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

by D. B. Hanna

One story is good till another is told. The rolling-in-luxury side of this episode of a siding on a chilly October night is this:

The man at the table head was the railway president. Two of his guests were representing financial houses. The fourth man was his secretary. The car had been dropped at the siding because, next morning, teams would be there to drive the party forty miles north to inspect the country through which it was intended to build a branch line; and in which it had been reported that there were many farmers to whom getting out their grain was a burdensome operation, depriving them of the chance to prosper by their season’s work.

The financial men were from London, and could facilitate or hinder the flow of millions of dollars to Canada for the development of agriculture. They were touring the country to see what sort of conditions their clients were being invited to back. They wanted to visit a typical piece of country without railway facilities; and to get an idea of the courage and capacity of pioneers who would start farms in the wilderness ahead of means of economically getting their produce to market.

The president was on his annual inspection trip—just as necessary to efficient discharge of his duty as a farmer’s Sunday walk around his fields is to his knowledge of his crops. He did not want to drive for whole days across new country. His trusted engineers and locators were in the habit of doing that; and time was valuable. But it was good policy to go personally with the men who were extremely influential in the money market that was as important to the Saskatchewan farmer as the wheat market is. All day he had been with his guests, telling them about the country, and observing the condition of the track and stations through which the train passed; and receiving messages off the telegraph wire.

Long after the farmer had gone to bed, and his oxen had exchanged cud-chewing for slumber, the railway president, having said “Good-night” to his guests, was dictating replies to the messages he had received during the day, and working as hard as if he had been in his office fifteen hundred miles away.

It is true that the car looked like self-indulgent wealth to the farmer sitting in the wagon outside; to whom it seemed the height of luxury to be waited upon by a man in a white coat. But it was all in a hard day’s work to the man who was getting the money to build railways into the prairie country, without which the owner of a yoke of cattle would be forlorn indeed. The president, who came from the farm, would regard it as the height of luxury to have nothing more to worry about than to sit on a binder for a few hours, and see the nodding heads of wheat fall on to the carrier, to be delivered in rows of sheaves to the stooker.

Any business man who has worked his heart out to establish something out of nothing, and has overcome difficulties that had a knack of springing up out of nowhere, and spoiling the best-laid calculations, knows that most capital has to be wrung out of trouble.

The farmer too, knows this; for sitting on a binder isn’t all golden grain; and chores have their own worries. But he is apt to associate difficulties only with manual labour. Never having travelled in a car that is also an office he doesn’t apprehend what working on wheels really is.

The point is that, to a man harassed by a multitude of cares, as a railway executive is, there is no such thing as luxury. He cannot even envy the sensation of my countryman who was encountered at a funeral.