Canada's most beautiful train ride? It's not the Rocky Mountaineer

Times

29-05-2025

It was a good morning to leave Halifax, Nova Scotia. We'd enjoyed a spring Saturday exploring the harbour-front promenade of Canada's main Atlantic port. Our sons, 13-year-old Desmond and nine-year-old Victor, had indulged in the scones at the farmers' market, followed by an energetic parkour session in a playground that included a yellow submarine, massive anchors and a slide shaped like a whale's tongue. At the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic we'd wandered among lighthouse lenses and ocean-liner models, taking in exhibits about the rescue of Titanic survivors and the explosion of the munitions ship that levelled the city's North End at the end of the First World War.
But the previous day's sunshine, which allowed sweeping views of grey-hulled naval vessels and gargantuan ships stacked with multicoloured containers, had yielded to an all-encompassing fog. Fortunately, we had an escape plan: we'd booked rooms on the oldest named train in North America, which has linked Montreal to Halifax via the tracks of the historic Intercolonial Railway since 1904. My wife, Erin, and I had ridden the Ocean from Montreal in the early days of our courtship and the laughter we'd shared on the upper level of the glass-domed Park car on that trip had helped to cement our bond. This time we'd be riding in the opposite direction — across three provinces, two time zones and 840 miles — with our two energetic boys, deprived of their electronic devices for the duration of the trip, along for the ride.
Getting to the platform was easy: our hotel, the Nova Scotian, built in 1930 to accommodate Canadian National passengers, was connected to the train station by a covered passageway, which prevented a soaking in the driving rain outside. Half an hour before our scheduled 11.30am departure we wheeled our bags from the lobby, a concoction of marble, copper-leaf and brass railings, to the station's beaux arts atrium. A trio of employees of Via Rail, Canada's national passenger rail operator, were waiting at a podium to scan our tickets, and showed Desmond and Victor how to attach the baby-blue wristbands that indicated we had reserved spots in 'sleeper class'. Passengers with larger suitcases could have them checked into the baggage car for recovery in Montreal but we'd kept it light and packed everything in overnight bags.
Desmond and Victor were delighted with their compact room, which included a toilet, a shower, a fold-down bunk reached by a narrow ladder and hidden compartments for stowing the cans of ginger ale they'd pilfered from the Via Rail lounge in Halifax. While they were settling in, I returned to the platform to get a good look at the train that would be our home for the next 23 hours. The Ocean was a motley museum of rolling stock, consisting of 18 cars of varied provenance. At the front were a pair of massively proportioned diesel-electric locomotives, fit for crossing Rockies and prairies on tracks shared with mile-long freight trains. The rear was made up of hulking stainless-steel carriages of mid-century vintage, most of which were intended for coach passengers. Sandwiched between the super-sized locomotives and the 70-year-old streamliners were our much smaller sleeper cars, whose compressed dimensions hinted at their original vocation: these were former Nightstar carriages, originally intended for overnight service to Europe through the Channel Tunnel, and picked up second-hand by Via Rail in 2000.
Absent was the Park car where, on our first trip on the Ocean, plaid-vested 'learning co-ordinators' had schooled us in the significance of Nova Scotian tartans and the correct use of the lobster trap. For complicated reasons involving a change to the track layout in Halifax, the panoramic cars have been pulled from service. (They still run on the Canadian, Via Rail's Toronto-to-Vancouver service, as well the Skeena, which runs from northern British Columbia to Alberta.) Desmond and Victor were quite happy with the two mid-train lounge cars, especially when they learnt that their wristbands entitled them to unlimited soft drinks and hot chocolate.
While we were still rumbling past the port's red-roofed lighthouses, our sleeper-car attendant poked her head in to remind us that we'd booked a table for the first sitting at lunch. Our sleeper-car tickets, which gave us access to the station lounge in Halifax, also entitled us to three meals in the dining car and I found the menus, which feature locally sourced products — haddock puttanesca, salmon cakes and Nova Scotia wines — a notch above the offerings on American long-distance trains, where the food is plated on plastic rather than china. (That said, Via Rail, unlike Amtrak, its counterpart in the US, charges passengers for wine and beer.) After dispatching huge squares of carrot cake, our boys set out to explore the train, leaving Erin and me to sip coffee and gaze out over a landscape of birch, white spruce and maple which, as we left behind the meandering shores of the Shubenacadie River, was increasingly patched with snow.
The dining car was abuzz with conversation, encouraged by the easy-going staff. 'It's nice taking the train across Canada,' opined one of the waiters as he cleared a table. 'You look up and see a fellow chopping firewood in the backyard of his cabin and then you remember you're travelling in this luxurious metal tube.'
