Hi John,
Take a look at http://www.seat61.com it has everything you need to know about train travel wordwide, once the page loads, scroll down to America, then open up the Canadian page. The guy that runs the site, Mark Smith works in the railway industry, and he has probably forgotten more about railway travel than most of us know about it. We use the site whenever we take the train abroad, and it's never let us down yet.

Hi polisian
Thank you for the info , the web site is excellent and I would like to do a train trip in late January 2009 for my wife's 65 birthday so I'll be checking with Travel agents to see if it can be arranged at a reasonable price . preferably flying from a Scottish airport . regards wee-john