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

by D. B. Hanna

After twenty-seven years, the adventure looks rather entertaining from the meridian of King and Yonge. Then it was regarded as part of the evening’s work—a chore that might have to be done any day of the week—a commonplace which takes a long time to assume the hue of frosty romance.

Comparatively, the zero hours of railway operation are less perilous than their counterparts in the life of the constructor who has to spend winter days and nights in empty country, far from his sheltered base. The general local administration of Canadian Northern construction was mainly in the hands of Rod Mackenzie, eldest son of the President. He was not technically an engineer, but had been almost continuously on his father’s work since boyhood. I believe he spent some time in the mountains when The Farmer Outfit was building snow sheds for the C.P.R. To my knowledge, he was in charge of contracts from 1898, when the first 125 miles guaranteed by the Manitoba Legislature was completed by extending the line 25 miles from Sifton Junction to Winnipegosis.

Rod Mackenzie was one of the most likeable men in railway service. He had a good deal of his father’s remarkable driving force, and attracted to himself a larger quantity of genial companionship. He was a member of Mackenzie, Mann, Limited, though it was not generally known that the firm included more than the two senior principals. My own official relationship was entirely with the railway company, so that I did not come as closely in contact with him as with the chief engineer of the Canadian Northern, who became general manager.

Some day, perhaps, fitting tribute will be paid to the railway engineers who have wrought so magnificently to transform the face of Canada. They scarcely ever seem to think of their work as, in any degree, romantic, or bookworthy. What more prosaic than a blueprint? unless it be a blue-stocking? But what goes into many a blueprint which shows how a river is to be crossed, or a bridge is to be built?

At this writing, the City of Toronto is concerned over a viaduct along its waterfront, which was the subject of a Railway Commission order ten years ago, and is now the subject of a revision by an engineer of whose highly distinguished career the public knows little. The scheme to build the viaduct east of Yonge Street as originally planned, and to construct bridges west of Yonge, instead of the Moyes viaduct, is the work of Mr. M. H. MacLeod, officially the special consulting engineer of the Canadian National Railways with headquarters at Toronto.

Mr. MacLeod is the quietest man who ever devised a solution for a troublesome and expensive problem. He had no previous official connection with this matter; but, returning in the autumn of 1923 from a trip to Europe, he saw in the press that it was once more eruptive. Without seeing a plan, or knowing more of what was proposed than any non-technical outsider could gather from the newspapers, he walked over the ground, alone, using the eyes and experience of the builder of more miles of railway in Western Canada than any other man, and the deviser of the entrance into Winnipeg of the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific railways, and of their great Fort Garry Union Station.

The waterfront scheme as adopted by the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Presidents is the MacLeod scheme, worked out on his own study of the problem on the ground. I have been told by one who was present at a meeting of prominent business leaders which discussed it closely, that Sir Edmund Walker, who was there, told his colleagues that he had known Mr. MacLeod for twenty-five years, as an engineer, and his bank would back any scheme he devised up to ten million dollars.

It was one of the constant satisfactions of twenty-two years out of twenty-six of a Canadian Northern and Canadian National railway experience to be a colleague and friend of Mr. MacLeod, as it is one of the deepest pleasures of a period of reminiscence to draw upon an episode of his service of the Canadian Northern which, on the whole, I think, typifies, better than any other that comes to mind, the quality of that distinguished service.

MacLeod is a Hebridean, from the Isle of Skye. He came to this continent as an infant, and went to school mainly in the United States. His early engineering experience was gained in the vicinity of Toronto. He has recently told of his first meeting at Kirkfield with Sir William Mackenzie, over forty years ago, when he was sent to look over the country through which it was proposed to build a railway from Lindsay to Bracebridge. He was working on the Superior division of the C.P.R. in 1883. He built the line up the east shore of Lake Temiskaming; and was in charge of construction in the Crow’s Nest Pass.

MacLeod became chief engineer of the Canadian Northern in the spring of 1900. We had the line from Gladstone to Erwood, on the way to Prince Albert, with a branch to Grandview, westerly from Dauphin. We also had the South Eastern, on which the Muskeg Express hauled firewood to Winnipeg from the Lake of the Woods. When MacLeod came to us from the C.P.R. our mileage was 600. Before he asked for relief from strenuous duty his jurisdiction as Vice-President of the National Railways, in charge of construction, covered over 17,000 miles.