VIA Rail – The Canadian

This app is totally unusable. It will not work on an iPhone and appears to just be a very old-school screensaver with some unreadable buttons along the bottom. You cannot exit out of it without shutting down your phone and rebooting it. The Via Rail desktop site has no mobile functionality either. I cannot believe a national rail service has such an appallingly bad digital presence.

Absolutely useless app. It blocked my screen and I had to shut down my phone twice before deleting it. This is nothing but an infomercial and screen saver. There are no discernible schedules or booking tools. What an absolute embarrassment to VIA Rail!

Downloaded expecting a convenient app to book a trip and maybe even explore (destinations, routes, scenery, etc) but not the case. I have too many apps as it is and this one adds zero value IMHO.

First thing in my mind once you downloaded app related to Travel is the trip that I purchased. This one is not, and it seems like junior high school project. Waste my time!!

There is nothing worthwhile in the app.

The app is AMAZING for design… but no schedules, no fares, no trip planner, no delay warning, no payment/fare ticket, nada… agree beautiful design… but not practical.

We are booked on the Canadian...Vancouver to Toronto...in mid-2025, and are very excited about the trip. I wanted to understand a little better what we have in store. I had no idea this app existed...just stumbled across it a few days after we booked the trip. People rate apps based on lots of things. I care about whether the app does what it advertises. This doesn't claim to be a booking site, and it's not, so I don't hold that against it. Rather, this app claims that you will get to know the Canadian train. Which you absolutely do. So, five stars.

THE WORST. I have traveled the world and used rail apps everywhere but this is truly a hunk of junk. You can’t even use it on an iPhone MAX because the screen will not adjust to vertical and the print is so tiny you can’t get to any of the portals. I cannot believe this is a national railway company. This is absolutely inexcusable.

Waste of time. Fancy Video Game through the train, but how to use? Icons tiny on cell phone - leaving one to guess “what does this do”. Forced startup animation takes a long time. Was looking to see schedules and book, not play a video game.

And the award for worst app in the app store goes to…..🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁 Via Rail Canada! One would think this would be the perfect place to find schedules and...going out on a limb here… book a trip! But no. This genius app does none of these things. It's very nice if you want to learn about the train and are able to read French. But if you are an English speaker and are hoping to to accomplish an important task quickly, you will be very disappointed. Very disappointed, because you waste about 10 minutes to download and then come to the determination that this is nothing but a terrible commercial for what appears to be a beautiful train. Pro tip... Bring a magnifying glass if you are over 15 years old because they used font size .0005 to label navigation.