Famous Name Trains: Travelling in Style with the CPR

Have you ever wondered, while sitting in traffic or waiting to board a crowded airplane, what it was like to travel the rails?

 

In his new book, Famous Name Trains: Travelling in Style with the CPR, former CPR archivist David Laurence Jones goes back in time to describe what it was like to travel on some of the CPR's famous "name trains," like the Pacific Express, the Imperial Limited, and the Canadian.

 

Jones evokes both the practical interiors of the early colonist cars with their communal sleeping arrangements and wooden bench seats, and the luxury of the higher-end cars that looked and felt like rolling men's clubs with wooden veneers, plush carpets, and upholstered chairs. These first-class cars would later become five-star hotels on wheels. Jones tracks the evolution of the passenger train, detailing improvements in engine strength, heating, lighting, interior design, and innovative sleeping arrangements.

 

Although the focus of the book is the CPR's famous name trains, Jones talks about other CPR enterprises that fed into and contributed to the railway. These included the dining halls and mountain chalets built at railway divisional points across the country, the rustic bungalow camps operated in both Ontario and within the Canadian Rockies, and the CPR's iron steamships that sailed the Great Lakes. Steamships like the Algoma, Alberta, and Athabasca provided passenger service between Owen Sound and what is now part of Thunder Bay, connecting passengers to CPR trains heading west. As the reader will find out, the steamships have their own stories to tell, both romantic and tragic.