Caledonian Railway

“ British Locomotive of about 1905
In the national collection is an operable model (figure 71) of a British locomotive of the period of about 1905. Made by the well known English model makers Carson and Co., and given in 1933 to the Museum by Frank A. Wardlaw and Frank A. Wardlaw, Jr., the model (USNM 310584) represents the Caledonian Railway Co. No. 903, a 4-6-0 with inside cylinders. The length of the locomotive and the 6-wheeled tender is 45 inches and the gauge is 31⁄4 inches. ”

“ The Caledonian Railway now puts this choice veal within the reach of English mouths; and we hope it will, at the same time, add to the prosperity and profits of the Strathaven breeders.
The lambing of ewes, the care of the mothers and offspring, the diseases to which they are subject, as well as the other operations which demand the farmer's care in the months of spring, we must pass by. ”

“ From Invergordon the Highland Railway crosses Scotland to Lochalsh, and from Inverness the Caledonian Canal runs to Fort William. These two [Pg 255] transportation lines—the Highland Railway and the Caledonian Canal—served as connecting links in our communications. If we wish a complete picture of our operation, we must call to mind first the hundreds of factories in all parts of our country, working day and night, making the numerous parts of these instruments of destruction and their attendant mechanisms ”

“ The rivers are not navigable, and a canal opened in 1823, connecting the city with Port Carlisle on the Solway Firth, was unsuccessful, and was converted into a railway. Silloth, on the Irish Sea, is the nearest port of importance (21 m.) . Carlisle, however, is one of the principal railway centres in Great Britain. The London & North-Western and the Midland railways of England, and the Caledonian, North British and Glasgow & South-Western of Scotland, here make a junction for through traffic between England and Scotland ”

“ These thoughts come to me now just as I am riding westward on the public observation car of a Canadian Pacific Railway train, through the great mountains that are piled up on the sunset verge of the Dominion of Canada. The traditional weariness of travel is practically banished by these wheeled palaces, which that living, breathing, throbbing locomotive, under the skilful direction of her driver, draws through passes and tunnels and glorious river canyons down to the Western sea. ”

“ A state-owned railway, 161⁄2 m. long, starting from Maseru crosses the Caledon river and joins the line connecting Bloemfontein and Ladysmith. This railway follows, N.E. of Maseru, the right bank of the Caledon, and affords a ready means of transport for the cereals raised on the left or Basuto side of the river. Highroads, maintained by the government, traverse every part of the country, and bridges have been built across the Caledon. The usual mode of conveyance is by ox-waggon or light cart. Several passes through the Drakensberg into Griqualand East and Natal exist, but are little used. ”

“ Little did these adventurous pathfinders who discovered mountain passes and ocean lanes think that, before a century had passed, a group of men with vision and courage would follow the inspiring example of the explorers by land and sea, and achieve not only the crossing of a continent, but the girdling of the earth in a magnificent transportation system. Yet despite the gloomy prophecies of failure uttered by sceptics who declared that the thing could not be done, the Canadian Pacific Railway has driven its iron horses through the mountains to stand by the Western Sea. ”

“ The railway had come and was outrivaling the canal. If Canadian ports and channels were even to hold their own, they must take heed of the enterprise of all the cities along the Atlantic coast of the United States, which were promoting railroads to the interior in a vigorous rivalry for the trade of the Golden West. Here was a challenge which must be taken up. The fifties became the first great railway era of Canada. In 1850 there were only sixty-six miles of railway in all the provinces ”

“ First to seize the golden opportunities were the group of men who built the Canadian Northern. Railway history offers no more remarkable record than the achievement of these few men, who, beginning in 1895 with a charter for a railway one hundred miles long in Manitoba, leading nowhere in particular, succeeded in building in twenty years a road from ocean to ocean, and in keeping it in their own hands through all difficulties and vicissitudes. ”

“ In the Maritime Provinces, from 1835 to 1850, many railways had been projected, but, with the exception of a small coal tramway in Nova Scotia, built in 1839 from the Albion coal-mines to tide-water, not a mile was built before 1847. There, as elsewhere, the pamphleteer and the promoter acted as pioneers, and the capitalist and the politician took up their projects later. The plans which chiefly appealed to public attention looked to the linking up of St Andrews, St John, and Halifax with Quebec and Montreal and with the railways of Maine. ”

“ Mr John A. Poor, whose lifetime was devoted to the extension of railways in northern New England, dreamed of making it, by a road to Montreal, the outlet of the trade of the West, at least so far as freight traffic went. Passengers and mails, he conceived, could best be carried to Europe from Halifax, nearly six hundred miles nearer than New York to Liverpool, but the railway connecting Halifax with the large American cities should pass through Portland, and thus make it an important divisional point, if not a terminus. ”

“ In more than one tight pinch “U.S.” railways have come to the fore, furnishing an expeditious alternative when shipper and consignee have been stewing over congested yards, crippled motive power, notorious scarcity of cars, strike and snow disadvantages which trouble every line sooner or later and which are not unknown to the men piloting the Canadian railway interests to success.
Twenty-two foreign railroads, nine operating in the east and central States, and thirteen western companies, each maintain one to six passenger and commercial offices in this country. ”

“ The C.P.R., with its 2990 miles of railway, is the iron girdle that binds Canada together from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. She gives cohesion to this conglomerate whole, with its varieties of climate and production. Every mile of the line is worth a mile of gold to the country, for at every place where she lays down a station, that place becomes a town, a centre of population, civilization, and wealth to the surrounding district. This railway has been the great explorer, the great colonizer, the great wealth producer of Canada. It is the artery of the body of the Dominion. ”

