THE ROMANCE OF RAILWAY CONSTRUCTION
Modern Canada, as has been intimated, is the creation of railway
enterprise. But for the railway, not only the Prairie Provinces and
British Columbia, but the larger portion of the Eastern Provinces must
have remained unpopulated and undeveloped. In pre-railway days
population followed the banks of the St. Lawrence and the shores of the
Great Lakes. There were a few small scattered inland villages kept in
communication with the world by different “portages.” What was the use
of cultivating the land, felling the timber, and working the minerals
when there were no means for their conveyance and marketing? With the
coming of the railway, however, a great and glorious future dawned upon
Canada. Millions of square miles of “acreage” of what had been
considered worthless wilderness were seen to be rich in untold
potentialities of corn-raising. The interminable forests presented
themselves as sources of inexhaustible wealth. The lakes, other than the
Great Lakes, scattered through the Provinces, and the rivers navigable
for hundreds of miles, were seen through the eyes of practical
imagination as equally sources of wealth to vast populations of the
future who should reap the harvest of the fish and use the waters, in
conjunction with the railways, as means of transport.
The first railway in Canada was the short local line between Laprairie,
Quebec Province, opposite Montreal, and St. John, on the Richelieu
River, a distance of just under seventeen and a half miles. This railway
was incorporated into the system of the Grand Trunk Railway, which
received its Charter in 1852 from the Provinces of Upper and Lower
Canada. For a long time, however, railway construction hung fire, partly
due to the political troubles which came to an end with the
reconciliation of the French and English and the creation of the
Dominion of Canada by the Act of Confederation. It was the daring
enterprise of the Canadian Pacific Company that really inaugurated the
development of Canada to which the Dominion owes its present prosperity
and its great future.
We are not accustomed in the Old Country to talk affectionately about a
railway as a friend of the people and the country, but I had not been
long in Canada before I found that everybody talks of the “C.P.R.” as if
it were a personal friend. As I travelled westward through the Prairie
Provinces to Vancouver, farmers, commercial travellers, business men,
politicians, everybody kept bringing up what the Canadian Pacific
Railway has done for the Dominion. “The C.P.R. has made Canada,” “The
C.P.R. is at the back of Canada,” “Canada owes its future to the
C.P.R.,” and such expressions are heard all the while with monotonous
reiteration. The C.P.R. appears to fulfil the function in Canada
discharged by the weather in England of bridging awkward pauses in
conversation. It might be imagined that fairy financiers with no sordid
thought of dividends devised the scheme and carried through the
construction of the C.P.R. out of sheer benevolent desire to do good.
But financiers are not built that way. The fathers of the C.P.R. were
just men with vision who had a great dream, and they persuaded investors
to back the dream with millions of capital in the face of the
pessimistic cawings of a grand army of croakers. “The earnings of the
C.P.R.,” it was said, “will not pay for the axle-grease that it will
use.”
Forty years ago Canada was practically the Canada of the British
conquest of Quebec and the French cession to England. Even to-day the
entire population of the Dominion, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, is
not more than that of Greater London. West of Ontario stretched for
nearly 1,500 miles the level prairie land, many hundreds of miles from
the United States border northwards to the regions of Hudson’s Bay. The
prairie was roamed by buffalo, moose and caribou, who found rich feeding
in the abundant grass of the most productive soil of the world. Few
besides the Indians and the Hudson’s Bay traders, following certain
traditional trails, traversed the prairie. It was regarded as for ever a
waste as the sea is a waste. What was the use of cultivating an inland
wilderness 1,500 miles from the populated part of Ontario, and cut off
by the Rocky Mountains from British Columbia and the Pacific? But the
projectors of the C.P.R., in their dream, saw the prairie waving with
harvests; they saw cities rising amid the “waste,” and their financial
souls rejoiced in visions of phantom trains conveying wheat enough to
feed hundreds of millions along the phantom “steel” of the as yet
unsubstantial dream of the C.P.R. They convinced the Government that
there was “something in it,” and the Government gave every encouragement
to them to “go ahead.” To-day it might seem to some that the Government
was too generous in the concession of miles of land on either side of
the line to be constructed, but then the land had no value at all at the
time, and it never would have value till the “steel” was laid, and lots
of people who were considered shrewd judges prophesied that even then
the line would stretch for thousands of miles through country doomed for
ever to be uninhabited and profitless. To-day, for 3,800 miles, the
C.P.R. “steel” spans Canada from Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the Atlantic,
to Vancouver, on the Pacific. Its sleepers are laid a foot apart. Its
sectional construction parties have their wooden houses and workshops at
convenient intervals along the route. Thousands of towns and villages
have sprung up on either side and several of them are leaping ahead to
the size of cities running into hundreds of thousands of population. The
C.P.R. literally created four new Provinces of the Dominion, each now
with a Government of its own, Prime Minister, Cabinet and Parliament
complete—Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia. Other
railways are striking across Canada—the Canadian Northern and the Grand
Trunk are racing each other to the Pacific, which they expect to reach
this year—but the C.P.R. was the prophet pioneer, and on running down
by its line from the Rockies into Vancouver I found, thirty to forty
miles out of Vancouver, the construction men at work on the double
track, which is to duplicate the single line from the Pacific to the
Atlantic. The C.P.R. feels that it has got to be “on its mettle,” as
well as on its metal. Quite apart from rivalry, which it does not fear,
for the new lines will open up new country and get their traffic from
the new towns and villages and farming and lumber districts, the present
resources of the C.P.R. are heavily overtaxed to meet the growing
traffic of the Prairie Provinces, while the opening of the Panama Canal
is certain to set in a tremendous flow of traffic towards the Pacific,
as well as through the Lakes to the States and westward to the St.
