Produced by Al Haines
[Transcriber's note: This book has varying page headers. Those headers
have been collected at the start of each chapter as an introductory
paragraph.]
[Frontispiece: 'The surveyor, often an explorer as well, striking out
into the wilderness in search of mountain pass or lower grade.' From a
colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys]
THE
RAILWAY BUILDERS
A Chronicle of Overland Highways
BY
OSCAR D. SKELTON
TORONTO
GLASGOW, BROOK & COMPANY
1916
_Copyright in all Countries subscribing to
the Berne Convention_
{v}
CONTENTS
Page
I. THE COMING OF THE RAILWAY . . . . . . . . . . . 1
II. EARLY TRAVEL IN CANADA . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
III. THE CALL FOR THE RAILWAY . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
IV. THE CANADIAN BEGINNINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
V. THE GRAND TRUNK ERA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
VI. THE INTERCOLONIAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
VII. THE CANADIAN PACIFIC--BEGINNINGS . . . . . . . . 109
VIII. BUILDING THE CANADIAN PACIFIC . . . . . . . . . 131
IX. THE ERA OF AMALGAMATION . . . . . . . . . . . . 169
X. THE CANADIAN NORTHERN . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
XI. THE EXPANSION OF THE GRAND TRUNK . . . . . . . . 196
XII. SUNDRY DEVELOPMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220
XIII. SOME GENERAL QUESTIONS . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 248
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
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ILLUSTRATIONS
'THE SURVEYOR, OFTEN AN EXPLORER AS WELL,
STRIKING OUT INTO THE WILDERNESS IN SEARCH
OF MOUNTAIN PASS OR LOWER GRADE' . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
From a colour drawing by C. W. Jefferys.
THE FIRST RAILWAY ENGINE IN CANADA, CHAMPLAIN AND ST LAWRENCE RAILROAD,
1837 . . . . . . _Facing page_ 38
From a print in the Chateau de Ramezay.
RAILROADS AND LOTTERIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 48
An Early Canadian Prospectus.
SIR FRANCIS HINCKS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 66
From a portrait in the Dominion Archives.
RAILWAYS OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA, 1860 (Map) . . . " 92
SIR GEORGE SIMPSON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 110
From a print in the John Ross Robertson Collection,
Toronto Public Library.
SIR SANDFORD FLEMING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 114
From a photograph by Topley.
FLEMING ROUTE AND THE TRANS-CONTINENTALS (Map) . . . " 118
{viii}
RAILWAYS OF CANADA, 1880 (Map) . . . . . . . . . . . " 130
LORD STRATHCONA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 134
From a photograph by Lafayette, London.
LORD MOUNT STEPHEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 140
From a photograph by Wood and Henry, Dufftown.
By courtesy of Sir William Van Horne.
SIR WILLIAM CORNELIUS VAN HORNE . . . . . . . . . . " 148
From a photograph by Notman.
RAILWAYS OF CANADA, 1896 (Map) . . . . . . . . . . . " 180
CANADIAN NORTHERN RAILWAY, 1914 (Map) . . . . . . . " 194
CHARLES MELVILLE HAYS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . " 200
From a photograph by Notman.
GRAND TRUNK SYSTEM, 1914 (Map) . . . . . . . . . . . " 218
CANADIAN PACIFIC RAILWAY, 1914 (Map) . . . . . . . . " 224
GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY, 1914 (Map) . . . . . . . . . " 230
RAILWAYS OF CANADA, 1914 (Map) . . . . . . . . . . . " 238
{1}
CHAPTER I
THE COMING OF THE RAILWAY
The Coming of the Railway--The Iron Road--The New Power--Engine and
Rail--The Work of the Railway
On the morning of October 6, 1829, there began at Rainhill, in England,
a contest without parallel in either sport or industry. There were
four entries:
Braithwaite and Ericsson's _Novelty_.
Timothy Hackworth's _Sans-pareil_.
Stephenson and Booth's _Rocket_.
Burstall's _Perseverance_.
These were neither race-horses nor stagecoaches, but rival types of the
newly invented steam locomotive. To win the L500 prize offered, the
successful engine, if weighing six tons, must be able to draw a load of
twenty tons at ten miles an hour, and to cover at least seventy miles a
day. Little wonder that an eminent Liverpool merchant declared that
only a parcel of charlatans could have devised such a test, and wagered
that if a locomotive ever went ten miles an hour, he {2} would eat a
stewed engine-wheel for breakfast!
