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By NANCY GIBBS

William Cornelius Van Horne, painter, poker player, collector of Japanese porcelain, was probably the man most responsible for the most beautiful train ride in the western hemisphere. It was 1881 when he took over construction of the trans-Canadian railway, a project that consumed several fortunes, 4 1/2 years of agonizing labor and an untold number of lives. "Since we can't export the scenery," he once said, expressing a frontiersman's thirsty love of the land, "we'll have to import the tourists."

For the past century, imported tourists and Canadians alike have treasured his handiwork. The legendary Canadian is one of the last great, long, unforgettable rides left in the world and the only daily transcontinental run in North America. But those who dream of taking the journey will have to start packing.

Last week the Canadian government, straining from a subsidy that costs about $85 a passenger, announced that, as of Jan. 15, 51% of Canada's national rail network and 37% of its work force will be eliminated. This means the loss of the Canadian and the end of an era. Additional cuts affect thousands of riders across Canada, and their reaction was loud and indignant. "They've cut the Maritimes and the prairies adrift," cried Charles Crosby, mayor of the Nova Scotian fishing town of Yarmouth. "The railway was one of the things that held us together."

Losing the Canadian is a sad sacrifice to the bottom line. It is a steel bond linking towns that nobody would otherwise visit with cities that nobody would otherwise leave. During the summer months, 3 out of 4 Canadian passengers are foreigners, seeking perhaps a window on a country. The rest of the travelers are natives, many of whom are seeing the land across the mountains for the first time.

The eleven-car train starts in Montreal and hooks up in Sudbury with another train from Toronto before setting out toward the west, along a 2,800-mile route. It plows across the vast prairies of Saskatchewan, where wheat and canola fields stretch from horizon to horizon. Then it is on to the Rockies, along ledges that would make an aerialist faint. It presses near the old Calamity Curve, through the Jaws of Death Gorge and, lest passengers have failed to get the message, into the Devil's Caldron.

Riders love the journey for what they can dream as well as for what they can see: the elk, which roam the Rockies ("Is that a reindeer?"); the prairie towns, which resemble those in a grainy old movie; the vanilla flatlands; the rolling farms. "More than anything else I can imagine, it makes you appreciate the size and grandeur of the country," says Geraldine Stevenson, 71, a retired schoolteacher from Saskatchewan who has ridden the Canadian many times. "It seems we're always being nibbled at here and there. We're losing our identity, and trains are a part of that."

Signs of that loss, alas, had already been felt. The starched tablecloths and silver on the Canadian have long since disappeared from the dining car, and the salmon dinner has lately been spawned in a microwave. And yet the romance lingers. "The train is what welded a widespread and thinly populated nation together," says Canadian novelist W.O. Mitchell, who rode the freights across his native prairies during the Great Depression. "I don't guess that's too relevant now with air travel and cars and television, but it doesn't change my sadness at seeing what's happening."

With reporting by James L. Graff/Ottawa