Unlike British engine drivers, whoever is stuck at the front of the train for the duration of the journey from west to east certainly doesn't seem to be in any massive rush to get anywhere - but then again, I don't suppose there's any real need to put your foot down when you're not expected at the other end for several days, and I definitely wouldn't be in any particular hurry to leave the scenery behind and get back to the big city. I'm told that, despite the town appearing to be thousands of miles from anywhere, a driver can make it from Jasper to Edmonton by car in about four hours if all the roads are open and he puts his foot down, but for some reason The Canadian managed to take that long to make the same journey despite having no other traffic to contend with and a perfectly straight track to whiz along instead of twisty-turny mountain roads. By the time we left Jasper it was starting to get dark, and as day turned into night on board the train, the mountains gradually began to give way to the flat, snowy prairies of Alberta.

We didn't arrive in Edmonton until very late, certainly much later than it had said we were supposed to on the schedule, and those of us who had started to drift off to sleep hunched over our tables in the observation car were woken up quite suddenly by the driver screaming at us over the intercom that we would be arriving in the next few minutes. Those of us who were leaving the train for a few days stopover then had to rush around getting our stuff together, although I really don't know why we panicked because the train always seems to stop in major stations for an hour or so while people get on to clean up all the mess we've obviously been making since the last stop! Considering how long the journey is from Vancouver to Toronto at the other end of the line, and how small the distance we have travelled so far is, I feel certain that the driver must have stopped the train during the night and put his feet up in the cab for a while so that we wouldn't miss the mountains in the morning, which I thought was a nice touch if true. Mind you, since the next train isn't due to come along for three days, this is one of the few lines in the world where an engine driver can probably safely choose to stop the train wherever he wants and get out just to admire the scenery with absolutely no chance of anything else coming along unexpectedly and crashing into him. A red light on this line is quite likely to be a mirage.

I had arranged to leave the train at Edmonton, spending three days in town before joining the next to pass through. Edmonton is only the third stop on the line which VIA Rail considers important enough to mark with an extra large spot on the map - the first two being Kamloops and Jasper, both places which anybody with any grip on reality would still consider relatively small towns - and it the first that I would actually regard as a major city. Edmonton feels very spread out compared to other cities, but still manages to call itself home to over a million people and is therefore considered the northernmost major city in North America. When I visited, it was also home to the world's largest shopping centre - West Edmonton Mall - a place really quite staggeringly huge and almost totally unnecessary in every way except for the purpose of boasting. West Edmonton has since been surpassed in size and is now only the fifth largest in the world, but it held the title for twenty-three years during which other places tried and failed to pull off something larger, so you're probably wondering what would make anybody decide to build the worlds largest shopping mall in the middle of Canada miles from anywhere in a city of only a million people. Why not build it in a major destination such as Florida or California where it would be overrun by millions of visitors every day? Well, I can't answer that question - but then, people in North America clearly think in a totally different way to the rest of us, and this need for relatively small places to get something up on the rest of the world sums them up nicely. Despite wanting to get off the train and see Edmonton itself as one of the few major cities along my route eastward, I had been told by people who had never been there that I absolutely must visit the mall and report back, so I was actually quite keen to spend some time shopping and see if the place really was all it was hyped up to be.

It is certainly a lot colder here than it was back in Vancouver - the snow is clearly several inches deep and the wind is bitter all the time. It's been getting progressively colder as I've travelled north and then further into Canada, but Edmonton is the first time I've had to walk around with my hands buried deep in my pockets and my collar pulled tightly up around the bottom half of my face every time I go out in order to avoid getting pneumonia! Okay, so I know I probably look like a bit of an idiot, but given the choice between looking cool and groovy and having my extremities fall off from frostbite, I know which option I would choose. I was advised by a friendly elderly lady on the train that, from now on, I will need to stock up on all those extra thick woolly jumpers that I totally failed to pack in my suitcase before leaving the UK. Under normal circumstances, a comment like this from a pensioner would probably have resulted in my nodding politely while telling myself that people feel the cold more as they get older and a young strapping lad such as myself would be able to strut around naked in the snow without feeling a thing. However, given the fact that simply glancing out of the train window at any point was now revealing inches of white as far as the eye could see, I thought she might actually have a point. On the other hand, I just know that if I stock up on winter clothing now then I'm going to end up with a suitcase full of clothes I don't need in a couple of weeks time when I find myself heading down towards the sweltering heat of Florida. Why can't this continent (I nearly said country there, but didn't want a Canadian to come over and slap me) just decide on a single weather system and stick to it?

