Part 3 (2/2)
[2] The Bra.s.sey firm were paid about 9000 sterling a mile for the line from Toronto to Montreal, 8000 for the section from Quebec to Riviere du Loup, 6500 for the Quebec and Richmond road, and 1,400,000 for the Victoria Bridge. Gzowski and Co., consisting of Messrs Gzowski, Holton, Macpherson, and Galt, secured the Toronto to Sarnia contract at 8000 a mile. In both cases these prices included equipment. The English contractors were required to take a large portion of their pay in depreciated bonds and stock, whereas the Canadian contractors were given cash; on the other hand, Bra.s.sey had a higher price and less difficult country to work in. The English firm, with all their experience, were not familiar with building roads in countries where labour was dear, and the plant they sent out was antiquated compared with the labour-saving equipment familiar to American and Canadian contractors. They claimed to have lost a million pounds on their enterprise, while Galt, Holton, Macpherson, and Gzowski all made fortunes.
[3] Port Hope borrowed for railway investment $740,000, Cobourg and Brantford $500,000 each, and Brockville $400,000--all towns of less than 5000 people. The counties of Lanark and Renfrew borrowed $800,000, and villages borrowed in proportion. In all some $6,500,000 was borrowed through the Loan Fund for railway purposes alone, the bulk of it in Upper Canada, while another three million was invested by towns that borrowed on their own responsibility. To aid the Brockville and Ottawa Railway, for example, Lanark and Renfrew advanced $800,000, Brockville $415,000, and the towns.h.i.+p of Elizabethtown $150,000, or over half the cost of the road. Huron and Bruce invested $300,000 in the Buffalo and Lake Huron, and other munic.i.p.alities $578,000, and so on throughout the province.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Railways of British North America, 1860]
{93}
CHAPTER VI
THE INTERCOLONIAL
The Battle of the Gauges--Expansion and Compet.i.tion--Local Bonusing--The Intercolonial
The first 'age of iron--and of bra.s.s' came to an end before 1860.
Between 1850 and 1860, it has been seen, the mileage of all the provinces grew from 66 to 2065. By 1867 it had increased only 213 miles. In two of the intervening years not a mile was built. A halt had come, for stock-taking and heart-searching.
This first era of activity had given as its most obvious result over two thousand miles of railway. In Nova Scotia, Halifax was linked with the Bay of Fundy and the Gulf of St Lawrence; in New Brunswick, St John was connected with the Gulf, and a road was struggling Canadaward from St Andrews. In the Canadas a 'Grant Trunk,' so nicknamed, ran from Riviere du Loup the whole length of the province to Sarnia, while lesser roads opened up new districts to the north or gave connection with the grain-fields and the ocean {94} ports of the United States.
The western province, at all events, was well served for a pioneer country, and the s.h.i.+pper and consumer had no great cause for complaint.
To the taxpayer it seemed otherwise. He had been induced to embark on a lavish policy of financial aid on the a.s.surance that the roads would at worst be no burden, and at best might yield large profits to the state. As a matter of fact, nine out of every ten dollars advanced might be written off as lost. The Grand Trunk, Great Western, and Northern roads were indebted to the old province of Canada on July 1, 1867, in over twenty million dollars for princ.i.p.al advanced and in over thirteen millions for interest. Other roads were indebted to Canadian munic.i.p.alities in nearly ten millions for princ.i.p.al alone. Yet the taxpayer was not wholly justified in his grumbling. There had been waste and mismanagement, it is true, but the railways had brought indirect gain that more than offset the direct loss. Farming districts were opened up rapidly, freights were reduced in many sections, intercourse was facilitated, and land values were raised. The contribution to the railways was bread well cast upon the waters. It would have been better, if foresight had {95} equalled hindsight, to have given the money out and out.
For the shareholder, English or Canadian, there was little but disappointment. Grand Trunk ordinary stock in 1865 was selling at 22, and even Great Western at 65. The securities of several of the minor roads had been almost entirely wiped out by reorganizations. In 1866 some $4,180,000 was paid in dividends and leases, representing only 2.7 per cent on the $158,000,000 which the roads had cost or were alleged to have cost. Premature extension into unremunerative territory, for political or contracting reasons, excessive compet.i.tion in the fertile areas, heavy fixed charges on inflated capital or leased roads, water compet.i.tion, absentee proprietors.h.i.+p, all played their part. Whatever the causes, the results were clear, and capitalists long fought shy of Canadian railway projects.
In the first thirty years of Canadian railway development no question aroused more interest than that of the gauge to be adopted. The cows of the good Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam fixed the windings of Broadway as they remain to this day. The width of the carts used in English coal-mines centuries ago {96} still determines the gauge of railway track and railway cars over nearly all the world. 'Before every engine,' declares Mr H. G. Wells, 'trots the ghost of a superseded horse.' When the steam locomotive was invented, and used upon the coal-mine tramways, it was made of the same four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch gauge. In England, in spite of the preferences of Brunel, Stephenson's great rival, for a seven-foot gauge, the narrower width soon triumphed, though the Great Western did not entirely abandon its wider track until 1892. In Canada the struggle was longer and more complicated.
It was a question on which engineers differed. Speed, steadiness, cost of track construction, and cost of maintenance were all to be considered, and were all diversely estimated. In early years, before the need of standardizing equipment was felt, many experiments were made, especially in the United States. In the southern states five feet was the usual width, and the Erie was built on a gauge of six feet, to fit an engine bought at a bargain. But in the United States, as in England, the four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch width was dominant, and would have been adopted in Canada without question, had not local {97} interests, appealing, as often, to patriotic prejudice, succeeded in clouding the issue.
