Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

Our railroad development began in the East and extended westward, but we have no system that reaches from coast to coast. Canada, on the other hand, has two such systems. Neither have we any such transportation service as the Canadian Pacific, which can take a passenger on board ship at Liverpool, Hamburg, Cherbourg, land him in Canada, carry him across the continent and across the Pacific, and set him down in Japan or China, putting him up at its own hotels whenever he wants to stop over.

Before the World War, the Canadian Pacific, with some fourteen thousand miles of its own rails, and five thousand more under its operation, was the world’s largest land and water transportation system under one management. To go over all its lines would take nearly three weeks of continuous travel behind a fast engine. Now it has been eclipsed on land by the Canadian National lines, with twenty-two thousand miles of track, owned and operated by the Dominion government.

I have ridden for thousands of miles over both of the present systems, and have made trips in Canada when some of the lines were in the process of building. I have talked with the pioneers of railroad development in the Dominion and the officials of the great railway organizations of to-day. I have watched the wheat trains pull out of Winnipeg, one every half hour, all day and all night. Both the Canadian National and the Canadian Pacific are doing their jobs well, and both furnish excellent equipment and service on their main lines. As a rule, the trains run at slower speed than the best expresses of the United States, and, excepting the Trans-Canada Limited, they stop at places so small that they would get only a shriek of the whistle from our fast railway flyers. Most of the lines have only a single track, but this is generally sufficient to handle the traffic. Both systems operate almost exclusively their own sleeping and dining cars. Each has also its own express service, and combined they have more than one hundred thousand miles of telegraph lines open to the use of the public. The food I have eaten on the dining cars here has averaged in quality above that served on eastern trains in the United States. The prices are about the same, though the portions, as a rule, are more generous.

With a population of less than two and one half persons per square mile, strung out across a continent nearly three thousand miles wide, Canada has had to make enormous investments in railroads to bind the country together.

“Selling the scenery” has become a great source of revenue to Canada’s railroads, which are experts in exploiting the natural beauties of the Dominion. Americans furnish the bulk of the patronage over the scenic routes.

The managements of both of these systems make strenuous endeavours to cultivate the highest morale in their employees, and to win their coöperation in the struggle for efficiency. Every man in the Canadian railroad service understands that the Dominion needs more and more people, and from managing vice presidents to dining-car stewards, each seems to have constituted himself an entertainment committee of one. I have never received anywhere more courteous treatment from train men, and I notice that neither the brakemen nor the sleeper conductors consider themselves above helping me with my numerous pieces of baggage.

The Canadian Pacific has a chain of thirteen hotels supplemented by eleven bungalow camps extending from St. Andrews, New Brunswick, to Victoria in British Columbia. The Canadian National lines operate half as many between Ottawa and the Rockies. Both organizations are most enterprising in selling not merely transportation, but all the attractions, business opportunities, and resources of Canada. Either one will cheerfully locate a newly arrived immigrant on the land, take an American sportsman on a hunting trip, find a factory site or lumber tract for a group of capitalists, or help a bridegroom plan his honeymoon journey. Both are tremendous forces for advertising Canada.

Canada’s railroads have made the country. They have always been, and still are, ahead of the population and the traffic. Settlement in Canada has followed, instead of preceding, railroad construction, and the roads themselves have had to colonize the territories served by new lines. Uneconomic railroad building has been a part of the price the Dominion has had to pay, not only for settlers, but also for political unity. Both the Maritime Provinces and British Columbia refused to become parts of the Dominion except on condition that the Ottawa government build railways connecting them with central Canada. From that day to this, political pressure has been the force behind much of the railroad building in the Dominion.