A long ride across Canada, a long ride across time. With humour, insight, and charming curiosity, Dave Preston shares an epic, month-long trip right across the country, covering more than 4,500 miles by rail and a few hundred more by road. Travelling thorugh every single province that still has a working track, stopping to enjoy and recount the glory days of the luxurious, iconic railway hotels, Rails & Rooms lovingly delivers a unique travel story that fondly embraces Canada, past and present, from coast to coast.
From Halifax to Victoria, readers are taken through days and nights spent rollicking across the amazing and diverse geography of Canada, punctuated by stays at some of the country's oldest and most prestigious hotels - those extravagantly built by wealthy 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. North America'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. It was too much fun not to share!
Review in Canadian Literature - Takes the reader on a leisurely passage by rail from Halifax to Vancouver, with side trips to St. Andrews, New Brunswick, to Quebec City, and to Banff and Lake Louise. The comfort and delights of Via Rail's modern transcontinental service offer a marked contrast to the accommodations of earlier, steamhauled equipment, let alone the rough conditions faced by v
oyageurs, fur traders and surveyors... provides a sense of the vastness of this nation as it unfolds past the windows. Preston describes the journey in detail - lakes, muskeg, grasslands, and mountains all come sharply into view - as well as stops along the way in some of our fabled hotels. The history, decor, and ambience of these buildings is well developed, just as is some of the history of railway construction and practice... the past is nicely blended into present moments.
