4,500 km of railway tracks

Right now Im in a train a couple of hundred kilometres from Toronto waiting to move on. Apparently the train traffic is so busy that we might be here for some time.

The train has, over the past 3 1/2 days, taken me from Vancouver in West a little more than 4,500 km towards East. We have crossed 3 time zones (one a day), a couple of mountain ranges, a very big and wide prairie (which was much grassier than I'd expected), huge fields, lots of forest and lakes, but very few towns, people, civilisation. Well except for the telegraph poles. They're still there. All the way. Reminding of old days. The wires are also still there most of the way. So if anybody wants to get into the copper business, Im pretty sure you could get some cheap in Canada...

I wanted to take the train to get a feeling of the size of Canada. I did. It's big! Huge! And I've even only covered two thirds of the country when I get off in Toronto.

(we've just been told there's some problems with the brakes, which needs to be fixed before we can continue, so it might take a while.)

The train has been quite an experience in itself. We've had the cheapest of the expensive seats (half price as earlier described), which means we had two berths in the hallway. The berths were transformed to seats during the day. As most people choosing to go on this kind of trip pays to have their own cabin with private toilets, we had 6 berths to ourselves, which meant we both had living room and bedroom. Very suitable our car is named Draper Manor (Oh Don Draper - unfortunately he hasn't come a long...).

Of course, there's also a dining car (actually 2 - it's a big train) including waiters, white cloth on the tables and different menus for each meal. And an activity car with panorama windows above the roof so you'll get a 360 degrees view of the surroundings. The first day we even had a full panoramic car that made you feel like standing right in the mountains while we were passing by.

(Now we're driving again, very helpful (and necessary) with mechanics on the train).

So time to finish off with some shots from the trip.






Day 1 - Kamploops - Edmonton views from the panoramic car


Day 2 - sun rise seen from my bed


Prairie as far as you see


The last car in the train at one of our stops we where allowed to disembark to get some fresh air.


Day 3 - sunrise seen from my bed


Draper Manor - our car

Location:In the outskirts of nowhere