Lawrence and the Atlantic.
People tell stories of the ubiquity and omniscience of the C.P.R.; of
its grandmotherly benevolence to the farmers, and its liberal treatment
of its _employés_. One shrewd settler at Regina told me that the C.P.R.
has rather “spoiled” the farmers by doing too much for them. There is
the matter of grain elevators, for instance. Grain is stored in these
huge tin-plate structures until it can be removed by the freight trains.
The farmers, said the critic, ought not to depend on a railway for the
storing of their grain. They should combine to provide their own
elevators. As it is, scores of millions of bushels have to remain in ear
on the prairie waiting to be threshed until the elevators are empty, or
the freight trains are available in the sidings. Prompt transit is
necessary, or the best of the market may be missed. The C.P.R. has
encouraged settlement on its concessions on the easiest terms to
suitable men. Just now it is creating “ready-made farms,” with house,
etc., all provided, for men with a little capital to enter into
possession of at once. Then it has its hotels all along the line. At a
pleasure resort in the Rockies a Canadian “drummer” said “the C.P.R. is
running up a sixteen-storey two-million dollar hotel at Lake Louise.” It
even regulates the time along the route. There is “C.P.R.” time,
changing in the central part of Canada to the European-Continental
twenty-four hour system. The story is told of a visitor who got tired of
having C.P.R. “deepos,” elevators, hotels, and the rest pointed out to
him, and when he asked what hour it was, and was told “22.18 C.P.R.
time,” he answered, “Good heavens! Does the C.P.R. own the sun and the
time, too?”
The piercing of the Rocky Mountains and the construction of the line
through 800 miles of mountainous country down to Vancouver was one of
the most audacious and successful pieces of railway engineering ever
done. British Columbia was worthless before the railway; to-day
Vancouver City has a population of 100,000, risen from 5,000 in less
than twenty years, and Victoria, the capital, on Vancouver Island, is
even larger, and one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It was a
wonderful revelation to see freight trains of a hundred wagons laden
with the lumber of British Columbia, and equally long trains on the
prairie laden with grain. Most of the grain is shipped at Fort William
and Port Arthur, the “twin cities” at the north-west angle of Lake
Superior. It is carried on ships rising from 12,000 and 15,000 tons
through the chain of the Great Lakes to the great distributing centres
of the Dominion and the United States.
A journey across Canada by the C.P.R. gives the finest bird’s-eye view
of the Dominion. Space fails to tell of experiences in the
sleeping-cars, and the dining-cars, which serve first-class hotel menus,
with such native specialities as turkey and cranberry sauce, prairie
chicken, and trout and white fish of the lakes. But it takes an English
visitor, to whom a journey from London to Edinburgh is an adventure,
some time to get used to stages of 1,400 miles, 890 miles, and 1,110
miles, which are samples of those we took.
The Grand Trunk Railway was never a financial success until it was taken
in hand by Mr. Charles Hays, one of the victims of the _Titanic_
tragedy. Mr. Hays was trained in the United States. It was a fortunate
day for the Grand Trunk when, at the period of the reconstruction of the
company in 1895, Mr. Hays, then Vice-President and General Manager of
the Wabash Railroad, was appointed General Manager with headquarters at
Montreal, and given the fullest freedom to go ahead. He began by
acquiring various local lines which were incorporated into the Grand
Trunk system. Many English capitalists were interested in the Grand
Trunk, and it has been very heavily financed with English money. Mr.
Hays completely revolutionised the whole system, had the single line
doubled, struck out branch lines in all directions, linked the Grand
Trunk up with other systems, and induced the company to follow the
example of the C.P.R. and strike straight across the continent to the
Pacific. By 1908 the Grand Trunk system included 5,192 miles of line.