When the road from Portland to Montreal was being planned, the astute Portland promoters insisted upon a gauge of five feet six inches, to prevent the switching of traffic to Boston. Montreal, in its turn, insisted on the same gauge for the Grand Trunk line, to ensure that all east-bound traffic should be brought through Canada to Montreal. It carried its point, and the wider or 'provincial' gauge became the standard in the Canadas, and later in the Maritime Provinces.
Experience proved that it was impossible to maintain different gauges in countries so closely connected as Canada and the United States. As roads became consolidated into larger systems, the inconvenience of trans.h.i.+pping at break of gauge became more intolerable. The expedients of lifting cars bodily to other trucks, of making axles adjustable, and even of laying a third rail, proved unsatisfactory. Late in the sixties and early in the seventies the Great Western and the Grand Trunk had to adopt the four-foot-eight-and-a-half-inch gauge solely, and other lines gradually followed.
Meanwhile, the cry was going up for a still {98} narrower gauge. In pioneer districts, at least, it was contended, a road three feet six inches wide, such as had recently been adopted in Norway, would suffice, and would be much cheaper both to build and to operate.
Between 1868 and 1873 two experimental narrow-gauge lines were built running north from Toronto--the Toronto and Nip.i.s.sing, and the Toronto, Grey and Bruce. This proved only a temporary diversion, however, and the decision of the Dominion government in 1874 to change the gauge of the Intercolonial to four feet eight and a half inches, and the adoption of the same standard by the Ontario government, ended the controversy.
Memory is short and hope eternal. Soon after Confederation another burst of activity began in all the provinces of the new Dominion. It was distinctly the period of local development.
In Ontario the opportunity which the fertile western peninsula, jutting down between New York and Michigan, offered for both local and through traffic, led to many projects, much parliamentary jockeying, and at last construction. The Canada Southern was built in 1873, running between Fort Erie, opposite {99} Buffalo, and Amherstburg on the Detroit river. It was controlled by the Vanderbilt interests and operated in close co-operation with their other roads, the Michigan Southern, Michigan Central, and New York Central. The Great Western met this attack upon its preserves by building in the same year the Canada Air Line, from Glencoe near St Thomas, to Fort Erie, giving more direct connection with Buffalo. Both roads made use of the magnificent International Bridge, built across the Niagara in 1873, under Grand Trunk control.
The marked feature of this period, so far as Ontario was concerned, was the rivalry of the cities along the lake and river front in building new roads to tap the north country. From London there was built in 1875 the London, Huron and Bruce, halting at Wingham. From Hamilton, or rather from Guelph, with connections to Hamilton, the Wellington, Grey and Bruce reached Southampton on Lake Huron in 1873 and Kincardine in 1874. Both roads were virtually branches of the Great Western, and were expected to bring to London and to Hamilton respectively the trade of the rich northwestern counties. The Ambitious City, as Hamilton came to be {100} called at this period, a few years later invaded the Northern Railway's territory by a line from Hamilton to Collingwood, also extended southerly to Port Dover, but control of this road was immediately acquired by the Northern interests. From still more ambitious Toronto two narrow-gauge routes were built between 1869 and 1874--the Toronto, Grey and Bruce running northwest to Owen Sound and Teeswater, and the Toronto and Nip.i.s.sing northeast to Coboconk and Sutton. Whitby also had its visions of terminal greatness, when the Whitby and Port Perry was built in the later seventies. The Port Hope, Beaverton and Lindsay, renamed the Midland, was pushed northeast to Orillia in 1872 and to Midland in 1875. Cobourg's unfortunate northern line was continued to the iron mines of Marmora. Belleville was linked with Peterborough in 1878-79 by the Grand Junction. Kingston, with the co-operation of interests in New York state, planned the Kingston and Pembroke, which reached Mississippi in 1878, and five years later compromised on Renfrew as a terminus. The bankruptcy of the Brockville and Ottawa did not prevent its extension through an allied company, the Canada Central, to Pembroke in 1869 and to {101} Ottawa, by a branch from Carleton Place, in 1876.
In Quebec the chief developments were the building of a line connecting Quebec, Montreal, and Ottawa along the north sh.o.r.e of the St Lawrence, and of further connections between Montreal and Quebec and United States roads. The North Sh.o.r.e route had been projected early in the fifties, but, in spite of lavish cash and land bonuses, it was not until the Quebec government took it up as a provincial road, in the seventies, that it was pushed to completion. On the south sh.o.r.e the Eastern Towns.h.i.+ps triangle was interlaced by a series of smaller roads.
From Levis, opposite Quebec, the Levis and Kennebec ran south to the Maine border, and the Quebec Central to Sherbrooke. From Sherbrooke and Lennoxville the Ma.s.sawappi Valley gave connection with the Connecticut and Pa.s.sumpsic, to which it was leased for 999 years, while branches of the Central Vermont and minor roads opened up new sections and gave further connection with Montreal.
An interesting experiment, motived by the same desire for cheap pioneer construction which in Ontario brought in the narrow gauge, was the wooden railway built in 1870 from {102} Quebec to Gosford. The rails were simply strips of seasoned maple, 14'x7”x4”, notched into the sleepers and wedged in without the use of a single iron spike. The engine and car wheels were made wide to fit the rail. In spite of its cheap construction the road did not pay, and the hope of extending it as far as Lake St John was deferred for a generation. A similar wooden railway was built from Drummondville to L'Avenir.
<script>