“ Railways.—​At the present day Canada, in addition to the unsurpassed water ways through her vast extent, has the greatest number of miles of railway according to inhabitants in any part of the world. In 1832, the Liverpool and Manchester Railroad was completed, which was “the great precursor of all railroads.” Fourteen years later, 1846, a movement was initiated at Kingston to build a road from Wolfe Island, through Kingston to Toronto, and a survey was ordered to be made. ”

“ Sir Thomas Shaughnessy maintained the progressive policy and the honourable record of straightforward management which has distinguished the Canadian Pacific—a railway singularly free from the questionable manipulations which have brought so many great American systems to bankruptcy. Other men left their impress on the road: men like Sir William Whyte, for over twenty years in charge of the western lines, David M'Nicoll, and George M. Bosworth and many others, gave most effective service. ”

“ Now-a-days, a trip to England by the Allan Line is thought tedious if it last ten days, and even five days is considered not unattainable. When we left England, a thirty mile railway from Liverpool to Manchester was all that Europe had seen. Dr. Dionysius Lardner pronounced steam voyages across the Atlantic an impossibility, and men believed him. Now, even China and Japan have their railways and steamships; Canada is being spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific by a railroad, destined, I believe, to work still greater changes in the future of our race, and of the world. ”

“ The engineers who designed the line must have been skilful men, and by the track, as the train curves in and out of narrowing valleys and broadening plains, we are led to suppose that the Continent slopes gently from the interior down to Table Bay. The railway is a surface line, without a single tunnel or any serious cutting. The gradients in some places are stiff, but a single engine finds no difficulty in surmounting them.
At 4 p.m. of November 1 we reached the 458th mile from Cape Town, so that our rate of travel had been nineteen miles the hour. ”

“ The St Lawrence and Atlantic was the Canadian half of the first international railway ever built. At the outset much more than half of the enterprise and activity was centred in the United States, for the Canadas {42} were still apprentices in railway promotion and construction. The ambition of an American seaport prompted the planning of the line, the untiring energy of an American promoter made it possible, and American contractors built the greater part. ”

“ But Sir John Macdonald, as soon as he knew that their wealth had become great, and that they would be looking for new avenues for investment, approached them with an appeal to undertake the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was the biggest railway construction project in the world, and the proposal to build the road, except by slow stages, was characterized, not only by prominent public men, but by some well-known experts, as sheer madness. Stephen, as we have seen, was not disposed to go into such a huge undertaking at all. ”

“ These slow methods, however, did not appeal to the engineer, and secretly he decided to effect an improvement. He fashioned a locomotive from the best materials he could command, a portable engine which was used at the mines being mounted on a truck in such a way as to secure self-propulsion. This was used for haulage between the collieries and the head of the canal. As no ill results attended its use, the Government finally approved of its utilisation. Shortly afterwards the line as a railway was extended to Tientsin, and opened for traffic in October, 1888. ”

“ Later on, British Columbia, as we shall see, proved magnetic enough to draw the steel of the great railway across the continent to the Western Ocean.
On the general subject, it may be well to remind our readers that a railway with its locomotive steam engine is a comparatively modern arrangement for travel, although trucks of various kinds were wheeled on tracks in the coal mining regions of England two centuries ago. ”

“ But never before did a group of men plan to unite, on such a scale, all three arrangements—to build ten thousand miles of railway without themselves investing a dollar and still retain control. The men behind the Canadian Northern not only planned such a project, but carried it through, displaying in the process, and at every stage of the undertaking, a mastery of political diplomacy, an untiring persistence, and great financial resourcefulness. ”

“ And it was the building of the Canadian Pacific that opened up the West and bound it fast to the distant East. Certainly not least among the makers of Canada were the men who undertook that doubtful enterprise and carried it through every obstacle to success; and not least {168} among the generations whose toil and faith have made possible the nation of to-day were the four millions of the Canada of the eighties who flung a great railway across the vast unpeopled spaces of a continent to the far Pacific. ”

“ The Canadian Pacific Railway is now fed by branches many hundreds of miles in length in all parts of Canada. In the North-West a new competitor has arisen in the shape of the Canadian Northern Railway, a line begun only ten years ago, which runs westerly from the head of Lake Superior, and already has about 1,400 miles of railway in operation. ”

“ I have known the West all my life, but I do not recall any period more generally discouraging than that after-the-boom period in the 80’s, during which the Canadian Pacific Railway was begun and carried to an amazingly successful completion. The sudden drop in everything, as well as the rumblings and then the outbreak of the Riel Rebellion on the plains, put, in large measure, a damper on immigration; and railway building through an uninhabited land is not exhilarating work. ”

“ A few words with respect to the fastest trains on the Continent. Previous to the 1st of April of this year, the mail trains between Calais and Paris completed 203 miles, with 15 minutes of stoppages for passenger accommodation, in 5 hours and 50 minutes, about 331⁄4 miles an hour. Since the opening of the railway between Calais and Boulogne, the mail trains go to and come from Paris viâ Boulogne. The distance is shortened to 186 miles, and the journey is performed, 15 minutes of stoppages for passenger accommodation being allowed, in 51⁄2 hours, or at the rate of 34 miles an hour. ”

“ Mixed trains, usually avoided by all who are not compelled to use them, are really the best for seeing all the pleasant little by-places of the Garden Province; for while freight is being handled at each station, it is possible to alight and ramble a little in nearby luxurious paths that fringe the railroad along its whole extent. This applies not only to the route from Summerside to Tignish, but also to the whole railway system of the Island. As is perhaps generally known, the Prince Edward Island Railway is part of the extensive system known as the Canadian Government Railways. ”