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

by D. B. Hanna

Allied with this Quebec form of public recognition of railway expansion were the more distinctly political aspects of the development. For nearly thirty years the Intercolonial had traversed the province on the southern side of the St. Lawrence. Whatever else might not be in politics the Intercolonial most certainly was. The railway was as much a part of every candidate’s hopes and fears as the ballot box itself. It was as close to every member’s duty, if he supported the Government, as the orders of the day. A share of dominion over it was one of the sustaining longings of hope deferred in the heart of every opposition M.P. whose constituency it touched.

For two generations, as statisticians reckon time, and for five generations as politicians take the count, the first Government-owned, Government-operated railway in Canada was regarded, in the territory it traversed, more as a rich and benevolent relative than as a servant who gave service only for money received. One feature of the “rich relative” notion of public-owned railways should be mentioned tenderly. It was a legacy from the days when barter was most common as a form of disposing of farm products, and eggs and butter were traded at the general store at values that were amazingly low, for groceries and dry goods, the costs of which were extraordinarily high. Real money was scarce indeed, everywhere, and a job that brought pay in cash was a rare and coveted beneficence. The best job of all was a post with the Government. All over the country there was severe competition for country postmasterships, the revenue from which would nowadays buy but small quantities of gasoline. Wherever the Government railway ran, a job as a section hand became a lawful prize of electioneering war.

It is useless to mourn bitterly over these conditions which are an inheritance not only from the economic construction of Canada, but also from the Government departments of the Old Lands—Britain as well as France. Men bought civil appointments as they bought the right to appoint their own friends to the livings that rewarded the cure of souls. When I was an office boy in Glasgow the system of purchase in the British army was still operating. It cost twenty-two hundred dollars to get a cadetship and sixty-three hundred dollars to become a lieutenant-colonel. Every intermediate step in promotion was paid for commensurately with the rank acquired.

The abolition of purchase in the British army was only achieved after long and bitter opposition. In the younger days of those of us who are still on the humorous side of seventy, the idea that there must be perquisites attached to all sorts of offices was apparently as invincible as the Rock of Gibraltar. The cook had the fat, the fur and the feathers from everything that came into the squire’s kitchen. The official of the College of Heralds and the royal clerk who records the outpourings of the fountain of honour receive their fees. The notion that it isn’t necessary to work very hard at a Government job wasn’t born on this continent. It was expressed in the sinecure that was waiting for a British Prime Minister’s son, and in the ease with which the clerk in Whitehall could begin his work a little after ten, and lay down his quill a little before four.

We are getting away from that quality of public service, though it isn’t always easy to make progress along a straight and thorny path—and it is harder to do it in some parts of Canada than in others. With a country so vast, and a population so diverse, it is impossible that the sectional benefit will always be subordinated to the advantage of the whole. The railway builder, as well as the Government, has to recognize, and at times, to capitulate to something which he does not want in order to be able to get something he really needs. The building of the transcontinental Canadian Northern, as a privately directed enterprise had its share of these difficulties. So did the undertaking of a transcontinental system by the Canadian Government shortly after the Canadian Northern entered Eastern Canada as the second stage of its evolution from a prairie carrier to a nationwide system.

There was a great difference between the methods followed by the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific transcontinentals. Fundamentally, the Canadian Northern was a wheat-country road, designed to cover the most productive regions, and to be assured of the essential business which would carry, later, the more costly construction in the more sparsely populated, less productive territory. The other line was an across-continent project from the beginning, without any initial development of traffic whatever on the prairies. Its cost across the northern wilderness to the Western plains was evidently only guessed before the scheme was submitted to Parliament—at least the public never saw the detailed reports of engineers who had gone over the ground and estimated the cost per mile. The expenditure on original construction was out of all proportion to the earnings, because the road was built on the scale of a trunk main line, when it could only expect to secure revenue from a pioneering service.

There is great disappointment in old Quebec, to this day, because the National Transcontinental is not bringing to the ancient port the business that was predicted for it. It is true that the railway has opened up country in northern Quebec, through the energy and skill of the French-Canadian pioneer to whom the axe is as much the implement of agriculture as the plough. But the Western wheat is not coming to the St. Lawrence by way of La Tuque; and the good people of the city think it ought to be pouring in.

The conditions are impossible for such a consummation and bliss. Wheat moves from the prairies down to the seaboard in accordance with commercial laws of gravitation which express themselves in the relative terms at which cargoes can be shipped from the busiest ports in America, to the biggest ports in Europe. Merely because a railway has been built across Northern Quebec to Quebec harbour, which is closed half the year, the law of commercial gravitation will not be reversed.

But the railway remains a monument to a demand that was based more on the ambitions of a section of Canada than on the true railway factors of a situation that became more political than economic. The cost of construction finally worked out at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a mile—twice as much as the Canadian Northern spent to build through the mountains from the Yellowhead to Vancouver, with very much more steel bridge work, and very much less wooden trestle than went into the railway between Quebec and Transcona.

What the $150,000 per mile meant, in addition to the purely colonization aspects of the road, can be partially judged from a glance at the map. The National Transcontinental entered a wilderness north of New York, and didn’t leave the wilderness until it was north of Omaha, in Nebraska. In that wilderness, at that time there was not an existing community of twenty white people.