Twenty-one days across Canada by train: the best days are the ones with nothing in them

Start where the city did. Gastown is two blocks of cobbles and cast iron left over from the 1880s, at the top end of a downtown that is otherwise almost entirely glass, and it takes an hour. Note that the Downtown Eastside begins immediately east of it and that Vancouver's street homelessness is concentrated there and is confronting.

Five minutes south, the Dr Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden is a full scholar's garden built in 1986 by artisans brought from Suzhou, using no nails, screws or power tools, and it is the first of its kind constructed outside China. It is small, it takes forty minutes, and the guided tour is what makes it work.

Finish on the water at Canada Place, which was built as the Canadian pavilion for Expo 86, is shaped like a ship under sail and now takes cruise ships. Walk the promenade around it for the first proper look at the North Shore mountains.

Stanley Park is mostly second-growth rainforest and the seawall runs right around the outside of it: flat, paved, nine kilometres, sea on one side and cedar on the other. Rent a bike at the Georgia Street entrance and the loop takes ninety minutes with stops. The totem poles at Brockton Point are two kilometres in.

In the afternoon, cross False Creek to Granville Island. It was a sandbar full of sheet metal works until the 1970s, when the federal government converted it into a market, a theatre, an art school and a set of boatyards under a motorway flyover, leaving the industry visible rather than tidying it away.

The market is the reason to come and lunch is the reason to time it right. Eat outside on the dock and watch for the gulls, which are organised.

The Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia is ten kilometres west on the 99 bus and it is the single best thing in Vancouver. Arthur Erickson designed the building in 1976 around the objects rather than the other way round: a concrete post and beam frame that copies the structure of a Northwest Coast big house, with a glass wall at the end so the poles stand against the sea and the mountains behind them.

The Great Hall holds house posts and poles from Haida Gwaii and the coast, and the collections behind it are unusual in being visible in full rather than in storage, in glass drawers you open yourself. Give it three hours. Much of what you will see for the next three weeks makes more sense afterwards.

Come back into town for the afternoon, look at whatever the Vancouver Art Gallery has on in the old courthouse, and then stop. Pack tonight. Tomorrow you get on a train for four days and what is not in the small bag is not coming out of the luggage car.

The train leaves Pacific Central in the middle of the afternoon and you should be there an hour before, because checked luggage closes early and the queue for it does not move fast.

The first evening is the best introduction the trip could ask for. You run east up the Fraser Valley with the light going, past Hope, and then into the canyon itself, where the river is a long way below the track and the Canadian Pacific line runs on the opposite wall. Dinner is served in sittings while this is happening. Take the late one.

Overnight the train climbs through the interior. Sleep with the blind up if you can stand it: at some point in the small hours you cross into Alberta over the Yellowhead Pass, which at 1,131 metres is the lowest crossing of the continental divide of any railway in the Rockies, and which is why the line goes this way rather than through Banff.

Breakfast in the dome as the mountains arrive is the reason people book this train, and by the second cup of coffee you are running beside the Athabasca with peaks on both sides. Jasper is late morning, and the town is small enough that everything is a walk from the platform.

Jasper was reached by a wildfire in July 2024 and lost a substantial share of its buildings. What survived is intact, the park is open, the trails and the lakes are unaffected, and rebuilding is underway. It is worth knowing before you arrive, and worth being unsurprised by the gaps along the residential streets.

In the afternoon, drive or take the shuttle seven kilometres to Maligne Canyon, a limestone slot that the river has cut up to fifty metres down and barely two metres wide in places, crossed by six footbridges. Walk from the first bridge to the fifth and back and you have the best short walk in the park. Then the cable car, if the weather is clear: seven minutes to 2,263 metres, and the ridge walk above the upper station puts the whole valley below you.

The Maligne road runs forty five kilometres southeast from town and holds two of the strangest bodies of water in the Rockies. The first, Medicine Lake, is not really a lake at all: it has no surface outlet, and every autumn it empties down a sinkhole system into one of the largest underground drainages in North America, reappearing sixteen kilometres away. By October there is a gravel flat where the water was, and by June it is full again. The local Stoney Nakoda name for it referred to that behaviour long before anyone dyed the water to prove where it went.

