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

by D. B. Hanna

The war brought a grievous end to the Canadian Northern as a Mackenzie and Mann enterprise. It also demonstrated beyond a peradventure the hopelessness, from the beginning, of the Grand Trunk’s fathering of the Grand Trunk Pacific, by throwing that western system into the hands of the Government, under a receivership.

Then, as if these difficulties were not aggravating enough, the entry of the United States into the war, at a time when wages across the line had soared almost beyond trade unionist dreams of avarice, threw the railways into a Government pool, with a confounding result on Canadian railway administration. The McAdoo wages award on the railways which came under control of the Secretary of the Treasury raised expenses on all Canadian railways to a point which, though they compelled rate increases, still could not adequately be met by any charges which the Railway Board deemed fair to the public interest. The policeman’s lot in the Pirates of Penzance was indeed a happy one compared with the Canadian railway executives’ job towards the end of the war, and during the period of re-construction immediately following the armistice.

In such circumstances it was fated that we should carry through one of the strangest phases of the history of transportation—to change two great systems of privately projected and privately controlled railways, into public ownership properties, to join them with a network of Government railways already in existence; and to prepare the way for the speedy incorporation with these three main ingredients, of the senior system of Canadian railways—the Grand Trunk.

One had travelled a long way from the tiny line between Gladstone and Dauphin, although it was less than twenty-two years from the day I left the old Manitoba North Western to the period during which the new directors of the publicly-owned Canadian Northern Railway took over the Intercolonial and the National Transcontinental, and “Canadian National Railways” was first used as a name that was to represent the legal unity of the largest system in the world.

Perhaps, if we were hunting for records here, something unique might be discovered in one’s service. A little pioneer railway came into existence; grew to a system of nearly ten thousand miles, passed from private ownership to a national enterprise; carried on for four years under its former statutory identity, during which period there were associated with it, first all the Government railways whose building was fundamental to Confederation; and, secondly, the Grand Trunk Pacific, launched as a semi-public enterprise with the intention of dwarfing its existence. Only one general officer was concerned with every phase of that kaleidoscopic story.

His experience involved a multiplicity of responsibilities which, viewed from a comparatively restful contact with less exacting business, seem now to be chiefly remarkable for the fact that they did not entirely swamp his sense of personal identity. An advantage of being away from it all is that one may obtain a clearer perspective of what happened, and of the trend of its public importances, than was possible when one was encompassed by administrative labour.

There were eight years between the outbreak of war and the departure of my colleagues and myself from the Canadian National Railways. That fateful period seems naturally to divide itself into three distinct phases: the labour immediately attributable to the war; the measures required to make the best of the general situation left by the war, and the methods by which it was endeavoured to reconcile the efficiency of private management with the essentials of responsibility to Parliament. The last first.

As far as public policy was concerned, the situation into which a Board of Directors, newly appointed by the Government, entered was made for them by events which happily, perhaps, for them, were part of the war, as well as part of a railway problem of the first financial and administrative magnitude. We came into office when members of Parliament had something to think about besides jobs.

Even if the word “politics” were not used here, readers would use it; for, after all, you cannot have a revolution in a nation’s railway affairs which depends on Parliamentary action, without political considerations entering into it. Besides the great interest of the whole body politic, which is statesmanship, the pull of the hungry partisan is sure to be felt, sooner or later.