THE GREAT TRANSCONTINENTAL RAILWAYS
Can you imagine all the railroads of the United States divided into two
systems, paralleling each other from our Atlantic coast to the Pacific?
Think of them as north of a line drawn from Baltimore westward through
St. Louis to San Francisco. Let the distance between terminals be
nearly four thousand miles, and the total length of track ten times as
great. Finally, suppose that the larger of the two systems is owned and
operated by Uncle Sam, and the other by such a corporation as the New
York Central. If you can do that you will have the background of the
railroad situation in Canada to-day.
With a mile of track for every twenty-three people, Canada has more
railroads in proportion to her population than any other country on
earth. Only the United States and Russia have a greater total mileage.
Geographically, British America extends from our northern border to the
Arctic Ocean, but the active life of the Dominion is mostly confined to
a strip of territory averaging less than five hundred miles wide from
north to south and more than three thousand miles long.
Our railroad development began in the East and extended westward,
but we have no system that reaches from coast to coast. Canada,
on the other hand, has two such systems. Neither have we any such
transportation service as the Canadian Pacific, which can take a
passenger on board ship at Liverpool, Hamburg, Cherbourg, land him in
Canada, carry him across the continent and across the Pacific, and set
him down in Japan or China, putting him up at its own hotels whenever
he wants to stop over.
Before the World War, the Canadian Pacific, with some fourteen thousand
miles of its own rails, and five thousand more under its operation,
was the world’s largest land and water transportation system under one
management. To go over all its lines would take nearly three weeks of
continuous travel behind a fast engine. Now it has been eclipsed on
land by the Canadian National lines, with twenty-two thousand miles of
track, owned and operated by the Dominion government.
I have ridden for thousands of miles over both of the present systems,
and have made trips in Canada when some of the lines were in the
process of building. I have talked with the pioneers of railroad
development in the Dominion and the officials of the great railway
organizations of to-day. I have watched the wheat trains pull out of
Winnipeg, one every half hour, all day and all night. Both the Canadian
National and the Canadian Pacific are doing their jobs well, and both
furnish excellent equipment and service on their main lines. As a rule,
the trains run at slower speed than the best expresses of the United
States, and, excepting the Trans-Canada Limited, they stop at places so
small that they would get only a shriek of the whistle from our fast
railway flyers. Most of the lines have only a single track, but this
is generally sufficient to handle the traffic. Both systems operate
almost exclusively their own sleeping and dining cars. Each has also
its own express service, and combined they have more than one hundred
thousand miles of telegraph lines open to the use of the public. The
food I have eaten on the dining cars here has averaged in quality above
that served on eastern trains in the United States. The prices are
about the same, though the portions, as a rule, are more generous.
[Illustration: With a population of less than two and one half persons
per square mile, strung out across a continent nearly three thousand
miles wide, Canada has had to make enormous investments in railroads to
bind the country together.]
[Illustration: “Selling the scenery” has become a great source of
revenue to Canada’s railroads, which are experts in exploiting the
natural beauties of the Dominion. Americans furnish the bulk of the
patronage over the scenic routes.]
The managements of both of these systems make strenuous endeavours
to cultivate the highest morale in their employees, and to win their
coöperation in the struggle for efficiency. Every man in the Canadian
railroad service understands that the Dominion needs more and more
people, and from managing vice presidents to dining-car stewards, each
seems to have constituted himself an entertainment committee of one.
I have never received anywhere more courteous treatment from train
men, and I notice that neither the brakemen nor the sleeper conductors
consider themselves above helping me with my numerous pieces of baggage.
The Canadian Pacific has a chain of thirteen hotels supplemented by
eleven bungalow camps extending from St. Andrews, New Brunswick, to
Victoria in British Columbia. The Canadian National lines operate
half as many between Ottawa and the Rockies. Both organizations are
most enterprising in selling not merely transportation, but all the
attractions, business opportunities, and resources of Canada. Either
one will cheerfully locate a newly arrived immigrant on the land,
take an American sportsman on a hunting trip, find a factory site or
lumber tract for a group of capitalists, or help a bridegroom plan his
honeymoon journey. Both are tremendous forces for advertising Canada.
