Great Financiers Seem Sometimes Ready To Devour
Their Own Industrial Children.
The Canadian Pacific Railway from Quebec to Port Moody is a mixture of
the new and the old.
The first section, from Quebec to Montreal, is an
old friend, the North Shore Railway, once possessed by the Grand Trunk
Company, and sold back to the Canadian Government for purposes of
extending the Pacific route to tide-water at Quebec, and making one,
throughout, management. From Montreal to Ottawa, and beyond, is another
section of older-made line. The piece from Port Arthur to Winnipeg is
an older railway, made by the Canadian Government. Again, on the
Pacific there is the British Columbia Government Railway. All the rest,
round the head of Lake Superior up to Port Arthur, from Winnipeg across
the Great Prairies to Calgary, and on to, and across, the Rocky
Mountains, the crossings of the Selkirk and other Columbian Ranges, is
new Railway - with works daring and wonderful.
Pioneer railways are not like works at home. The lines are single, with
crossing places every five, ten, or twenty miles; ballast is not always
used, the lines on prairies being laid for long stretches on the earth
formation; rivers, chasms, canons and cataracts are crossed by timber
trestle bridges. The rails, of steel, are flat bottomed, fastened by
spikes, 60 lbs. to the yard, except through the mountains, where they
are 70 lbs.
Begun as pioneer works, they undergo, as traffic progresses, many
improvements. Ballast is laid down. Iron or steel bridges are
substituted for timber. The gorges spanned by trestles are, one by one,
filled up, by the use of the steam digger to fill, and the ballast
plough to push out, the stuff from the flat bottomed wagons on each
side and through the interstices of, the trestles. Sometimes the timber
is left in; sometimes it is drawn out and used elsewhere. This trestle
bridge plan of expediting the completion, and cheapening the
construction, of new railways, wants more study, at home. Whenever
there are gorges and valleys to pass in a timbered country, the
facility they give of getting "through" is enormous. The Canadian
Pacific would not be open now, but for this facility.
All these lines across the Continent have very similar features. They
each have prairies to pass, with long straight lines and horizons which
seem ever vanishing and never reached; mountain ranges of vast
altitudes to cross, alkaline lands, hitherto uncultivable, hot sulphur
springs, prairie-dogs, gophyrs, and other animals not usually seen. The
buffalo has retired from the neighbourhood of these iron-roads and of
the "fire-wagons," as the Indians call the locomotives. Here and there
on all the prairies on all the lines, heaps of whitened bones, of
buffalo, elk, and stag, are piled up at stations, to be taken away for
agricultural purposes. The railways resemble each other in their
ambitious extensions. The Canadian Pacific Railway, from Quebec to Port
Moody, is above 3,000 miles in length, but the total mileage of the
Company is already 4,600 miles, and no one knows where it is to stop,
while Messrs.
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