The second, Maligne Lake, is the largest natural lake in the Rockies at twenty two kilometres long, and the part everybody has seen a photograph of is fourteen kilometres down it, which means the boat. Spirit Island is a small stand of spruce on a spit with the Queen Elizabeth Ranges behind it, and you get fifteen minutes on a viewing platform before the boat goes back. It is worth the money and it is not a wilderness experience.

Bring the day back slowly. Elk and bighorn sheep on the road are normal and bears are not unusual; the rule in both cases is to stay in the vehicle and not to stop in the middle of the carriageway, which is what everybody does.

The eastbound train comes through Jasper around the middle of the day and stops long enough to walk the platform. Get back on and the mountains are behind you within two hours.

The afternoon is the transition that makes the rest of the trip legible: foothills, then aspen parkland, then the first genuinely flat ground. Edmonton is in the evening and the stop is long enough to stand outside in the dark and stretch, which by then you will want to do.

Then the first full night in the berth, running southeast across Alberta. If the sky is clear and you are awake at two, turn the cabin light off and look up. There is nothing on the ground for a hundred kilometres in any direction.

This is the day that people either love or endure, and which one it is depends entirely on whether you accept it. There is nothing to do. The train crosses Saskatchewan and half of Manitoba, and outside the window there is wheat, canola, grain elevators every twenty kilometres and a horizon that does not move.

What you notice, after the first three hours, is that it is not empty. It is farmed to the edge of sight in every direction, which is a different and more impressive thing, and every so often a town of four hundred people goes past with a hockey rink and a Ukrainian church in it.

Winnipeg comes in the evening. It is the longest scheduled stop on the whole route, long enough to leave the station, and the platform is a five minute walk from the middle of the city.

The Forks is where the Red and the Assiniboine meet, and people have been meeting there for about six thousand years, first as an Indigenous trading place, then as a fur trade post, then as railway yards, and now as a market and a park. It is five minutes from the station and it is where to start.

Standing over it is the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which opened in 2014 in an Antoine Predock building of stone, glass and a tower of alabaster ramps that you climb in the dark towards the light, which is exactly as heavy-handed as it sounds and works anyway. It is the first national museum built outside the capital region, and the galleries on residential schools and on Canada's own record are the ones that stay with you. Three hours, and it is tiring in a way that is not physical.

Cross the pedestrian bridge to St Boniface, the French quarter, and go to the cathedral. The 1908 basilica burned in 1968 and the decision was not to rebuild it but to leave the stone facade and side walls standing as a ruin and put a smaller modern church inside them. Louis Riel, who founded Manitoba and was hanged for treason in 1885, is buried in the yard in front of it.

The Manitoba Museum's central gallery is built around the Nonsuch, a full-size sailing replica of the ketch that sailed into Hudson Bay in 1668 and came back with enough fur to persuade the English crown to charter the Hudson's Bay Company, which then governed a third of the continent for two hundred years. The ship sits in a reconstructed seventeenth century dockside and you can board it. The galleries around it cover the province from the ice sheet forward.

Walk up to the Legislative Building afterwards, which is a 1920 neoclassical pile with a gilded statue on top and a genuinely strange amount of masonic and classical symbolism worked into it, enough that there are tours devoted entirely to arguing about what it means.

Give the afternoon to Assiniboine Park, then eat early. The train leaves late in the evening and there is no advantage to being on the platform before you have to be, but there is a real disadvantage to missing it: the next one is three days later.

You wake up in a different country. Overnight the train has crossed into the Canadian Shield, and for the whole of today there is nothing outside but rock, spruce, muskeg and water, in an order that repeats for eighteen hours.

This is the emptiest stretch of the route and the one that explains why the railway was built at all. There is no road alongside for most of it. The line was blasted through the shield north of Lake Superior in the 1880s at ruinous cost, because a promise of a railway to the Pacific was the condition on which British Columbia joined the country at all, and there was no cheaper way through.

