Maps, photos, timetables, legislation, Stephen Leacock!
This interesting Portage la Prairie booster booklet can be seen at archive.org. Photos in books printed during that era tended to be kind of 'muddy', and the older scanning algorithms reduced file size at the expense of detail. The photos shown below have been downloaded as the largest 'page' possible from archive.org and were fiddled with to bring out detail.
Link to archive.org P la P booklet
For example, the retouched/redrawn photo above does not show a lot of detail, but it was perhaps taken in the yard area near the shops. Probably it shows some CPR/Manitoba & Northwestern and Canadian Northern single-storey buildings.
Here are the three stations as they existed. The famous GTR/GN 'Union' station, the familiar CPR station and the less well-known Canadian Northern station with its interesting 'gas station' sign. The caption has been moved to make the image more compact.
Various industrial views are presented below without interpretation. The photos are not great, but they are the key 'heavy industry' images from the booklet.
The map from the back cover of the booklet will help present the focus of Part 7 as it shows the Grand Trunk Pacific's trajectory.
Without any branch lines, the GTP enters one side of Portage and exits the other.
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I think the Winnipeg 'Fort Garry' reference below refers to the GTP's hotel ...
which is across the street from the Union Station which the GTP shared with a handful of railways.
... or ...
A circa 1920 CNR guidebook refers to a stone gateway and wooden door
which remains from the second Hudson's Bay Company Fort Garry of 1850.
I think that relic still exists between Union Station and the Fort Garry Hotel.
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| from: Altitudes of Canada; James White; 1915; Canadian Commission of Conservation. |
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The British-based Grand Trunk Railway was one of Canada's oldest railways and originated in the mid-1850s. It had built and acquired an extensive network in Quebec and Ontario, with an important asset being its line to Chicago. A decision was made that the Grand Trunk would develop a transcontinental profile of its own.
The proposed line from Moncton, New Brunswick - via Quebec City, northern Quebec and Ontario - to Prince Rupert ... would be a sort of public/private partnership. This 'deal' would be different in a number of ways from the government incentives offered to the CPR and CNoR.
- The historical account on Page 234, below, will give you a little bit of detail on the two main sections of this railway system.
- Closer to the end of this post are the chains of legislation for both the Grand Trunk Pacific and the National Transcontinental for you to compare ... if you are really interested!
Here is a map from 110 years ago ...
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| from: The Railway Builders: Oscar D Skelton; 1916; Glasgow, Brook & Co. edg |
The red lines represent the traditional regional Grand Trunk - a British-style operation which was poorly-supervised from London. People at the Canadian headquarters at Montreal had no authority to make strategic decisions.
The solid blue lines represent what the Grand Trunk Pacific (and its federal government partner) intended to build and operate from scratch.
'Not exactly as shown':
The extreme ends of the connection to Vancouver via the Pacific Great Eastern were not completed until the 1950s. The GTP depended on their own steamships to connect with Vancouver. Like the CPR, the construction of the mountain section was begun from the coast - at what became Prince Rupert.
Keep in mind that the Grand Trunk's transcontinental construction would benefit from 30 years of technological advances since the building of the CPR. This would include more efficient and safer explosives, mechanically enhanced tracklaying techniques, more powerful locomotives and higher capacity railcars, plentiful continental supplies of heavier rail and better track hardware, and a well-established railway network west of Winnipeg to deliver construction materials and workers. The GTP construction process would be different from that of the pioneering CPR.
However, similar to the CPR's WC Van Horne, an American railroad superman by the name of Charles Melville Hays was re-hired to mastermind the Grand Trunk's new transcontinental transformation. He was credited with organizing a corporate turnaround on the Wabash. The first time he was hired by the GTR, he started to make some significant changes. However, he suddenly quit for an opportunity at the Southern Pacific, but found he had less independence that he'd hoped. He was nonetheless welcomed back by the Grand Trunk.
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| from: The Railway Builders; Oscar D Skelton; 1916; Glasgow, Brook & Co. |
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| from: Biographical Directory of Railway Officials; T Addison Busbey; 1901: Railway Age. edg |
Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to work with the Laurier government to build a transcontinental railway from scratch.
The GTR bureaucracy at the Montreal headquarters was comfortable and risk averse. Hays shook up the local Canadian corporate culture by firing people who were not sufficiently committed to his railway. So then ... he had a nucleus of people who were a little more motivated, no more talented than they had been, and afraid of being fired.
