Rails & rooms

From Halifax to Victoria, clear across Canada, Dave Preston rode the rails, exploring what was once the most popular mode of transport in the country. Days and nights spent rollicking across the amazing and diverse geography of Canada were punctuated by stays at some of the country's oldest and most prestigious hotels; those built by the railway companies to entice the most affluent of travellers. **From the author**: There are many ways to get from A to B -- or from one the east coast of Canada to the west. I’ve flown this expanse, driven most of it, ridden a motorcycle across much of it, and hiked for days along its lakesides and riverbanks. But it wasn’t until I rode a train for 4,414 miles across every Canadian province that still has a track that I truly appreciated this country’s size and diversity. Our nation’s love of rail travel has been a torrid and well-documented affair, spanning more than a century and a half. Canadian railway history can be traced through hundreds of separate companies to its birth in 1836. In 1850, Upper Canada had just sixty-six miles of railway track, but by 1943 there were more than forty-three thousand miles of route being operated by thirty-eight separate corporations. Between 1900 and 1916, railway mileage in Canada increased from seventeen thousand miles to more than forty thousand. I also had the privilege of staying in some of the nation's oldest and finest railway hotels. This is the story of a month-long trip that took me gently across Canada, and occasionally through time.