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

by D. B. Hanna

Long ago, plans were prepared for a rearrangement of the station accommodation, which would bring the passengers into a building on a higher level, discharge baggage at a lower elevation, improve the street railway facilities, and generally give to St. John what everybody admits St. John needs, on a business-like basis.

The cost of over a million and a half dollars must be shared by the National Railways, the civic government and the street railway. The improvements were held up because the railway executive believed the other parties to them should contribute more to the cost than at first they were willing to undertake. “Let George do it” is not an isolated view of expenditures in which what some people no doubt would like to call the king’s railway is concerned, jointly with other public and semi-public authorities.

Situations like that at St. John abound in varying magnitude. They call for an armoury of qualities which any one man might be forgiven for not possessing. They are just a part of the day’s responsibilities which crowd into the private car.

They abide with the executive while he is showing guests the aspects of Canada in which they are specially interested. Consider two examples from Canadian Northern ante-public-ownership days. The first excursion that looked like a joy ride to everybody except to the men responsible for completing it, was the visit, in 1898, to Dauphin and Winnipegosis of as many members of the Manitoba Legislature as could go to see the railway that had been built under legislative guarantee. Having none of our own, we had to hire sleeping and dining cars from the Canadian Pacific. The trip occupied two long days with a banquet in Dauphin on the night out.

The last considerable excursion attributable to public responsibilities was the Parliamentary journey to the Pacific Coast when the road to Vancouver was prepared for business, in 1915. The ever-ready cynic can say that these excursions are near, but extravagant relatives of the electioneering campaign of which the cheap cigar is a nauseating and corrupting feature. But, looking back through the severe spectacles of the prohibition age, and not forgetting that the prairie air, especially as it approaches the Great Divide, is very prone to sharpen Eastern appetites, I think it is well within the truth to declare that journeys like these have been performed absolutely in the public interest.

The most solicitous railway in the world cannot give to a member of Parliament the faculty of imparting to his constituents and to the public generally the highly instructive information which has come to him in his representative capacity. All it can do is to give him the opportunity to acquire knowledge of the development of his country which only travel under informing auspices can bestow. That we did, at various times, and left the event to a providential future.

Prince Arthur of Connaught travelled over the Canadian Northern from Edmonton, when on his way home from Japan, whither he had been on a special mission for King Edward. To act as if a railway owed nothing of courtesy to such a representative of majesty would flout the amenities of civilization. The Prince of Wales travelled thousands of miles over the Canadian National system. This journey couldn’t have been prevented without injuring public sentiment, and couldn’t be accomplished without making the most and the best of the private car.

There was the courtesy of finance in other personally conducted travels such as those, say, of Mr. Andrew Jameson and Mr. Robert Kindersley—to give two typical instances of civilities that had practical respect to the future, from the farmers’ as well as from the railway builders’ point of view.

Mr. Jameson was an ex-governor of the Bank of Ireland, and a leader in Irish manufactures and finance. In 1907 he was revisiting this continent with his wife and daughter Violet. The family travelled with me from Winnipeg to Edmonton. Mr. Jameson had a qualification for sizing up Western Canada which not many of our visitors brought with them. As a young man he had been a rancher on the Texas prairies. One of his reminiscences of that experience was a testimony to the intensity of the youthful patriotism which flourishes beneath the stars and stripes.