Overnight we had travelled over the last remains of the Prairies and awoke as the train was on the edge of the Athabasca River. It was flowing north from its headwaters of the Athabasca Glacier towards the Arctic Ocean. The murky white water of the river indicated that it was of glacial origin. The sun […]

After Winnipeg, but overnight, the train crossed some of Canada’s most fertile land. The flatness was broken only by farms and grain elevators. These are used to store grain, in particular, before loading onto freight trains. Most of them these days are built of steel and concrete but a few of the original timber ones

Overnight we crossed more of the Shield, passing small communities where the trains have to be requested to stop. We moved to -6 GMT. By breakfast we were still passing lakes and forests at Auden, a busy logging centre and home to the indigenous Ojibway people. At 09:53 we passed the east bound Canadian, Train

We departed Toronto on ‘The Canadian’ or Train 1 for the 2,795 mile journey to Vancouver. This will take 4 days and 4 nights. Overnight we stayed in the Royal York Hotel, formerly Canadian Pacific Hotel. Such hotels were provided for passengers who had to wait for connecting trains that only ran on a small

Overnight we crossed New Brunswick to Quebec. After breakfast we followed the south bank of the St. Lawrence and by lunchtime had reached Sainte-Foy. The is the railway station for Quebec City. As a terminus it involved crossing the Quebec Bridge, a smaller version of the Forth Railway Bridge, both backwards and forwards. Before entering

We started our journey in Halifax because, if we have a successful transit of the Northwest Passage (NWP), we will disembark here. The expedition convenes in Vancouver so we took the opportunity to cross Canada by train. We stayed at the Westin Hotel because this was previously the Canadian Pacific Hotel and the starting point

Peggy’s Cove is the home of Canada’s most photographed lighthouse. The rugged, now wave swept outcrops of granite, are the exposed sections of the primeval continent of Pangea which have been sculptured into formations known as roche-moutonneés, similar to those on the Lofoten Islands of Norway. The hamlet has 26 regular inhabitants and from the

We are in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. It is the country’s largest and busiest port on the Atlantic Coast. Following John Cabot’s finding of the Grand Banks the Portuguese, Spanish and French arrived here from 1502 onwards. Eventually the Portuguese and Spanish pulled out of the cod trade and left it to the French and

We flew to Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, the country’s largest and busiest port on the Atlantic Coast. En route we overflew the icebergs in the Labrador Sea.

This was departure day with time to walk around the city before boarding the Boeing 777 to London. Essentially the plane was pointed towards Paris for 10 hours before we adjusted course for a landing from the east. On this expedition we travelled around 14,500 miles.