Trains of Recollection / Drawn from Fifty Years of Railway Service in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes

by D. B. Hanna

CHAPTER III.

Recalling Van Horne and the Canadian Pacific challenge to the Grand Trunk.

At sixty, one cannot realize how long he has lived until he sits down and counts up the revolutions he has seen since he arrived at man’s estate.

Of course, one does not mean political revolutions, merely; although they are becoming too numerous to mention. I left Scotland before the man who produced the crops from which the rent rolls of the House of Lords were paid could vote for a member of the Parliament which might send his sons to the wars. When I came to Canada in 1882, the St. Lawrence, below Montreal, flowed through a country that was about as clear of forests as it is to-day. But Ontario forty years ago, was half bush. Toronto was warmed with more wood than coal in winter. My friend Noel Marshall was called the wood king of this city. His trainloads of cordwood arrived almost daily from the territory around and beyond Lake Simcoe.

The locomotive with the big funnel-top out of which came wood sparks and smoke was still common on the railways. There wasn’t an air brake on a train. The electric light was just beginning to take its place among the marvels of the age; but the electric street car was only the dream of foolish persons who imagined that harness could be put upon the lightning. The telegraph was everywhere with the steam locomotive. But, though men had talked to each other from almost incredible distances, and prophecies were made by daring spirits about what would some day be accomplished by the human voice over an electrified wire; if you wanted to speak to a man in his office across the street, you crossed the street.

One of the surest things in human existence, to most shrewd people’s way of thinking, was the impossibility that men should ever fly. Anybody who would have predicted that in his lifetime it would be possible to send his voice out into the atmosphere in the form of a silent wave of ether, have it picked up by a piece of wire a thousand miles away and turned again into his voice so that one or one thousand people standing in a park could hear it as plainly as if the living person shouted into their ears—why, for such a prophet the only appropriate abiding place would have been where brains had ceased from troubling, and wisdom was at rest. As for the motor car, although the horseless vehicle was a subject of prophecy, the wildest visionary never proposed anything like the present speeds and dangers of the streets.

The advances that have been made in moral and social standards are, in their spheres, as remarkable as those just suggested are in the mechanical helps of life. But before we come to them, and their relation to one or two of the more remarkable variations from the way of conducting railways forty years ago, suppose we take a look at the railway situation from the constructional point of view, as it was in Canada when my service began with the Grand Trunk.

Towards the C.P.R. the high and mighty Grand Trunk directors in London had a disdain not unlike what their successors felt for the Canadian Northern when it first stretched its hand towards the London money market. The year that began my service produced two most remarkable developments in the general scheme and the administration of the C.P.R. The first day of 1882 saw the first day’s work of Van Horne as general manager of the C.P.R. The first year’s work of Van Horne saw also the abandonment of the plan of first reaching Winnipeg by rail from Eastern Canada via Sault Ste. Marie, instead of by Port Arthur. To give an idea of the atmosphere that it was sought to develop in the London money market at that time, it is interesting to see a pamphlet that was issued under Grand Trunk auspices, in opposition to the proposal to build the C.P.R. around the north shore of Lake Superior.

The territory now traversed by three transcontinental lines was described as “a perfect blank, even on the maps of Canada. All that is known of the region is that it would be impossible to construct this one section for the whole cash subsidy provided by the Canadian Government for the entire scheme.”