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.
