The Journey to Edmonton

Via Rail gives itself a pretty big wrap on the comfort of their carriages on the Canadian, the train that we will be spending quite some time on on and off over the coming weeks. The seats themselves (we are travelling economy) offer a large amount of space and the carriages are clean but refurbishment would be timely. Although the seats have an extender part at the front it is difficult to get comfortable to sleep and as this is an overnight journey a comfortable sleep would have been appreciated. Definitely time to replace the ageing seats with a more comfortable option.
So we spent the first 9 to 10 hours of the journey in darkness. The first town of note in daylight was Kamploops and from there we followed a meandering river through a relatively narrow valley passing through farmland and forests.
It's a slow journey as the freight trains have priority and have right of way when it is single track. The freight trains are many and massive, some with three engines and can be up to 1600 metres long. It takes quite a lot of time for these long ones to pass us by. We were late arriving in Jasper but made up for a bit of the time by having a quickish stop there but we are currently stopped again so hopefully we will not be too late getting to Edmonton as it will be almost mid-night by the time we get to our hotel without being late.Read more