Exclusive:
Reporter David Broome journeyed on a scenic rail experience through western Canada where he saw breathtaking landscapes, vibrant wildlife, and met fellow amazing passengers
An incredible train journey, eye-bulging scenery and an eclectic cabal of passengers from across the globe – all that was missing was a murder on board and a moustachioed detective for me to have been living out a personal fantasy.
Even without these elements, however, my bucket-list rail adventure across western Canada aboard the Rocky Mountaineer scenic train was nothing short of spectacular. My favourite mystery/thriller books and films are those set on trains – I’m talking The Lady Vanishes, Murder on the Orient Express, Train to Busan – and the romantic idea of long-distance rail travel, done in style, has always held a special fascination for me.
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My only previous visit to Canada had been as a culturally deaf teenager 20 years ago, and even that involved only one night each (of too much beer and not enough sleep) in Toronto and Montreal. I had never been to the west coast of North America before, never clapped eyes on the Pacific Ocean, never walked in the footsteps of Ryan Reynolds – a proud Vancouverite and Wrexham Football Club’s Hollywood A-lister co-owner.
The train journey – a two-day, 20-hour trip from Vancouver to Jasper, via Kamloops – was the highlight of the trip, but before that, we had a day to explore the place they call – and not without reason – Rain City.
After availing myself of the rooftop pool at the Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, our home in Vancouver, it was an early start for our first train day, but any lingering cobwebs were quickly blown away with the help of the Rocky Mountaineer’s in-house bagpiper, who blasted out as tuneful a song as is possible on that particular instrument before an officer blew a traditional wooden whistle and led a round of “all aboard”.
The train was a magnificent beast, made up of domed carriages, the roofs of which are windowed, so that you do not miss an inch of scenery as you rattle through the Canadian landscape. It is split into single-decker “SilverLeaf” carriages and “GoldLeaf” double-deckers, and we were in the latter, meaning we also had our very own dining car below us, so we could easily make our way down for breakfast and lunch throughout the day.
From our spacious, all-mod-cons seats, we were treated to two days of simply breathtaking scenery, with two journeys of around 10 hours each, separated by a stopover in the mountain town of Kamloops. What was crazy for me, coming from an island one can traverse in half a dozen hours, was that in 20 hours of train travel, it was only as we approached our final destination of Jasper, Alberta, that we even left British Columbia.
News just in: Canada is really big.
Our carriage’s dedicated staff, Mauro and Jacques (as well as waiting on they indulged our every whim, including cocktails at 10.30am, and just one more glass of the Steamworks Pale Ale for which Vancouver should be famous) were experts in all that passed by and above our windows.
Highlights included hours rolling alongside the Fraser and Thompson rivers, whose bountiful deltas have supported the peoples of the area for thousands of years; and Hell’s Gate, a rather daunting name for a rather beautiful stretch of the former waterway. Described by Simon Fraser (for whom the river is named) as “a place where no human should venture”, it is now a popular tourist spot, but does have a dark history, with several workers being cast into the torrent below as dynamite was used to blast away rocks in order to build the railroad on which we now travelled.
The small village of Lytton, further east, also provided a dramatic photo opportunity, as the Fraser and Thompson rivers converge and the huge difference between the muddy former and clear latter was startlingly evident. Along the way, our merry band of international travellers were on the lookout for wildlife.
Day one brought us sightings of bald eagles, buzzards, huge pink salmon, white-tailed deer and, rather less excitingly, cattle and sheep, as we held out hope for a glimpse of a bear (black or grizzly), and maybe even a couple of sasquatch on day two. After wobbling our train legs (like sea legs, a very real but hardly debilitating phenomenon) back on board, the second leg of our journey took us north from Kamloops into the Canadian Rockies.
The wildlife-spotting continued, and our group gradually became like one of those teams you see at the end of a David Attenborough documentary, frantically searching for the elusive animals we had been promised. As we pulled into Jasper – now starting the road to recovery after severe wildfires hit the region, causing major damage in July – we had resigned ourselves to having glimpsed nothing wilder than a couple of exuberant sheep, when suddenly there was a cry of “bear!” from Jacques, and we all whirled around to see where he was pointing.
Sure enough, a short distance from the train tracks, was a brown bear, quizzically staring back at us, probably wondering what all the fuss was about.
That sighting proved to be the uncorking of the bottle. From the window of the bus which took us to the incredibly luxurious Fairmont Jasper Park Lodge (now reopened after the fires), we saw two black bears – a mother and a cub, while on the next day’s wildlife tour around Jasper, we saw three more bears of varying shades, plus a bald eagle and several elk.
The experience would have been incredible even without these last-gasp wildlife sightings, but being able to come home to my kids with tales of coming face to face (behind the protective glass of a train or bus window, admittedly) with wild animals we just do not get in this country, turned a great trip into a truly incredible one.
Book the holiday
- British Airways flies from Heathrow to Vancouver from £525 return in April. ba.com
- Flair Airlines flies from Calgary to Vancouver £46 one way. flyflair.com
- Rocky Mountaineer’s 2025 two-day Through The Clouds, from Vancouver via Kamloops to Jasper starts at £1,389pp in SilverLeaf Service, £1,897pp in GoldLeaf Service. Departures between April 15-October 10, with all meals on the train, one night’s hotel stay in Kamloops. rockymountaineer.com
- More info at destinationvancouver.com, hellobc.com, tourismkamloops.com, jasper.travel, travelalberta.com