After eavesdropping on a retired Englishman's animated account of his adventures on the Camino de Santiago, we chatted with the couple across the aisle, who lived in Halifax. He was a 12th-generation Acadian, a member of the Chasson clan, one of 60 families from France who in the 17th century settled in what is now New Brunswick. (Though I'm fluent in French, I was hard pressed to understand conversations between Acadian francophones in the lounge, who speak in heavily accented Chiac, a patois heavily peppered with English terms.) They were looking forward to a romantic getaway to Montreal; they'd scheduled a hockey game at the Bell Centre, a crash course in bagel-rolling and a visit to a luxurious spa in a riverside barge.
'Compared to the plane, this train is so relaxing,' she marvelled. 'We just drove up to the station 20 minutes before we had to leave. No announcements about seat belts. No sitting on a runway. The train just quietly leaves the station. We even got to watch our house roll by.'
Returning to the sleeper car, Erin and I found that Desmond had folded down the top bunk, where he was enjoying an adolescent power nap, while below, Victor was absorbed in the latest instalment of the Dog Man saga. In our room, where the attendants would come to make up the beds while we were dining, I settled into a relaxing afternoon of hypnosis-by-scenery.
The standard foreground of rail travel in Canada, a blurred scrim of trackside pines and listing wooden telephone poles, occasionally parted to reveal vistas of reddish-hued tidal flats and lakes dotted with Canada geese, newly returned from their annual southern exile. Every once in a while, when a stop was announced, I'd disembark to snap a photo at Amherst, Rogersville or another of the lovingly maintained brick-and-timber station houses along the way.
Our northward route through the snow-shrouded highlands of eastern New Brunswick took us along the original line of the Intercolonial Railway, which was conceived to transport British troops, quickly, from Halifax to Quebec. The construction was managed by Sir Sandford Fleming, the creator of Canada's first postage stamp and a promoter of international time zones, who prided himself on building the line to a higher standard than competing railways, using stone and iron, rather than wood, for trestles and bridges. The rationale behind the Intercolonial was preventing the US from annexing Canada — a possibility that, for many Canadians, is once again top of mind — and when the line opened in 1872 it was pointedly sited far enough from the border with Maine to reduce the likelihood of seizure by belligerent Yankees. In the 20th century, the largest incursions came in the form of American tourists, who thronged fishing lodges to angle on New Brunswick's salmon rivers.
During dinner, after crossing the iron bridges over branches of the Miramichi River, our pace slowed to less than 30mph as the train pitched and rolled over the uneven trackbed. As we passed through Bathurst, the sun set and we settled into the lounge car for a prolonged family tournament of crazy eights. That night, we were rocked asleep in our bunks by the clickety-clack of steel wheels and the periodic flashes of crimson-lit signs at level crossings.
When I awoke, the Ocean was returning from a scheduled side trip to Sainte-Foy, on the outskirts of Quebec City, and the sunrise was flashing its golden light through the trusses of the Pont de Quebec. In the kids' room, Desmond was yawning and stretching, and Victor, who is fond of ranking every experience, declared that, of the top ten sleeps he'd had in his life, 'that was number one'.
Waking up on a train, we all agreed, was a fantastic way to start the day. After a somewhat cut-throat stab at shaving, I decided to skip the in-room shower, and joined Erin and the kids, who were well into their lemon-ricotta pancakes and omelettes in the dining car. When our attendant told us that it was common to see wild turkeys and other fauna along the tracks in the morning, Victor got out his Polaroid camera and just missed getting a shot of a brace of white-tailed deer gathered for a post-dawn conference in a farmer's field.
By 11am, the train was making the creaking turn into the tracks over the Victoria Jubilee Bridge, whose span still rests on two dozen ice-breaking piers built in 1860 under the supervision of Robert Stephenson, the son of George, the inventor of the Rocket, which ran on the world's first inter-city passenger line. The slow crossing of the St Lawrence River signalled our return to home in Montreal, half an hour behind schedule, and the end of the adventure.
Well, this adventure, at any rate. Victor and Desmond, though deprived of screens, had clearly loved their first overnight train ride, perhaps even more than Erin and I had when we'd ridden the Ocean 20 years earlier.
As the boys lugged their backpacks through the crowds of Monday morning commuters in Montreal's Central Station, their father was secretly scanning the Via Rail departures board, wondering where future rail excursions would take them.Taras Grescoe was a guest of Via Rail, which offers one-way Comfort Class (standard seats, food for purchase on board) seats from £95pp or full-board Sleeper Plus tickets from £280pp on the Ocean from Halifax to Montreal (viarail.ca), and the Westin Nova Scotian, which has room-only doubles from £159 (marriott.com). Fly to Halifax