Everyone told me to wake before sunrise. The steward mentioned it when he turned down the bed. A retired schoolteacher from Winnipeg said it over dinner, leaning across the white tablecloth as though passing on something confidential. Even the bartender in the Park Car lounge, polishing glasses against the dark, said the same thing: set an alarm, go up to the dome, you will understand. I resented it a little. I had booked this trip partly to stop obeying alarms, and here was an entire train conspiring to hand me a new one.
I set it anyway. At 6:40 the next morning, I climbed the narrow stairs to the dome car in the kind of darkness that has weight to it, carrying a coffee that was too strong for the woman who drinks half-strength lattes, and found the glass bubble empty. The rest of the train was asleep below me. Somewhere ahead, the locomotive was pulling four hundred people through Saskatchewan, and for the moment, I was the only one watching.
What I saw first was nothing. Then the nothing began to organise itself. A gray line separated from a black one, and the gray line became sky, and the black line became land, and between them a seam of orange opened so slowly that I could not say when it began. The snow took on the color before the sky finished making it. For perhaps twenty minutes, the entire visible world was pink, and the train ran through it without hurry, and I sat there with my cooling coffee, understanding exactly why everyone had told me to come.
People warn you that the Prairies are empty, and in summer, watching them from a car on the Trans-Canada, I might have agreed. From the dome of The Canadian in January, empty is the wrong word entirely. The land is not empty. It is vast, which is a different thing. Emptiness is an absence. Vastness is a presence, and it presses gently on you for hours, a horizon that keeps its distance no matter how fast you approach it, fence lines stitching away to nothing, a single grain elevator holding down the whole sky. You do not look at the Prairies in winter so much as sit inside them.
And they are quiet in a way I had no reference for. Snow absorbs sound. I knew this as a fact, but I had never experienced it at scale. When the train paused at a siding to let a freight pass, I stepped into the vestibule, and the silence outside was not the absence of noise but a material, something laid over the world an inch thick. No birds, no wind that morning, no hum. Just the tick of the train’s own metal cooling and, underneath it, nothing at all. I found myself lowering my voice for no one.
The towns arrive without warning. A cluster of lights, a rink with its lot half full at ten in the morning, and then gone, folded back into the white before you can finish forming a question about who lives there. Melville. Watrous. Biggar, whose sign famously says “New York is big, but this is Biggar.” Each one appears and disappears in under a minute, and each one leaves a small wake in you. Somewhere around the third or fourth of these, on the second day, I noticed that I had stopped checking the time.
This is what winter on The Canadian actually changes. Not the comfort, though the comfort is real. It changes the way you experience time. The train takes four days to cross the country, and it makes no apology for this, and in winter, when the days are short, and the land does most of the talking, the schedule stops being a constraint and becomes a kind of permission. There is nowhere to be. The next meal will announce itself. The light will change on its own. I read forty pages in a sitting for the first time in years, not because I had decided to concentrate but because nothing asked me to stop.
The Prestige cabin, I should say, is a genuinely beautiful room, with its massive window and its bed that faces the country going by, and I slept in it the way you sleep in deep cold, completely. But by the second night, I understood that the cabin was not the point. It is the frame, not the picture. What Prestige buys you, more than the shower or the wine pairings, is the freedom to be unhurried inside an unhurried thing, and after that, the room itself becomes almost secondary.
Jasper, when we arrived, was thirty below. The steward warned us with the cheerfulness of a man who was staying on the train. Stepping down onto the platform, the cold was not a temperature so much as an event. The insides of my nostrils froze on the first breath, a sensation like a small electric crackle. The snow did not crunch underfoot; it squeaked, a high, clean note with every step. My phone, fully charged in the cabin twenty minutes earlier, died before I could photograph the station sign. Thankfully, I had my camera. The mountains stood over the town in the early morning light, absolutely still, and the air itself seemed to have edges.
And here is the thing about seeing the Rockies this way, after two days of prairie and one long climbing night. In summer, you can drive to them. They are magnificent, and they are also, from the highway, merely scenic, a backdrop that asks nothing of you. Arriving by train in deep winter, having watched the land flatten and empty and then slowly gather itself into foothills, the mountains feel earned rather than merely scenic. You have crossed something to reach them, at a speed that lets you feel the crossing, and they receive you differently for it.
By the fourth day, the train had become a small town of its own. The couple from Halifax who claimed the same dome seats each afternoon. The teenager who was traveling alone to see her grandmother, who beat me twice at cards. The schoolteacher, who was right about the sunrise and knew it. We had watched the same country together at the same slow pace, and that turns strangers into familiar faces faster than any other arrangement I know.
I came for the cabin and the mountains. What I took home was the pace. Winter strips the journey down to light, snow, and time, and The Canadian gives you four days to notice all three.
The journey this essay belongs to: Across Canada by Rail