VIA Rail Question / Advice
 

I'm looking at taking a train trip from Montreal to Halifax on the Ocean in June, and I have a question about the sleeper class service on board that train.

I would be travelling alone, and on the website it offers a comfort sleeper class double for the day I want to travel for roughly CAD$275. Would this be a private room or would they stick someone else in there with me? Do these have private bathrooms or is there a shared bath in the sleeper car somewhere? I couldn't open any of the pictures on the website.

Thanks.

And since I seem to be on the subject of night trains today, and nobody has answered this yet :
You will have the 'double' bedroom to yourself - they do not make you share a compartment with strangers, the way they do on many night trains in Europe.

Private bathrooms in all the compartments. Some of them - the 'deluxe' rooms - have rather awkward but usable private showers as well. The older wagons-lits have a shared shower (but still have private toilets in the compartments).

One of the good things about these "Renaissance" sleeping cars is the low surcharge for single occupancy of a double bedroom. Because there are no single bedrooms (formerly known as roomettes and soon to be called single cabins in VIA-speak) the surcharge, which is built into the quoted fare, is a mere 15% over what the per person double occupancy fare is. In the standard equipment, known as Budd or HEP sleepers, there are tiny roomettes available, about the size of a broom closet, so the surcharge for single use of a double room is 50%. Neither my wife nor I like the upper berth, especially in the Renaissance sleepers, so we splurge on two rooms.

One other benefit of the new sleepers: if you are travelling on VIA Preference points, there is is no point surcharge for single occupancy, except in the deluxe (shower-equipped) rooms. So for the same number of points as we would spend to take one two-berth room, my wife and I always take two rooms instead. VIA will try to put two people travelling together on points in the same room, but I simply say we want "single bedrooms" and they have to give us two rooms. This used to work with the deluxe rooms, but I guess someone figured out there was too much revenue loss so more points are required.