HAVE YOU EVER WONDERED, while sitting in traffic or waiting to board a crowded airplane, what it was like to travel the rails? Not just on a commuter train moving from one suburb to the next, but across the country in style when traveling by train was the most sought after mode of transport by celebrities, wealthy industrialists, and politicians?In the latest addition to David Laurence Jones's CPR histories, Famous Name Trains: Travelling in Style with the CPR, 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. The birth and growth of the CPR's transcontinental passenger train service from Montreal, signalled travel opportunities not only for the rich and famous, but for immigrants, homesteaders, and entrepreneurs heading west in search of a new life.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. Jones tracks the evolution of the passenger train, and pays particular attention to extolling the virtues of the elegant dining cars on the name trains, and the gastronomic delights that were served to their patrons. The country's love affair with rail travel did not last forever. By the late 1950s, cars and planes were the wave of the future. As for the railway, Jones writes: "The future was freight. "However, Jones offers a little solace with his chapter on the present-day Royal Canadian Pacific, a vintage train that offers passengers with the means a taste of the past, "with enough carpets, mahogany paneling, inlaid marquetry, cut glass, fine china, and bone-white linens to conjure up the railway's storied passenger service of old.

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