Sioux Lookout and Hornepayne go past. Both are stops the timetable barely acknowledges and both are places where the train is a lifeline rather than a holiday. Watch for moose in the cuttings at dusk.

The last morning on the train runs down through cottage country and into the suburbs, and Union Station is early afternoon if the freight has been kind. It rarely has been. Assume you arrive later than the timetable says.

Union Station itself deserves the ten minutes it takes to walk through properly. It opened in 1927, the Great Hall is 250 feet long with a vaulted ceiling twenty seven metres up, and carved into the frieze around it are the names of every place the railways served, which after four days on one of them reads differently.

Then go east, drop everything and walk into the Distillery District. Five hectares of Victorian industrial brick that was Gooderham and Worts, at one point the largest whisky distillery in the world, closed in 1990 and reopened as a pedestrian quarter of galleries, cafes and small theatres. No cars, late afternoon light on the brick, and the first proper meal in three days.

The CN Tower held the record for the tallest free-standing structure on earth from 1975 until 2007 and is still the tallest in the Americas at 553 metres. The lift takes under a minute, there is a glass floor on the way down that people spend a surprising amount of time not standing on, and for a considerable extra sum there is an outdoor walk on a ledge around the outside of the pod.

The aquarium at the foot of it is better than the location suggests, mostly because of the moving walkway through a tunnel under the shark tank, which is a straightforwardly good idea executed properly. It is also the single busiest indoor attraction in the city, so go at opening or after four.

In the afternoon, walk east to St Lawrence Market, which has been the city's food market since 1803 in a building from 1845. The south hall is the one that matters: butchers, cheesemongers, a Portuguese bakery, and the peameal bacon sandwich that Toronto claims as its contribution to world food. It is shut on Sundays and Mondays.

The Royal Ontario Museum is the largest in Canada and has a Daniel Libeskind extension crashing through the front of it, a set of intersecting crystals in aluminium and glass bolted onto a 1914 building in 2007. The city has never agreed about it. Inside, the dinosaurs and the Chinese galleries are the strongest rooms and two hours is the minimum.

Frank Gehry grew up two streets from the Art Gallery of Ontario and rebuilt it in 2008 with a restraint that is unlike almost anything else with his name on it: a curved wood and glass gallery running the length of Dundas Street and a blue titanium box behind. The Thomson collection inside includes the Group of Seven, the school that taught Canada what its own landscape looked like, which after two thousand kilometres of shield you are unusually well placed to judge.

Then take the ferry. The Toronto Islands are fifteen minutes offshore, have no cars, and are the only place the skyline reads properly. Ward's Island at the eastern end is the quiet one, with a boardwalk, a cafe and several hundred people who live there year round.

Five hours east along the lake and up the St Lawrence, on a train that runs several times a day, is quiet and is punctual, all of which will feel like an unfamiliar luxury. Sit on the right for the water. Gare Centrale in Montreal connects directly into the metro without going outside.

Drop the bags and go to Old Montreal. Notre-Dame Basilica was finished in 1829 and is the reason people photograph this city: the interior was redone by Victor Bourgeau in the 1870s in deep blue with gold stars across the vault, thousands of them, lit so the whole ceiling reads as a night sky. It costs a few dollars to go in and it is worth being there when it is quiet rather than between coach parties.

Then Place Jacques-Cartier, the sloping square that runs down from the old city hall towards the river, which is touristy and pleasant and full of terraces. Eat there, or walk two streets inland and eat better.

Montreal is built around a hill and the hill is a park, laid out by Frederick Law Olmsted in 1876, who deliberately refused to flatten or formalise it. Walk up through the trees to the Kondiaronk lookout in front of the chalet, which is named for the Wendat chief who negotiated the Great Peace of 1701 between the French and thirty nine First Nations, and which gives you the river, the old city and the bridges in one frame.

Down the western slope is St Joseph's Oratory, the largest church in Canada, begun in 1904 by a lay brother with no money and finished as a basilica with a dome visible from most of the island. The wooden middle staircase at the front has ninety nine steps and pilgrims climb it on their knees, and the votive chapel inside is a room of several thousand candles and a wall of abandoned crutches.

