Rails Across the Prairies. Ron Brown
avoiding the need for federal approval. One such example was the Alberta Midland Railway (AMR), which the Alberta legislature chartered in February of 1909. The lines AMR completed were from Vegreville to Calgary and from Camrose to South Edmonton (later Strathcona), before becoming part of the CNo system.
But the CNo’s fortunes rebounded, and two years later it had extended tracks all the way to the Atlantic. However, the election of Robert Borden as prime minister in 1911 proved to be another financial setback, and the CNo sought help first from England and then the U.S. With the war then raging, Britain could no longer export capital — a similar dilemma to the one facing Americans after belatedly entering the war in 1917. In that year, the end effectively came for Mackenzie and Mann’s railway empire, when a royal commission recommended that the government assume control of the line.
The Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific Railway
Originally chartered in 1896 as the Edmonton District Railway, this line was intended to stretch to the gold fields of the Yukon. By 1898, however, no work had been done and the charter fell into the ambitious hands of Mackenzie and Mann and their growing Canadian Northern Railway Empire. They changed the name to the Edmonton, Yukon and Pacific (EY&P), whose charter allowed a route to the Pacific. Under the EY&P, the CNo finally linked Edmonton and Strathcona by constructing its line along the Mill Creek Ravine and crossing the North Saskatchewan River on the “Low Level Bridge,” which the federal government had built in 1900. In 1902 the CNo entered Edmonton, building its station below McDougall Hill. Meanwhile, the main line of the CNo arrived in Edmonton from the east in 1905, and the company built a station on 21st Street. An EY&P trestle still survives on the hiking trail that follows the rail right-of-way through the Mill Creek Ravine.
The Alberta Midland Railway
Chartered in 1909, this line runs from Vegreville to Calgary, with a short-lived “short cut” from Camrose to Edmonton. It was really an instrument of the Canadian Northern Railway, using a provincial charter to get around federal approval for its construction. In fact, once the charter was approved by Alberta, it immediately became part of the CNo. Its route took it through the coal fields of the Drumheller badlands, past the ghost town of Wayne, and along the valley of the Rosebud River and Serviceberry Creek, where sixty-two bridges were needed.
Laurier’s National Dream:
The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, Canada’s Third Transcontinental Line
Despite the building of the CPR and the CNo, prairie settlement still lagged, and the new Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier tasked Interior Minister Clifford Sifton to encourage more immigration, largely from Britain and eastern Europe. By 1911, seven hundred thousand immigrants had been persuaded and arrived seeking the “Last Best West,” as the brochures proclaimed. It helped that, in 1905, Charles Sounder, the Dominion “cerealist,” developed a type of wheat known as Marquis wheat, which could grow in harsher climates and less-fertile soil.
Meanwhile, the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR), which dominated eastern Canada, had been casting its own eyes toward the transcontinental cash cow since 1856 and lobbied to be let in. The Laurier government agreed and granted a charter to the Grand Trunk Pacific for a national line. But the GTR was hesitant to expend the large sums needed to build a line through the harsh terrain of northern Ontario and Quebec. Indeed, with the need for a third national railway being constantly questioned, the GTR sought to instead obtain the CNo. Mackenzie and Mann, however, refused to part with their own national dream.
Finally, Laurier agreed to the third national railway. To help the GTR financially, Laurier agreed that the eastern portion of the new railway would be built by the government itself and would become known as the National Transcontinental Railway (NTR), while the western portion from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert would be the responsibility of the GTR and would be known as the Grand Trunk Pacific (GTP). The two lines would meet in Winnipeg.
But, unlike the CNo, the GTP had little interest in branch lines and instead aimed straight for the coast, ultimately reaching Prince Rupert in 1914. From Winnipeg the GTP’s alignment took it through Melville, Saskatoon, and Edmonton, although it did add branch lines to Prince Albert and through Regina to the American border.
In building the eastern portion, the National Transcontinental Railway conquered countless construction hurdles, and structural engineers consider the construction of that line the world’s greatest feat of engineering in the early twentieth century outside of the Panama Canal. Conversely, the Grand Trunk Pacific’s western segment was relatively straightforward: in 1905 the GTP turned sod in Carberry, Manitoba, and in just two years, the heavy-duty steel rails were being pounded into Saskatoon. By 1910 they were in Edmonton.
Because of the heavier steel rail, the GTP trains could haul longer and heavier loads than could the CNo, and passenger trains between Winnipeg and Edmonton beat their rivals by four hours. West of Edmonton, and into the mountains near Jasper, the CNo and GTP tracks ran parallel to each other. Finally, common sense prevailed, and in 1917 the CNo switched to the heavier GTP track, while the redundant CNo rails were sent to wartime France to replace tracks damaged by bombing.
But, unlike the CPR and the CNo, the GTP received no grants of land. Instead, it went ahead and purchased forty-five thousand acres of land for eighty-six townsites, advertising them as “towns made to order.”
As early as 1911, it was becoming painfully clear that too much track had been laid in western Canada. With costs soaring, Charles Melville Hays, president of the GTP, urged the government to take control of the line, but that initiative sank in 1912, when Hays went down with the Titanic. In fact, the government itself was urging the GTP to take over the NTR and CNo, but to no avail. Between 1900 and 1915, trackage increased by 130 percent, whereas population increased by only 40 percent. Compared to the U.S. and the U.K., Canada’s lines were the most sparsely populated, at 1.5 kilometres of track for every 250 people — a far cry from the 1.5 kilometres per four hundred people in the U.S., and 1.5 kilometres per two thousand in the U.K. Even the influential Bank of Commerce, which owned banks in many prairie towns, was calling for a national railway system for the country.
Eventually, outright fraud and shady practices had increased the cost of operating the NTR section to the point where the GTR refused to continue operating it. The need to fund the war effort meant that the many lines in the Prairies suffered in a similar fashion to route right across the country. In 1916 Prime Minister Robert Borden established a royal commission, which urged that the federal government amalgamate the GTR, GTP, CNo, NTR, and ICR. The federal government ignored a CPR plea to assimilate the lines with its own and instead created the Canadian Government Railways to operate the eastern division of the GTR as well as the failing Intercolonial Railway. In 1918 the Canadian National Railway was created to take over the operations of both the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railways. Later, in 1919, the government passed the Grand Trunk Acquisition Act and the following year had control of both the GTP and GTR. The Canadian National Railway was formally born. But would it save the Prairie rail lines?
The Canadian National Railway
Under its new president, Henry W. Thornton, the Canadian National Railway could embark on new railway ventures, including restarting the moribund Hudson Bay Railway. Through the 1920s, the new CNR added branch lines and station styles of its own. It also merged the two CPR-operated lines to the Peace District. One of the CNR’s tasks at hand was to complete unfinished lines it had inherited, such as a branch the CNo had, in 1911, promised to build in order to open up the area north of the North Saskatchewan River between Edmonton and North Battleford. Under a province of Alberta charter for the “Canadian Northern Western Railway,” the CNo surveyed a northerly route from Edmonton to Saskatchewan to meet a section that had already been completed north of North Battleford to St. Walburg.
Progress on the western end had remained slow from the beginning, halting altogether with the onset of the First World War. With the return of more prosperous times in the 1920s, the CNR — now the new owner of the CNo — began work anew. While rails were extended to Grande Centre and Heinsburg, the final link to St. Walburg in Saskatchewan remained unrealized. Abandoned in the late 1990s, that portion of the old route between Waskatenau, Heinsburg, and Cold Lake later became the route of the popular Iron Horse Trail.