The Edmonton railway station, in a really quite breathtaking display of lunacy only possible on a continent where I've witnessed people eating Ice Cream on hamburgers, seems to be miles outside of town and situated in the middle of a snowdrift. OK, so I am willing to accept that there are probably times of the year when this isn't the case - the snowdrift part, anyway - but, as a poor tourist arriving in town looking for a nice warm hotel, I didn't find it particularly helpful. The only other place I've ever been where the railway station isn't right in the middle of town where any sensible person would expect to find it, is Milton Keynes back home in England, where somebody has decided to place it so far from the shops and houses that you seem to need a twenty minute taxi ride on arrival. In Edmonton, I stepped out of the station onto a forecourt which had carefully been glazed with enough black ice to ensure that I slipped and slid my way all the way to the taxi rank at the other end, where I discovered nothing more than a payphone with a piece of card shoved into the top advertising a local taxi company. Several other people had left the train with me, and they kindly decided to wait in the warmth of the station while I was the one who chose to brave the elements to find out that we had to call for a ride. I supposed it was obviously too much to ask that, when the only train for three days arrives in town, there would be someone already there waiting to pick passengers up - especially given that we would've otherwise had to walk miles into town with the snow coming up to our kneecaps. I made the call and went back inside the nice warm station lobby to join my fellow travellers, and we all waited what seemed like forever for anybody to show up. I realise you could argue that it's not exactly the height of the tourist season, but you really do think they could find somebody in the whole of Edmonton who was willing to drive a taxi to the station at ten o'clock at night, wouldn't you?

While I was waiting, I rescued my luggage from the airport style carousel next to the ticket counter, where it was now the only remaining bag endlessly going around and around waiting to be collected. I hadn't given much thought to what had happened to my suitcase, to be honest, since I'd handed it over to a porter back in Vancouver, and had started to get used to just having a camera bag and my carry-on luggage to haul around with me, so it was slightly depressing to see my suitcase, now weighed down with several months worth of souvenirs, going around and around on the carousel waiting for me. I wondered briefly why they actually needed to have a baggage carousel at all - surely it would've been far easier for the porter to simply take my luggage out of the luggage car on the train and put it on the platform like they manage to do anywhere else in the world, rather than having to carry it to a baggage check-in and hand it over to someone who puts it on a conveyor belt, but I certainly wasn't complaining about not having to slide all the way along the platform on black ice to collect it.

Finally, taxis started to turn up in response to my having alerted someone by phone that there were several people standing around at the station shivering their backsides off waiting for them to arrive - I forgot to mention that we were all actually inside in the warm and that very little shivering was going on at all, just in case they got to us faster. Deluded, I think is the word. Anyway, when taxis finally started to arrive half an hour later, they did so in their droves - every few minutes, a cab would appear from the distant road and circle vulture-like around the station a couple of times before swooping on the nearest person waving money. I waited patiently for my turn like a true Brit, even though I was the one who had called them in the first place, while everybody else barged in front of me - and finally ended up being about the only one left in the station. During my journey, the driver was only too pleased to explain what he would do if he was in charge of the country and boast that West Edmonton Mall is not only the biggest Mall in the World but also in the whole Universe, on the grounds that Canadians are obviously better than everyone else. I didn't like to argue, because he looked like the sort of person who might take this as interest and go on to explain how he had been abducted by aliens at some point and shown around all the Malls in the Universe personally. I was dropped off at a rather grand looking hotel, where the taxi driver was probably getting a commission and the receptionist explained that she would happily relieve me of some more of my fast diminishing stocks of cash in return for a place to call home - but I didn't fancy getting back in the cab with Mr Know-it-all for a second time so I just paid whatever she wanted and chalked it up to experience. Besides, I was just happy, for the first time in a while, to be staying in a hotel which didn't have the word "Sleepy", "Cozy" or "Snuggly" in the name.

About Simon and Burfords Travels:

Simon Burford is a UK based travel writer. He will be re-publishing his travel blogs, chapters from his books and other miscellaneous rantings on these pages over the coming weeks and months, and the entry on this page may not necessarily reflect todays date.