We spent 2 days on the Rocky Mountaineer travelling from Banff to Vancouver via Kamloops. We arrived at the “station” by 8 and were greeted on board by the crew. I use the term “station” very loosely as it appears most of the stations we went through don’t actually have platforms. Our bus brought us right next to the carriage and we boarded from ground level. We had been allocated seats at the front of the cabin across both rows which means we almost had a private section for ourselves. This made it quite convenient as the day progressed. Our carriage had windows all around the side and all the way across the top. This gave us unparalleled views of the surroundings.

While the scenery at Banff was spectacular nothing prepared us for what we were about to see. Over the course of the day the landscape changed from snowy mountaintops and pristine lakes to ravaging rivers and deserts. We were told the history of Canada through the creation of the train line that connected the west coast to the east. Moreover given the terrain, some of the tracks were engineering feats when they were first created and required multiple iterations to get right. There was a section of the tracks where we turned 235 degrees, down a 40 degree slope in the middle of a mountain (in pitch darkness in a tunnel).

We went past, across and over 7 different lakes today of different sizes. The largest had a shoreline of over 1,000 kms (and a depth of over 100m) while another is filled from glaciers and is always near freezing. All the lakes had pristine transparent waters and you could almost see the bottom.

The temperature soared quite a bit during the day and reached almost 37 degrees outside. Unfortunately this coincided with us travelling through the desert and for the air conditioning in the carriage to fail (or rather fail to keep up with the heat). Being in a glass carriage dish by help as it felt like we were in a greenhouse. It’s hard to describe how hot it got and we were sitting on our seats with sweat pouring down our faces.

We arrived at Kamloops at around 6 and we were transported to our hotel. Kamloops is a tiny town with a population of only 90k. We went for a walk and found an African fusion restaurant for dinner.

While on day 1 we went past lakes, on the second day we saw lots of rivers and where they merged. In one instance a river from the glacier merged with another that followed over limestone. The colour of these rivers were markedly different and even after coming together the colour didn’t merge for 10s of kms. The landscape changed from desert and arid land to rainforests as we got closer to Vancouver. This also meant we went over a number of bridges, some which were nearly 50 years old and some which have been rebuilt numerous times. This is also bushfire country and we saw the impact of recent fires and the vast acres of trees that had been destroyed. Apparently a similar train last year had to be aborted as the fires crossed the tracks.

More importantly the air conditioning had been fixed overnight and we had a lot more comfortable journey. This was lucky as the outside temperature reached 38 at one point

One of the highlights was the meal service on the train. While we sat on the first floor, there was a dining room below with elaborate menus and freshly prepared meals. They even had a kids menu (with unlimited drinks) that Thomas and Emily loved.

We were meant to arrive into Vancouver by 6pm on the second day, however we were meant to go over a bridge that opens. Unfortunately the bridge got stuck in the open state and couldn’t be closed. First we were stuck at a major intersection for about 2 hours and then we had to back track about an hour to transfer to a different line that went over a different bridge. We didn’t end up in Vancouver till after 11 and only made it to our rooms after midnight.