Trains of Recollection Drawn from Fifty Years of Railway Service in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes BY D. B. HANNA First President of the Canadian National Railways TORONTO: THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LTD., AT ST. MARTIN’S HOUSE MCMXXIV Copyright, Canada, 1924. By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA LIMITED. PRINTED IN CANADA...

This book is published because readers have said they obtained from the chapters that were written for The Toronto Star Weekly sufficient knowledge about railway conditions in Canada, during forty years, to cause them to ask for the material in permanent form. The third era of Canadian railway expansion, beginning with the unnoticed construction of a hundred and twenty-five miles of line in Manitoba, and issuing in the largest national system in the world, will sometime have its due place in the

Suggesting a typically Presbyterian background of Scottish migration to Canada. It seemed that one’s ability to identify a joke was being tested when one was asked to set down something of what one had seen of the development of Canada during forty years of railway experience. The work I have been doing since coming to Canada in 1882 is the same kind of service that has been well rendered by thousands of men. How could there be anything of public interest in a career that has had only an average

Sketching early years of service at country and city stations near the Clyde. The proportion of our immigrated people who visit their native lands is growing, despite the rise in steamer rates. There are multitudes to whom the Old Land still appears as it did when it was the only country they knew. For what it is worth, then, one who has several times trodden the old familiar ground, may say that you have to go back to the Old Land really to see it; and to appreciate what Canada has done for you

Recalling Van Horne and the Canadian Pacific challenge to the Grand Trunk. At sixty, one cannot realize how long he has lived until he sits down and counts up the revolutions he has seen since he arrived at man’s estate. Of course, one does not mean political revolutions, merely; although they are becoming too numerous to mention. I left Scotland before the man who produced the crops from which the rent rolls of the House of Lords were paid could vote for a member of the Parliament which might s

Reviewing vanished practices, including ticket scalping and fast freight lines. When the Canadian Pacific Railway was built across the prairies there was no railway for a hundred miles south of parallel forty-nine. Red River carts, canoes and dog-sleds furnished all the transportation between it and the North Pole. Van Horne earned his first freight revenue from the Saskatchewan plains by shipping buffalo bones to Eastern fertilizer manufacturers. When he stopped at construction camps he would d

Portraying scantily the lives of a poor prairie line and a beloved prairie town. On the way to the office one morning I heard that Mr. Baker, general manager of a railway in Manitoba, was looking for an accountant. A first effort to meet Mr. Baker failed, and, hearing that he had gone to Ottawa, I found him there. He offered me the post, at a salary of $150 a month, which was little more than I had received in New York. But the prospects in the newest section of a new country seemed better than

Remembering when farming in the West was misunderstood, and land could not be sold. In some respects, the Winnipeg of thirty years ago was a truer reflection of the conditions in the country from which it drew its sustenance than it has been during the last two decades. The boom had broken so disastrously that people asked whether the prairie region could ever be a country. Immigration fell to almost nothing. Beyond Manitoba, for several years, there were more abandoned than occupied homesteads.

Telling how Manitoba struggled through an era of expansion and the war of Fort Whyte. Winnipeg was at a peculiar stage of its growth at the time of my transfer there from Portage la Prairie when, in 1893, the Manitoba North Western went into a receivership, because it couldn’t pay its fixed charges and the Allan interests became tired of finding them from private sources. Probably not many of the well-known men of the city appreciated that they were participants in a phase of North American hist

Recording the first encounter of Mackenzie and Mann, with mules for a stake. It seems scarcely possible that the electric railway is only thirty years old. The marvel of Chicago, to a visitor less than thirty years ago, was the system of street cars moved by cables running between and beneath the rails. Winnipeg had a single track horse-car system, with passing sidings. It was the enterprise of Albert Austin, in these days president of the Consumers’ Gas Company of Toronto. The city gave a franc

Beginning the story of the Canadian Northern as a pioneer line with a staff of thirteen. A merciful Providence, which keeps us from seeing far ahead, gave to none of the men concerned in operating the first commercial train that ran upon what was to become the Canadian Northern System, the faintest idea of what was ahead. We should have invited the Tempter to take a back seat, no doubt, if we had heard, on the fifteenth of December, 1896, when one of our two engines pulled out of Gladstone for D

