive twiggy dome.

I watch the train curve with the tracks. Completely different from those craggy twists in the Alberta mountains! Here, a setting of scrub, aspen, birch and coniferous I don’t dare to try to identify.

There’s a rock cut that makes me think of driving though Ontario’s Muskoka region…

and piles of materials…

presumably for some project along this river.

A set-piece scene:

wildflowers, train tracks, aspen, birch and conifers.

Just before 3 pm, we do the back-and-forthing required to shift us from the main track to the spur line into Thompson. Thompson: created by INCO, a planned city and a mining town. While now more diversified, you still see that mining architecture from anywhere in town.

The part we got to walk is very big-box. Anybody who knows the outskirts of Barrie ON will know what I mean. Still, everyone I spoke with was friendly and helpful, and I did get to see my first — of what surely will be many — polar bear mural.

(Though I must add, I prefer the battered float plane mural on the left.)

Out of Thompson, back on the main line, and on to Pikwitonei. Population less than 100, says our travel guide, but don’t curl your lip. It also has its very own Greeter Dog.

Greeter Dog meets every train, and while I scratch under his ears and he leans happily on my leg, a Cree gentleman teaches me how to pronounce the town name. It is “Pick-whi-tonNAY.” with the emphasis very firmly on the last syllable. (Like NewfoundLAND. Understand?)

Round about 8:20 or so, somewhere north of Pikwitonei but still south of Ilford, I watch the moon rise…

and then I fall asleep.

Tomorrow: Churchill. Tomorrow: Hudson Bay.

My boots expect me to keep my promise.

6 Comments
by icelandpenny on 6 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Nature, photography, street art, Travel
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Posted by icelandpenny on 6 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/06/land-cruise-2-3-september/

Land Cruise: 29-31 August

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.

4 Comments
by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in Nature, photography, Travel
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Posted by icelandpenny on 1 September 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/09/01/land-cruise-29-31-august/

Land Cruise

29 August 2025 – Here’s the tease:

Oh yes, all of that. In stages, with add-ons.

You’ll see!

(But not immediately.)

2 Comments
by icelandpenny on 29 August 2025  •  Permalink
Posted in photography, Toronto, Travel, Vancouver
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Posted by icelandpenny on 29 August 2025

https://icelandpenny.com/2025/08/29/land-cruise/

  • WALKING… & SEEING

    "Traveller, there is no path. Paths are made by walking" -- Antonio Machado (1875-1939)

    "The voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes" -- Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

    "A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" -- Rebecca Solnit, "Wanderlust: A History of Walking"

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