Over the course of a few short years, how do you build a corporate culture with enough knowledge, skill and courage to create a great, modern steel highway - a 'standard railway' which others will envy and try to emulate? How will decision-makers thousands of miles away (from Montreal ... and from London) make choices as the line is built? It's not just two rails and ties ... it's surveying and locating, construction processes, materials procurement and management, recruitment, labour relations, land acquisition and land use and land sales, urban planning and harbour development, local government relations and taxation, provincial government relations and taxation, public relations, legal affairs, traffic decisions including interchange with other railways, equipment decisions. Relations with Laurier's government. Dealing with the board in London. Getting securities underwritten for sale in Europe ... After half a century of existence, the Grand Trunk Railway didn't even trade on the tiny Canadian stock market like the CPR did.
Answer: Charles Melville Hays
A good case study which examines these complexities is:
A Thousand Blunders, The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway and Northern British Columbia;
Frank Leonard; 1996; UBC Press.
For comparison, Mackenzie and Mann, over on the Canadian Northern, were contractors who had personally built parts of the western CPR and other lines. For using common agricultural graders and horses, they had been known as 'the farmers outfit'. Their little Gladstone, Manitoba railway ('and canal company') started and ran as a shoestring operation. They expanded their railway network in western Canada, which included a sizable low-cost branch line system, to provide income ... and then used their experience and connections to make strategic decisions about building a transcontinental system.
Their early methodical approach toward growth was almost the exact opposite of the
National Transcontinental/Grand Trunk Pacific approach.
Hays died during the sinking of the RMS Titanic in April 1912 - two years before the first through train arrived in Prince Rupert.
We can get a favourable version of GTP/NTR history from this account:
Of course, the GTP's use of the Yellowhead Pass was not innovative ...
it had been advocated by Sandford Fleming for the CPR,
and the Canadian Northern was also building through the Yellowhead.
Another section of this account provides dates and a unique detail about Portage la Prairie.
... and the National Transcontinental's battle with the muskeg goes on for paragraphs! Canadian school textbooks often worked to impress students by mentioning a section of generic Canadian railway line which swallowed 7 layers of fill ... I think it was during the National Transcontinental's construction that this happened.
Continuing with this 1933 account ...
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| from: Waiting for the Light: Brock V Silversides; 1995; Fifth House. |
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| from: A Statutory History of Railways in Canada 1836-1986; Dorman/Stoltz; 1987; Canadian Institute of Guided Ground Transport. |
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| from: archive.org |
The map above is not entirely in touch with reality.
See if you can spot some examples.
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Excerpt from: My Discovery of the West; Stephen Leacock; 1937; Thomas Allen.
Leacock had a doctorate in political science and political economy.
'The other original competitor of the C.P.R. in Eastern Canada was the Grand Trunk Railway, intended to link the Great Lakes to the Atlantic, a company of great opportunities, which it never realized. It had absorbed a group of minor roads in Ontario and Quebec, but it never paid a dividend on its Common stock, being managed or mis-managed, from London. The C.P.R., organized and conducted by a group of men of exceptional talent and enterprise, was soon able to compete successfully with the Grand Trunk on its own ground.
'It was this situation which Sir Wilfrid Laurier, whose true function was benevolence and not business, proposed to turn to political account by organizing a second transcontinental system, based on the co-operation of the Government and the Grand Trunk. The Government and the Grand Trunk were to build a railway from tide water in New Brunswick (Moncton) to a northern (ready-made) port on the Pacific, presently called Prince Rupert.
'From Moncton to Winnipeg the Government was to build and own the line, as a National Transcontinental spanning the St. Lawrence by a bridge just above Quebec. This was the last word in American railway construction. In England and in Europe railways were built to connect existing cities; in America, to connect cities with others not yet existing—the railway at the start going from somewhere to nowhere. The railway came first and the towns came after.
'This new departure went further. It went from nowhere to nowhere, passing nowhere. It was constructed far north of existing settlement. Its construction reaped a rich harvest for contractors; scandals grew like wild oats along its right-of-way. The western part of the line, from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert, was built by a new company, the Grand Trunk Pacific, its bonds guaranteed to 75 per cent. of its cost. The new company was to rent the National section for fifty years at 3 per cent. of the cost, an agreement by which everybody, except the taxpayer, wanted the cost as high as possible. But the taxpayer, as yet, didn't count. The bridge at Quebec was in the class of the Colossus of Rhodes, equally scenic and about as valuable. The system, operated in conjunction with the Grand Trunk, was a failure from the start, a mill-stone round the neck of Canada.'
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Here is dandy map which was printed about 110 years ago.
It shows all the Canadian-linked railways.
Notice how all the through railway lines funnel through Portage la Prairie.
You should print this map out, fold it up, and carry it in your wallet, purse or pocket!
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| from: The Railway Builders: Oscar D Skelton; 1916; Glasgow, Brook & Co. |