In the afternoon go north to Jean-Talon market, open since 1933 and one of the largest open-air markets in North America, and eat your way through it: Quebec cheese, cider, corn in August, and produce from farms an hour away.

Pointe-à-Callière is built on the exact spot where Montreal was founded in 1642, and the museum is largely underground because what it holds is the site itself: foundations, the old customs house, a Catholic cemetery, and a long walk through the city's first collector sewer, which was built over the river that used to run there and which you go along in the dark.

It is the best museum in the city and the most unusual, because almost nothing in it was brought from anywhere. Two to three hours, and the tower at the end gives you the port.

Spend the afternoon on the water. The old port has been a public promenade since the 1990s, and across the channel on the Cité du Havre spit is Habitat 67, which Moshe Safdie designed as a student and built for Expo 67: three hundred and fifty four identical concrete boxes stacked so that every flat has a roof garden on top of the one below. It was supposed to be the future of mass housing and instead became very expensive private flats, which is a story in itself. You can see it perfectly well from the promenade.

The 1976 Olympic stadium is a monument to ambition and to what happens when it goes wrong: it was not finished for the games, its retractable roof never worked properly, and the city took thirty years to pay for it. The inclined tower over it is 165 metres and the tallest leaning structure in the world, with a funicular running up the outside of the slope to a viewing deck.

Next door is the botanical garden, which is genuinely first rank: seventy five hectares, thirty glasshouses, and a Chinese garden and a Japanese garden that are both the largest of their kind outside Asia. The insectarium and the Biodôme are on the same site, the latter being the old Olympic cycling track rebuilt as four enclosed Americas ecosystems with the animals living in them.

Get back into town in good time. The Ocean leaves Gare Centrale in the early evening, and you want dinner in you before it does, because the first sitting on that train is early and the scenery is dark by nine.

You wake up somewhere in the Matapédia valley, where the line follows a salmon river between wooded hills, and the rest of the morning runs along the Baie des Chaleurs and into New Brunswick. This is the prettiest of the long legs and the least famous.

Miramichi, Moncton, Amherst. The train swings inland through spruce and blueberry barrens, crosses the isthmus into Nova Scotia, and the last two hours run down the Cobequid shore with the Bay of Fundy tides out somewhere on the right.

Halifax is late afternoon. The station is at the south end of the harbourfront, twenty minutes on foot from the centre, and the correct first move is to drop everything and get onto the boardwalk before the light goes.

The Citadel is a star fort on the hill above the town, the fourth on the site, completed in 1856 and obsolete by the time it was, because rifled artillery arrived while it was being built. Soldiers of the 78th Highlanders drill in the yard through the summer and the noon gun is fired every day, which is loud in a way nobody in the courtyard is ever quite ready for.

Down at the water, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic holds the world's largest collection of wooden objects from the Titanic, because Halifax was the nearest major port and the ships that recovered the dead sailed from here. It also holds the definitive account of the Halifax Explosion: in December 1917 a French munitions ship collided with a Norwegian vessel in the harbour narrows and detonated, flattening the north end of the city, killing around two thousand people and remaining the largest man-made explosion before nuclear weapons.

Both of those things are still visible in the city. Boston sent a relief train within a day of the explosion, and Nova Scotia has sent Boston a Christmas tree every year since as thanks, which is the sort of thing that sounds sentimental until you learn that it is genuinely still happening.

Finish where a million people started. Pier 21 was the ocean terminal through which almost a million immigrants entered Canada between 1928 and 1971, along with half a million soldiers going the other way during the war, and it is now the national immigration museum.

It is the right last stop on a trip that has spent three weeks crossing the country the long way, because it is where a very large number of the people you have been travelling among first arrived, and the arrivals hall has been left recognisable. The searchable ship manifests at the back repay another half hour if a family name might be in them.

Then the airport, which is forty minutes northeast of town and has direct flights back across everything you just spent three weeks travelling through. It takes six hours. Try not to think about it.