Describing meetings of a traffic manager with Sioux Indians and sudden millionaires. It is a curious truth that the only considerable railway retreat from Canada by United States interests was made by J. J. Hill, one of the syndicate which brought the C.P.R. to fruition. He was a pioneer in Red River navigation which Eastern Canadians, bound for Fort Garry, used in summer. His association with Donald Smith and George Stephen, future members of the House of Lords, transformed a little Minnesota l

Indicating several considerations which made Toronto the centre of a Transcontinental system. A rather cynical friend used to say his title to respectability was that he was permitted to live in Toronto. For twenty-one years I have been enabled to read that title clear. In truth, Toronto is a goodly city, which doesn’t think of itself more highly than it ought to think, although it has a contrariwise repute. Occasionally one is inclined to observe that it might have thought a little more generou

Offering explanations why luxurious ease does not distinguish living on a private car. This is the apologia of the private car, as to which there is probably more misapprehension in the public mind than about any other aid to railway business. The notion is abroad that there is as much relation between the private car and hard work as there was between the melodies and the briefs of a certain eminent lawyer, addicted to drops in aitches, of whom a competitor is said to have remarked: “’Ere ’e co

Recounting midwinter episodes of location and operation in empty country. The average outsider of railway travail may envy the official who, he thinks, continually revels in the luxuries of a private car; but nobody has suffered the pangs of jealousy because he could not share in some of the midwinter pleasures of the railroading pioneer in a Western Canada which, when all’s said and done, is not a banana belt in the earliest and latest months of the year. Between the Lake of the Woods and the R

Reciting events, the Great War being chief, which destroyed the Canadian Northern. Nothing in North American transportation quite equals the rise and fall of the Canadian Northern. Those who were intimately associated with its twenty-six years’ history scarcely realized the extent to which Mackenzie and Mann were unique among the roadmakers of all the continents. For the accumulation of wealth, and also for the domination of railway systems of huge mileage, James J. Hill was in a class by himsel

Speaking some truth about the difficulty of operating a railway for the nation. On this continent there surely never was such a weird phantasmagoria of railroad changes as occurred during and immediately following the war. Canada led the Western Hemisphere into the fight that was to save freedom, and was to magnify Canning’s saying about the New World redressing the balance of the Old. The cost of the war in economic disturbance, during its progress, and since the delusive peace, was as little f

Narrating several occurrences which made huge Canadian National deficits inevitable. Comparisons may be odious; but they are sometimes illuminating. To many sincere well-wishers to the experiment of nationalizing about twenty thousand miles of Canadian railways, the clearest remaining impression of the earlier years of that regime is of enormous deficits. Apprehension of the causes of these deficits is not clear. It certainly could not be among those who once advocated turning over this national

Shedding sidelights on unities of Canadian railway management during the War. A railway is a republic and a monarchy. It is a republic because there is no pre-emption of high offices for any favoured class among its servants. It is a monarchy in the virtual dictatorship of its President. The Canadian National system has practically a hundred thousand employes, to every man of whom, if he entered the service young enough, the highest executive office is open. All the great rises in railway histor

ABRIDGED SPECIAL REPORT OF THE OPERATING AND MAINTENANCE DEPARTMENT, CANADIAN NATIONAL RAILWAYS, FROM THE FALL OF 1918 TO THE END OF 1921. The following account of the operating and maintenance department of the Canadian National Railways is a shortened form of the report of the Vice-President in charge, which was included in the comprehensive survey of the railways’ position, submitted by the President to the Hon. Mr. Kennedy, on his becoming Minister of Railways and Canals, and as the outcome

EXTRACTS FROM REPORT OF THE CANADIAN NATIONAL RAILWAYS’ TRAFFIC DEPARTMENT, FOR THE PERIOD SEPT., 1918—DEC., 1921, AS SUBMITTED TO THE MINISTER OF RAILWAYS. To indicate what has been accomplished by the Traffic Department during the past three years, it is desirable to define the functions of that Department in the Railway Organization. It may be described as the sales department of the railway—selling transportation—under a Freight Traffic Manager, and Passenger Traffic Manager, each supervisin