With her feeders and tributaries tapping the distant, beautiful valleys of historic Arcadia and a trunk line that ensures a through fast freight service from ancient Quebec—an ideal gateway for men who go down to the sea in ships—the second steel highway in Canada’s transcontinental trio stretches hundreds of miles far and away through rolling uplands, untouched forests and waving wheat fields to Burrard Inlet and flourishing Vancouver, a busy maritime mart and door to the placid Pacific.
Built or purchased and gradually assembled by Sir William Mackenzie and Sir Donald Mann, the capitalization of the Canadian Northern Railway System, which will be taken over by the Government of the Dominion of Canada, has been reckoned at approximately $43,000 per mile for 10,000 miles of railway actually under operation, and during the arbitration proceedings at Osgoode Hall, Toronto, Mr. Pierce Butler, St. Paul, Minn., counsel speaking in behalf of his clients, stated that the railway was now on a basis of $50,000,000 gross earnings a year.
Previous to the declaration of war the “C.N.R.” was financed mainly by British capitalists whose intentions, apart from expected profit, were to directly increase the yield and transportation facilities for wheat against the possibilities of war, having in mind how far below consumption was their own production of the fundamental food.
In 1896 the Manitoba Legislature passed a charter, with land grants, providing for the construction of the Lake Manitoba Railway & Canal Company, which was not taken advantage of until 1899, when Messrs. Mackenzie and Mann purchased and commenced construction from Gladstone, Manitoba, to Winnipegosis, Manitoba, 123 miles, and operation was inaugurated January 3rd, 1897.
Construction was started the same year on the Manitoba & Southeastern Railway from Winnipeg to the Great Lakes, and in November, 1898, 45 miles of it were operated, St. Boniface to Marchand.
The Northern Pacific Railway lines in Manitoba were acquired in 1901, and in the same year the thin edge of the wedge was inserted in Ontario when Parry Sound rejoiced over its first railway connection with the outside—a 3.3 mile spur to a Canada Atlantic Railway junction.
Sir Donald Mann,
Vice-President, Canadian Northern Railway System.
In 1911 the track-end had reached the foot-hills of the Rockies and engineers declare the C.N.R.’s low elevation at the Yellow Head Pass, and where its line later decends to the sea by the valleys of the Thompson and Fraser Rivers through the Cascade Range, locates the track only a few feet above tidewater of the Pacific Ocean.