Luxury route
Rocky Mountaineer
Vancouver → Banff · Canada
All-daylight luxury through the Canadian Rockies: glass-domed coaches, an overnight hotel stop and the Kicking Horse Pass.
This is the 1885 Canadian Pacific main line ridden as pure spectacle, hosts narrating every trestle and tunnel between courses. Day one follows the Fraser’s chasm through Hell’s Gate, where the whole river funnels through a gap barely 35 m wide; day two runs past Craigellachie’s Last Spike and the avalanche country of Rogers Pass. The finale is the Spiral Tunnels, corkscrews bored in 1909 to tame the notorious Big Hill, before Castle Mountain heralds Banff.
Along the way
- Fraser Valley farmland
- Hell’s Gate in the Fraser Canyon
- Kamloops overnight halt
- Craigellachie — the Last Spike
- Rogers Pass glaciers
- Spiral Tunnels into Banff country
How this line was checked
- Line drawn from 4 OpenStreetMap relations, their own nodes end to end: relation 19430310 (250 km), relation 7449763 (197 km), relation 7449700 (203 km), relation 8082915 (197 km) — 847 km of the route between them
- Checked against OpenStreetMap: 95.7% of this line lies within 250 m of real track (median 28 m); the longest stretch away from it is 9 km
- The operator publishes this line's timetable: Rocky Mountaineer — a place to look it up, not a check of our drawing
- Wikipedia has an article for this line
- See for yourself: open this line on the map with OpenStreetMap's own railway drawn underneath it
Questions and answers
How long is the Rocky Mountaineer?
The Rocky Mountaineer runs 957 km from Vancouver to Banff.
How long does the Rocky Mountaineer take?
Over the 957 km, the fastest scheduled journey is 2 days, daylight only. The line's top service speed is 100 km/h.
Who runs the Rocky Mountaineer?
Rocky Mountaineer, with GoldLeaf dome cars.
How old is the Rocky Mountaineer?
The line has been in service since 1990. That is the year the atlas dates it from: for a modern brand running over an older railway, it is the railway's date, not the brand's.
How high does the Rocky Mountaineer climb?
1,627 m above sea level at its highest point.
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