This overlooked train journey is the finest way to explore Canada's natural beauty

Telegraph

4 days ago

Our train conductor was adept at multitasking: besides the duties of a British guard, Walter is baggage handler, buffet attendant and in-person announcer of passing points of interest. Further commentary on passing sights was provided by passenger Angela, who had flagged down the train at the tiny hamlet of Longworth and soon felt compelled to apologise for talking so much, because she hasn't spoken to anyone for days. That's the Canadian backcountry for you.
The Skeena is a very Canadian kind of train: informal, friendly and typical in providing a lifeline for remote homesteads. Running over two days between Jasper in Alberta and the Pacific Coast at Prince Rupert, it takes its name from the 'river of clouds' that flows into Hecate Strait. But the first river the train follows is the Fraser, west from Jasper.
Jasper has had a tough time. Last year a third of its buildings burned down in forest fires, but the idyllically sited resort is 80 per cent back on its feet and most hotels, fortunately, survived. Standing in a station built of rounded river stones were the three stainless-steel cars of the Skeena, still elegant though they date from the 1950s.
A baggage car, chair car and dome car with observation windows at the back provided more than enough space for springtime travellers. Run three times a week by VIA, the government-owned passenger train operator, the Skeena is a flag-stop train that allows people to wave a ride from the lineside, so it seldom exceeds 50mph.
As we pulled away from the scarred town, the dozen of us in the dome car began comparing itineraries and wondering whether we would see the highest peak in the Canadian Rockies, Mount Robson, without its veil of cloud (on only a dozen days a year is the 12,972ft peak completely clear).
Both the Fraser River and the railway follow the Rocky Mountain Trench, so we were at times looking down on the water from a shelf along a sheer-sided gorge, and at others just feet above the water. For much of the way, the line scythes through mixed forests of spruce, pine, alder, aspen and fir, flanked by a seemingly endless succession of peaks that dwarf Snowdon or Ben Nevis.
It isn't long before the first cry of 'bear!' and the sight of a large rump disappearing into the undergrowth. In places, the mountains retreated and the river widened to become a lake. As we skirted Fraser Lake, a bald eagle flew right alongside the train for a minute, allowing us to appreciate the graceful motion of its seven-foot wingspan.
The valley periodically morphed into open pasture framing wooden farmsteads, often surrounded by generations of discarded farm machinery and abandoned pick-ups. Large clearings denoted the site of abandoned sawmills that once employed enough people to warrant a cinema.
Every so often, we passed a two-mile-long double-stack container train, carrying more than 200 imported boxes from the port at Prince Rupert to cities in the east. The men who built the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway could only dream of such largesse.
They believed its western end was ripe for agricultural development, optimistic that the extra cost of providing easy gradients and gentle curves would be fully justified by lower operating costs – and faster speeds, thus attracting more traffic to the railway. It opened in 1914, but low revenues in the years which followed compelled the federal government to nationalise it in 1919, and merge the line with others to create the Canadian National Railway four years later.
The names of places along the way are redolent of Canadian history and its pioneering settlers, some in the service of the Hudson's Bay Company whose first governor was Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Dunster recalls the Somerset town; Tintagel has a lump of stone from Cornwall; McBride was named after the youngest BC premier; while Mount Rider takes its moniker from the novelist Rider Haggard, who travelled over the line in 1916.
Soon enough, we reached Prince George, where the Skeena and its passengers spend the night. In the 'spruce capital of the world', I spent a pleasant few hours visiting the open-air Railway and Forestry Museum, created in celebration of the symbiosis that has sustained the economy for a century.
The following morning, we climbed aboard again and continued onwards, the line following the bends of the Skeena river before it broadens towards the sea between towering peaks, taking on a look not unlike the Norwegian fjords.
And yet, despite these majestic landscapes, this line nevertheless remains overshadowed by its rivals – VIA's Canadian, which runs between Toronto and Vancouver, and the Rocky Mountaineer's routes. I imagined how splendid these views must be at all other times of year – in the autumn, when the aspens turn orange and gold, and in winter, when the air takes on a razor-sharp clarity and the sky an intense blue.
The long final approach to Prince Rupert – known both as the 'halibut capital of the world' and 'city of rainbows' – was spectacular. Running right beside the Skeena estuary, I gawped at the tree-crowned islands in Chatham Sound set against the mountains in the south. Stripped tree trunks tossed on to gravel bars testified to the power of spring melt water.
This town might have looked very different had it not lost its main promoter and president of the railway in 1912. Travelling on the Titanic, Charles Melville Hays put his wife and daughter into a lifeboat but went down with the ship, ending his plans for a grand station and 450-room hotel. Hays intended Prince Rupert to become 'the most perfectly laid out and most beautiful city in the Dominion…the Washington of Canada'. But alas, it was not to be.
Nevertheless, a century later, his faith in the attraction of a deep ice-free port 250 miles closer to Far East markets has been vindicated: Prince Rupert may not be the country's Washington DC, but it is Canada's third busiest port.
For travellers on the Skeena, however, its appeal lies in its coastal beauty – and that of nearby Khutzeymateen Inlet, which sits beside the Alaskan border and offers one of Canada's best opportunities to watch grizzly bears feed at the water's edge.
There's history to be had there too: pre-dating the railway is the atmospheric 1889 salmon cannery on Inverness Passage, now the North Pacific Cannery National Historic Site, which tells the story of its 1,000 Chinese, Japanese and indigenous workers. Indigenous culture and crafts are to the fore in the Museum of Northern BC, imposingly constructed of bark-stripped cedar posts and beams in the manner of a First Nations longhouse.
It is a fine place to spend a few days at the end of your trip, surrounded by picture-postcard views on what feels like the edge of the world – and which, in a sense, once was: until the train came roaring into town, and put Jasper, Prince George and Prince Rupert – three of the prettiest places in Western Canada – firmly on the map.
Essentials
Jasper Inn & Suites has doubles from CAD$159 (£86); Coast Prince George Hotel has doubles from CAD$129 (£70); Crest Hotel Prince Rupert has doubles from CAD$239 (£129); Fairmont Hotel Vancouver has doubles from CAD$329 (£178). VIA Rail Canada has one-way tickets between Jasper and Prince Rupert from £85.
Anthony Lambert was a guest of Destination Canada.