Canada’s railroads have made the country. They have always been, and
still are, ahead of the population and the traffic. Settlement in
Canada has followed, instead of preceding, railroad construction, and
the roads themselves have had to colonize the territories served by new
lines. Uneconomic railroad building has been a part of the price the
Dominion has had to pay, not only for settlers, but also for political
unity. Both the Maritime Provinces and British Columbia refused to
become parts of the Dominion except on condition that the Ottawa
government build railways connecting them with central Canada. From
that day to this, political pressure has been the force behind much of
the railroad building in the Dominion.
The Canada that we know to-day may be said to have had its beginning
when the Canadian Pacific Railway was put through to the west coast.
In 1880 the job was turned over to a syndicate that soon became world
famous. Its contract called for completion of the line in ten years,
but it was finished within half that time. This saved British Columbia
to the Dominion, and gave the British Empire another link in its world
communications, including a direct route through its own possessions
to the Far East and Australia. Within two years after it reached the
western ocean, the Canadian Pacific began its steamship service to
Japan and China, and tapped the Orient for cargoes to furnish traffic
on its land line. Sixteen years later it bridged the Atlantic. It now
has on both oceans a fleet of more than thirty vessels, including
some of the finest passenger steamers afloat. In its lake, river, and
coastwise services it operates fifty additional ships. It offers now
a favoured route between London and the Far East. The distance from
Canton, China, to Liverpool, via Canada, is fifteen hundred miles
shorter than by way of San Francisco and New York, and the journey
takes much less time than that by the Suez or Panama all-water routes.
Much of the main line between Montreal and Vancouver is being double
tracked; the mountain grades are constantly being reduced; tunnels
are taking the place of construction exposed to the snows; branches
and connections have been extended northward into new country, and
southward to connect with United States lines. To pay its nearly
seventy-five thousand employees takes almost eight million dollars a
month. Its car shops at Angus, near Montreal, are one of the largest
works of the kind on the continent, and they employ more than six
thousand men. Its freight yard at Winnipeg is among the biggest in the
world. Though the company is not fifty years old, its total assets were
recently valued at a figure in excess of one billion dollars. It is,
next to the government, the most powerful single organization within
the Dominion, and its influence is felt in Europe and Asia.
The success of the Canadian Pacific, and the development that followed,
started in Canada the fever for railroad construction that burned
itself out only a few years ago. The provincial and the Dominion
governments and even municipalities eagerly backed almost any railroad
project that promised to open up new territory. Not only were charters
granted freely, but the obligations of the constructing companies were
guaranteed, and cash subsidies advanced to the promoters of new lines.
The actual transportation needs of large areas were discounted decades
in advance, and competing lines were built parallel to one another in
districts producing hardly enough traffic for a single railroad.
In 1903 the Grand Trunk, the oldest railroad system in Canada,
contracted with the government for the construction of a new
transcontinental line from Quebec to Winnipeg and from Winnipeg to
Prince Rupert, a new terminus on the Pacific Coast, a total of 3559
miles. In the meantime, another road, the Canadian Northern, starting
in Manitoba, spread itself through the prairie provinces, crossed the
Rockies, and entered into competition with the Canadian Pacific at
Vancouver. By 1914 it had bought and built a total of 9400 miles of
railway. The Grand Trunk also had grown, and it then had 7500 miles of
tracks, a chain of hotels, steamship lines on the Pacific coast, and
grain elevators and terminals in the Dominion and the United States.
Both roads crossed the Rockies at the same point, giving Canada two
transcontinental lines over the northern route where one would have
been plenty.
It was in 1914 that these railroad chickens came home to Ottawa to
roost, and the end of the World War found the government up to its neck
in the transportation business. This did not come about by anybody’s
choosing, but through the working of forces set in motion years ago.