The contest had come about as the only solution of a deadlock between
the stubborn directors of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, or
tramway, then under construction, and their still more stubborn
engineer, one George Stephenson. The railway was nearly completed, and
the essential question of the motive power to be used had not yet been
decided. The most conservative authorities thought it best to stick to
the horse; others favoured the use of stationary steam-engines, placed
every mile or two along the route, and hauling the cars from one
station to the next by long ropes; Stephenson, with a few backers,
urged a trial of the locomotive. True, on the Stockton and Darlington
Railway, the first successful public line ever built, opened four years
before, a Travelling Engine, built by the same dogged engineer, had
hauled a train of some forty light carriages nearly nine miles in
sixty-five minutes, and had even beaten a stage-coach, running on the
highway alongside, by a hundred yards in the twelve miles from
Darlington to Stockton. But even here the locomotive was only used to
haul freight; passengers were still carried in old {3} stage-coaches,
which were mounted on special wheels to fit the rails, and were drawn
by horses. The best practical engineers in England, when called into
consultation, inspected the Stockton road, and then advised the
perplexed directors to instal twenty-one stationary engines along the
thirty-one miles of track, rather than to experiment with the new
Travelling Engine.
'What can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous,' the _Quarterly
Review_ had declared in 1825, 'than the prospect held out of
locomotives travelling twice as fast as stage-coaches! We should as
soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off
upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets as trust themselves to the
mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate.' And the _Quarterly_
was not alone in its scepticism. The directors of the new railway had
found great difficulty in obtaining a charter from parliament--a
difficulty registered in a bill for parliamentary costs reaching
L27,000, or over $4000 a mile. Canal proprietors and toll-road
companies had declaimed against the attack on vested rights. Country
squires had spluttered over the damage to fox covers. Horses could not
plough in neighbouring fields. {4} Widows' strawberry-beds would be
ruined. What would become of coachmen and coach-builders and
horse-dealers? 'Or suppose a cow were to stray upon the line; would
not that be a very awkward circumstance?' queried a committee member,
only to give Stephenson an opening for the classic reply in his slow
Northumbrian speech: 'Ay, verra awkward for the coo.' And not only
would the locomotive as it shot along do such varied damage; in truth,
it would not go at all; the wheels, declared eminent experts, would not
grip on the smooth rails, or else the engines would prove top-heavy.
To decide the matter, the directors had offered the prize which brought
together the _Novelty_, the _Sans-pareil_, the _Rocket_, and the
_Perseverance_, engines which would look almost as strange to a modern
crowd as they did to the thousands of spectators drawn up along the
track on that momentous morning. The contest was soon decided. The
_Novelty_, an ingenious engine but not substantially built, broke down
twice. The _Sans-pareil_ proved wasteful of coal and also met with an
accident. The _Perseverance_, for all its efforts, could do no better
than five or six miles an hour. The _Rocket_ alone met all
requirements. In a {5} seventy-mile run it averaged fifteen miles an
hour and reached a maximum of twenty-nine. Years afterwards, when
scrapped to a colliery, the veteran engine was still able, in an
emergency, to make four miles in four and a half minutes. 'Truly,'
declared Cropper, one of the directors who had stood out for the
stationary engine and the miles of rope, 'now has George Stephenson at
last delivered himself.'
Stephenson had the good fortune, he had earned it indeed, to put the
top brick on the wall, and he alone lives in popular memory. But the
railway, like most other great inventions, came about by the toil of
hundreds of known and unknown workers, each adding his little or great
advance, until at last some genius or some plodder, standing on their
failures, could reach success. Both the characteristic features of the
modern railway, the iron road and the steam motive power, developed
gradually as necessity urged and groping experiment permitted.
The iron road came first. When men began to mine coal in the north of
England, the need grew clear of better highways to bear the heavy
cart-loads to market or riverside. About 1630 one Master Beaumont laid
down broad {6} wooden rails near Newcastle, on which a single horse
could haul fifty or sixty bushels of coal. The new device spread
rapidly through the whole Tyneside coal-field. A century later it
became the custom to nail thin strips of wrought iron to the wooden
rails, and about 1767 cast-iron rails were first used. Carr, a
Sheffield colliery manager, invented a flanged rail, while Jessop,
another colliery engineer, took the other line by using flat rails but
flanged cart-wheels. The outburst of canal building in the last
quarter of the eighteenth century overshadowed for a time the growth of
the iron road, but it soon became clear that the 'tramway' was
necessary to supplement, if not to complete, the canal. In 1801 the
first public line, the Surrey Iron Railway, was chartered, but it was
not until 1825 that the success of the Stockton and Darlington Railway
proved that the iron way could be made as useful to the general
shipping public as to the colliery owner. At the outset this road was
regarded as only a special sort of toll-road upon which any carrier
might transport goods or passengers in his own vehicles, but experience
speedily made it necessary for the company to undertake the complete
service.
It took longer to find the new motive power, {7} but this, too, first
came into practical use in the land where peace and liberty gave
industry the fostering care which the war-rent Continent could never
guarantee. Nowadays it seems a simple thing to turn heat energy into
mechanical energy, to utilize the familiar expansive power of water
heated to vapour. Yet centuries of experiment, slowly acquired
mechanical dexterity, and an industrial atmosphere were needed for the
development of the steam-engine, and later of the locomotive.
