Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 184, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 5 August 1915 — NEW WAY ACROSS CANADA [ARTICLE]

NEW WAY ACROSS CANADA

Few People Know Much About the Construction of Grand Trunk Pacific Railway.

Most people on the American continent know more or less about Canada’s pioneer transcontinental railroad, the Canadian Pacific, but probably not many, outside railroad men, in the United States know very much about her latest creation in that line, which has just culminated in the completion of what has been called, during construction, the Transcontinental railroad on the eastern half and the Grand Trunk Pacific railroad on the western half, Scribner’s says. Joined together these halves constitute the new National Transcontinental railroad, to be operated by and called the Grand Trunk Pacific railroad.

It might be considered that the building of a trunk line railroad between 3,000 and 4,000 miles long is no great feat in these days of high explosives and gigantic steam shovels, but when it is understood that a large part of this line runs through rugged and comparatively unknown northern latitudes, where the summers are short and the winters long and cold; that scores of mighty rivers had to be spanned, the Rocky mountains crossed, and the whole line constructed on lower gradients and easier curves than had hitherto been thought practical, the accomplished fact becomes more interesting.

The government of the day, therefore, decided to construct the eastern division, from Moncton, N. 8., to Winnipeg, Manitoba, themselves, by means of a commission, and afterward to lease it to the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad company, which had entered into an agreement with them to construct the line from Winnipeg to the Pacific coast, and to operate the whole line from the Atlantic to the Pacific, when it was completed. Accordingly, an act respecting the construction of the National Transcontinental railroad was assented to by the Dominion parliament on the 24th of October, 1903, which provided for the construction of a line to be operated as a common railroad highway across the Dominion, from ocean to ocean, and wholly within Canadian territory.