We were scheduled to stop at Edmonton at lunchtime, so they served us a light breakfast, followed by brunch after 11am. They needed time at Edmonton to insert an extra carriage with seating for the extra passengers heading to Vancouver. At Winnipeg and Edmonton they promised us Wifi in the station, but it was hard to locate and overused when we finally got on so the blog was deferred. We are getting emails and some Facebook on the Kindle via 3G.
The train spends a lot of time waiting at sidings for a freight train to pass in the other direction, but curiously none have overtaken us. They can come every 15 minutes sometimes and they use two engines to pull up to 150 carriages, often with double deck containers. We were still nearly three hours behind time.
About an hour before we got to Jasper we started ascending up to 1000 meters and big mountains with snow appeared. Another sudden transition.
We followed a glacial river and sidled along a big lake before pulling into the beautiful Jasper Station, where many passengers disembarked.
We were met by a helpful young man from Sundog Tours who took a group of six of us who were using Fresh Tracks Travel to various hotels. He told us it snowed on the mountains last night and a brown bear had been observed in the town this morning. All the rubbish bins here have release mechanisms that bears cannot open.
This is the view from our balcony on the top floor of the Sawridge Conference Centre.
This is the view from our balcony on the top floor of the Sawridge Conference Centre.
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