The Dominion government was first led into running railroads by its
bargain with the Maritime Provinces. Out of this came government
operation of the Intercolonial Railways serving the eastern provinces
and joining them to the St. Lawrence basin. This system never earned
any profits. The government built the National Transcontinental from
Quebec to Winnipeg on the understanding that the Grand Trunk would
lease it for fifty years. When it was finished, the corporation
begged off, and the government was compelled to operate the line. In
1914, the owners of the Canadian Northern announced that unless they
received sixty million dollars at once they would have to suspend. They
got the money. Two years later it was the Grand Trunk Pacific that
appealed to Ottawa for financial aid. Sustaining these railroads was
such a drain on the public treasury that finally the government assumed
responsibility for all their obligations and absolute control of the
properties. It then began to weld them into the single system now known
as the Canadian National Railways.
For years the Canadian Pacific Railway has paid dividends regularly.
The lines making up the Canadian National have, for the most part,
never paid anything, and they were unloaded upon the government
because they were regarded more as liabilities than as assets. As the
largest taxpayer in Canada, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company must
contribute indirectly to the support of its competitor, unless the
government lines are able to earn their own way.
After the war, one year’s deficit on the government lines was
sixty-seven million dollars. In railroad subsidies, Canada has paid
out nearly three hundred million dollars. Bonds and other railroad
obligations to the total of four hundred and fifty-five millions have
been guaranteed, while four hundred and seventy millions of public
moneys were spent in building roads for the government. One student of
Canada’s railroad policy tells me that the national treasury would now
be four hundred millions to the good if the government had given the
National Transcontinental, the Canadian Northern, and the Grand Trunk
Pacific to some corporation, and had thrown in a cash bonus of two
hundred millions besides.
The government railroads now furnish a complete service to virtually
all parts of Canada, including the chief ports, from Halifax on the
east coast to Vancouver and Prince Rupert on the west. The Canadian
National Railways operate the Grand Trunk hotels and west coast
steamers, and also the sixty-five ships of the Canadian Government
Merchant Marine, which sail the seven seas. The curious situation
exists of railroads owned by the government of Canada using two
thousand miles of track in the United States. Nothing was thought of
the Grand Trunk having terminals at Portland, Maine and New London,
Connecticut, and Chicago, but the government ownership of these
properties raises the possibility of conflict between the two countries
in railroad matters.
The government is fortunate in having in charge of the Canadian
National lines Sir Henry Thornton, one of the great railroad men of
the time. To him all Canada is looking to find the way out of the
wilderness into which circumstances have brought the Dominion. Under
his administration duplicated services are being eliminated, and the
deficits have been greatly reduced. He is confident the lines can be
made self-supporting. He said the other day:
“The world expects the Canadian National Railways to fail. It does not
believe that we can make them succeed. I do. I believe that if the army
of workers lines up behind us, we shall achieve the greatest success
the annals of transportation have ever recorded.”
Though he is to-day a British subject, Sir Henry was born an American.
His boyhood home was in Lafayette, Indiana. From St. Paul’s School
in New Hampshire and the University of Pennsylvania, he went to
the Pennsylvania Railroad. He rose to be manager of the Long Island
Railroad, where he had much to do with the construction and operation
of the Pennsylvania Terminal in New York City. England sent for him
in 1914 to manage the Great Eastern Railway, which has the largest
passenger traffic of any railroad in the world, and during the war he
was in charge of all British army transportation in Europe.
Sir Henry is not the first railroad genius America has furnished to
Canada. Lord Shaughnessy, for many years the president and then the
chairman of the Canadian Pacific, was born in Milwaukee. When he was a
boy of fifteen he went to work for the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul
Railroad. I once spent a morning with him in his office at Montreal,
where he told me of his early career and his vision of the future
of Canada and the great transportation system that he had raised up
from infancy. His successor, E. W. Beatty, is the first Canadian-born
president the Canadian Pacific has ever had.
Thomas Shaughnessy came to Canada at the invitation of William Van
Home, another American. Van Home became the manager of the project
after the government had given up hope of building a road across
western Canada. It was he who carried it through the early period of
desperate struggle with the wilderness and the equally desperate fight
for money with which to meet the payroll. Years ago he established the
present policy of courtesy to passengers, and placarded the system with
a demand for “Parisian politeness on the C. P. R.” During their régime,
both men had associated with them many other Americans whom they called
to Canada to lend a hand in one of the greatest transportation jobs the
world has ever known.