Its Grand Trunk Pacific route lies partly in Canada and partly in the
United States, and the Pacific line is fed with passengers and freight
from both countries. The Grand Trunk struck into the Prairie Provinces
with depots at Fort William, Port Arthur, and many other strategic
centres. Mr. Hays had a great idea of the value of bridges. One of his
conceptions was a single-span double-track bridge crossing the Niagara
Gorge. This was opened in 1897, replacing the suspension bridge opened
in 1853. The Gorge Bridge is a splendid piece of engineering, the span
of the arch being 550 feet and the width of the railway flooring 32
feet, the lines being 245 feet above water. The Jubilee Bridge across
the St. Lawrence River is one of the great bridges of the world. It is
9,144 feet long with twenty-four piers 66 feet in width and 60 feet
above the water. Two other famous bridges are the International Bridge
across the Niagara between Fort Erie and Buffalo, 2,400 feet in length
with ten piers, and the bridge across the St. Lawrence at Coteau
Landing, which is 4,025 feet long. The once despised Grand Trunk is now
a formidable rival of the C.P.R. Mr. Hays’ ambition to make it a
trans-continental railway has been realised, for the “steel” has been
carried to the Pacific, opening up a vast stretch of new country for
settlement and development. Its terminal on the Pacific coast is Prince
Rupert, British Columbia, which is destined to run Vancouver very close
as a great western gateway of Canadian trade. The Grand Trunk is
developing hundreds of thousands of miles of the most fertile country of
the Prairie Provinces, and expects to play a leading part in the
development of the British Columbia resources of forestry, fruit
farming, mining and manufacturing industries. In Alberta it is looking
to take a very large share of the railway profit from the working of the
inexhaustible coal supplies and the manufacturing centres that will be
consequent on the development of the coal. Central Alberta, from
Edmonton to the Rocky Mountains, is likely in the future to be the
Canadian “Black Country,” far more extensive and productive than even
the original Black Country. It is calculated that the areas known as the
Edmonton coal district cover at least 10,000 square miles and contain at
least sixty million tons of workable coal. Already branch lines are
running to districts where the coal is even now being got, eastward from
Winnipeg to Moncton, the capital of New Brunswick. Main lines are being
constructed by the Canadian Government for leasing to the Grand Trunk
Pacific for a period of fifty years on conditions which ensure alike the
Government receiving a fair return for its money and the users of the
railway getting the fullest advantage of the lines. Altogether there is
every prospect of the Grand Trunk Railway fulfilling the most sanguine
dreams of the railway king who perished in the _Titanic_.
[Illustration: THE POWER PLOUGH IN SASKATCHEWAN.]
The third great Canadian Railway and youngest of the three, the Canadian
Northern, is forging ahead at a marvellous rate. The pioneers of the
Canadian Pacific struck through 3,000 miles of country practically
unpopulated, always with the Pacific as the object of their ambition.
The Canadian Northern promoters also had from the first in view the
construction of a trans-continental line, but their policy was not quite
the same as that of the C.P.R. founders. Their idea was to make their
line pay from the first by creating passenger and freightage traffic as
they went. This meant that the trans-continental ideal must wait for
realisation while the profit producing sections of the line were
establishing their earning capacity. The policy of the C.N.R. has
steadily justified itself. The main lines have been constructed section
by section, with branch lines striking out from them, each branch line
opening up productive new country. The Canadian Northern has
specialised, so to speak, on the Prairie Provinces, with Winnipeg as its
centre of operations, and the development of the West is largely due to
the enterprise of the C.N.R. It has linked up the West with the northern
part of Ontario, and its lines are ministering alike to the agricultural
prosperity of the West and the manufacturing and commercial prosperity
of the East. The C.N.R. runs through great forest regions and makes the
most of the lumber traffic. At Prince Albert, for instance, in the
centre of Saskatchewan, it has opened up an area of forest country into
which the widening stream of immigrants is always flowing. Prince
Albert—as I know from a Prince Albertian I met on the homeward
voyage—believes that it is “It.” Its ambition is to be a great
distributing centre for a territory as large as France and at the same
time a magnificent residential city on a site beautiful for situation.
The mills of the Prince Albert Lumber Company are the largest in Canada,
driven by electrical power supplied at an incredibly cheap rate.
The C.N.R. figures largely at Port Arthur, on the western shore of Lake
Superior, one of the great twin grain ports where hundreds of thousands
of bushels of the prairie crops are annually shipped. Port Arthur owes
its great and growing prosperity largely to the C.N.R., which has there
an elevator capable of storing 7,250,000 bushels of wheat. A 5,000-ton
steamer can lie alongside the elevator and be loaded up within an hour
or two and steam through the Great Lakes with its food freight to the
most important points in Canada and the United States.