Inventiveness was not lacking in the earlier days. In the second
century before Christ, Hero of Alexandria had devised steam fountains
and steam turbines, but they remained scientific toys, unless for the
miracle-working purposes to which legend says that eastern priests
adapted them. So in the seventeenth century, when the Norman, Solomon
de Caus, claimed that with the vapour of boiling water he could move
carriages and navigate ships, Cardinal Richelieu had him put in prison
as a madman. About 1628 an Italian, Giovanni Branca, invented an
engine which had the essential features of the modern turbine, but his
crude apparatus lacked efficiency.
Once more the coal-mines of England set invention working on a
definite, continuous {8} object. As the shafts were sunk to lower and
lower levels, it became impossible to pump the water out of the mines
by horse power, and the aid of steam was sought. Just at the close of
the seventeenth century Savery devised the first commercial
steam-engine, or rather steam fountain, which applied cold water to the
outside of the cylinder to condense the steam inside and produce a
vacuum; while Papin, one of the Huguenot refugees to whom industrial
England owed so much, planned the first cylinder and piston engine.
Then in 1705 Newcomen and Cawley, working with Savery, took up Papin's
idea, separated boiler from cylinder, and thus produced a vacuum into
which atmospheric pressure forced the piston and worked the pump. Next
Humphrey Potter, a youngster hired to open and shut the valves of a
Newcomen engine, made it self-acting by tying cords to the engine-beam,
had his hour for play or idling, and proved that if necessity is the
mother of invention, laziness is sometimes its father. Half a century
passed without material advance; even as perfected in detail by
Smeaton, the Newcomen engine required thirty-five pounds of coal to
produce one horse-power per hour, as against one pound {9} to-day.
Then James Watt, instrument-maker in Glasgow, seeing that much of the
waste of steam was due to the alternate chilling and heating of the
cylinder, added a separate condenser in which to do the chilling, and
kept the temperature of the cylinder uniform by applying a
steam-jacket. Later, by applying steam and a vacuum to each side of
the piston alternately, and by other improvements, Watt, with his
partner Boulton, brought the reciprocating steam-engine to a high stage
of efficiency.
It took fifty years longer to combine the steam-engine and the rail.
French and American inventors devised steam carriages, which came to
nothing. England again led the way. At Redruth in Cornwall Boulton
and Watt had a branch for the erection of stationary engines in Cornish
tin-mines, in charge of William Murdock, later known as inventor of the
system of lighting by gas. Murdock devised a steam carriage to run
upon the ordinary highway, but was discouraged by his employers from
perfecting the machine. Another mechanic at Redruth, Richard
Trevithick, captain in a tin-mine, took up the torch, built a 'Dragon'
for use on the common highway, but was baffled by the {10} hopeless
badness of the roads, and turned to making a locomotive for use on the
iron ways of the Welsh collieries. Two years later, in 1803, he had
constructed an ingenious engine, which could haul a ten-ton load five
miles an hour, but the engine jolted the road to pieces, and the
versatile inventor was diverted to other schemes. Blenkinsop of Leeds
in 1812 had an engine built with a toothed wheel working in a racked
rail, which did years of good service; and next year at Wylam on the
Tyne a colliery owner, Blackett, had the _Puffing Billy_ built, and
proved that smooth wheels would grip smooth rails. Still another year,
and an engine-wright in a Tyneside colliery, George Stephenson, himself
born at Wylam, devised the _Bluecher_, doubling effectiveness by turning
the exhaust steam into the chimney to create a strong draught. Using
this steam blast, and adopting the multitubular boiler from a French
inventor, Seguin, Stephenson finally scored a triumph, due not so much
to unparalleled genius as to dogged perseverance in working out his own
ideas and in adapting the ideas of other men.
Thus by slow steps the steam railway had come. It was a necessity of
the age. Crude means of transport might serve the need of {11} earlier
days when each district was self-contained and self-sufficing. But now
the small workshop and the craftsman's tool were giving way to the huge
factory and the power-driven machine. The division of labour was
growing more complex. Each district was becoming more dependent on
others for markets in which to buy and to sell. Traffic was
multiplying. The industrial revolution brought the railway, and the
railway quickened the pace of the industrial revolution.
To some critics, as to Ruskin, railways have appeared 'the loathesomest
form of deviltry now extant, animated and deliberate earthquakes,
destructive of all nice social habits or possible natural beauty.'
Animated and deliberate earthquakes they were indeed to prove,
transforming social and industrial and political structures the world
over. With the telegraph and the telephone, they greatly widened the
scope and quickened the pace of business operations, making it
possible, and therefore necessary, for the captain of industry or
finance of the twentieth century to have under control ten times the
press of affairs which occupied his eighteenth-century forerunner. The
railway levelled prices and levelled manners. It enabled floods of
settlers {12} to sweep into all the waste places of the earth, clamped
far-flung nations into unity, and bound country to country.
Nowhere was the part played so momentous as in the vast spaces of the
North American continent, and not least in the northern half. The
railway found Canada scarcely a geographical expression, and made it a
nation.
{13}