The C.N.R., again, opens up new country in British Columbia, and is
certain to capture a very lucrative trade in that most beautiful
Province.
Each of these three railways, with continual construction, is founding
almost daily towns and cities of the future. Every three or four miles
there is a station. Immigrants and traders are encouraged in every
possible way to settle along the line. The station, the elevators,
facilities to acquire stock and land and to erect houses, are held out
as irresistible baits. The baits are eagerly seized by the more
enterprising men keen on taking advantage of the opportunities offered
by places at their very beginning. It is well recognised in Canada that
a man with grit, enterprise, ideas, willing to endure a little temporary
hardship, is bound to get on if he is in at the birth of an infant
community. He arrives with a few dollars in his pocket or with nothing.
Within ten years he may be the proprietor of a big hotel, a flourishing
newspaper, or may be mayor of a city with a population of anything
between 3,000 to 10,000. The fascination of the new life to a man whose
habits have not been crystallised in the environment of a populous city,
who likes a free and unconventional life, and who is prepared to devote
his attention exclusively to business until he has laid a solid
foundation for the future “pile,” is particularly attractive to one who
has youth and strength. I heard endless stories of men who in a
phenomenally short time had established themselves in such new cities,
and are now rich men able to give themselves, if they choose, a summer
in Europe or to spend the winter in Toronto or Montreal. Commercial
travellers hunting up trade in the new towns springing up along the
lines of construction told me many stories of the changes a year or two
makes in these new towns. You go to the end of the “steel” in course of
construction. You find a few shacks and a rough shanty that calls itself
an hotel. You return a year later when the line has advanced another
hundred or two hundred miles, and you find a street a third of a mile
long of wooden houses. There are several stores very likely; there is an
infant newspaper. There is an hotel, still primitive in its simplicity,
but tolerable. You can sleep on the beds and you can eat the rough food.
You return at the end of another couple of years—the street is a mile
long, several of the wooden houses have given place to houses of brick
and stone; the newspaper has quite established itself. Its editorials,
its “notes” and its “personals” have the breezy audacity and the
intimate personal touch which are characteristic of Canadian journalism.
There is a municipality which has learnt the art of “boosting,” and the
Real Estate man is well in evidence. He has snapped up enticing plots,
and in Winnipeg, Toronto, Montreal and other centres he is “boosting”
the town and its unequalled possibilities for all he is worth. This
springing up and rapid growth of new cities is repeating itself hundreds
of times a year in all the Provinces of Canada, from Nova Scotia to the
Pacific.
There is a fourth railway, the Intercolonial, constructed and owned by
the Dominion Government. This runs from Montreal to the Atlantic coast,
serving the Provinces of Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. It is
managed by a department of the Ministry of the Interior at Ottawa. The
Intercolonial is considered by Canadians rather slow-going.
Nationalisation and State control of railways is not yet a particularly
popular proposition in Canada; in fact, throughout all the Provinces,
and especially the Prairie Provinces and British Columbia, the idea of
State control and management of anything is regarded with increasing
suspicion. The Canadian prides himself on his independence and on his
ability to manage his own affairs. To the financing of railways by the
Dominion Government, and the great inducements held out to the C.P.R.,
Grand Trunk and the C.N.R. to push on with their construction, the
phenomenal railway development has been largely due.
As indicated in my account of the C.P.R., there are dangers to the
country through the powers granted to the companies in their early years
of constructive enterprise, but I found a very optimistic belief on the
part of Canadians that the Canadian people will be strong enough to
grapple with the railway companies if they show any signs of seriously
abusing their privileges. The competition between the three great
companies at present is so strong and so keen that the danger of their
uniting for the oppressive exploitation of the people by a trust
combining them all seems a possibility of the dim future. It is likely
enough that some Napoleon of finance in the United States, Canada, or
Great Britain may conceive and try to carry out the idea of such a
Dominion Railway Trust. If and when that happens a very interesting
situation will be created. He will not only have the public opinion of
the Dominion expressing itself and bringing itself to bear upon the
Dominion Parliament and Government, but he will have to deal with the
public opinion of the several Provinces, and this is a power that will
more and more have to be reckoned with. The Provinces are not at all
likely to consent to the Dominion Government bartering away their
Provincial rights in the use of the railways. It will be a very
dangerous thing to the Dominion Government if it provokes a conflict
between itself and the Governments of the Provinces. All the
probabilities point to the continuance of the independent companies.
There is room enough and to spare for a good fifty years to come for
each of them to use all the capital it can command in the development of
its own spheres of influence, and while that is so there seems no
necessity for any big combine that would compromise the interests either
of the passengers or the manufacturing and industrial users of the
railways.
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