‘565 paved miles’
‘Not by hand did we build a Trans-canada Highway as they built the railway’
In the fall of 1966 when Premier Joseph Smallwood spearheaded celebrations on the completion in 1965 of our part of the Trans-canada Highway, he wrote of a similar, huge challenge that we in Newfoundland had undertaken not 70 years before that. And while the completion of our part of Canada’s 5,000 mile ribbon of pavement was a mighty undertaking for us, it was altogether possible that the railway was even more so in its day.
Smallwood described then Premier William Whiteway’s foresight and bravery in seeing that rails were laid from the eastern coast to the southwestern. For the most part it crossed land which Smallwood described as populated only by rabbits, caribou, moose and other wild game. The first trans-island railway trip (St. John’s to Port aux Basques) was made in June 1898.
In those days we were a small country with a population well below a quarter of a million annually producing government revenues below two million. To contemplate a railway, in Smallwood’s phrase “was either madness, or Newfoundland’s greatest example of far-seeing, courageous statesmanship.”
The railway was, essentially, built by hand. But in the 67 short years since it had opened, technology and machinery had moved ahead by light years. Yet despite that, our highway needed 12,500 men who pocketed some $28 million of the total cost of the project. Those men, among other phases of their work, laid in place 17 million tons of gravel and crushed stone and one-and-a-half million tons of asphalt. They had also removed ten million tons of bog, moved 50 million tons of earth and 20 million tons of rock.
Tunnel under the Straits
The highway was flagged as the greatest engineering feat in Newfoundland’s history. It cost Federal and Provincial Governments $120 millions. That amount in today’s money is close to a billion, at $948,402,000.
Vast sums aside, to Smallwood it was “in a way it is only a beginning.” He was casting his eye on our vast northern landmass where a highway “will stretch eventually to the heart of Labrador through a great tunnel under the Straits of Belle Isle.”
Perhaps the time to get our tunnel was when the cable from Muskrat Falls crosses the Straits; after all, what’s a few more billion shared over our monthly power bills?
But before our tunnelling day comes, we will need to be a much bigger market with many, many more people. In 1966, we had some 500,000 people. Today we have just over 528,000. We’re not “there” yet!
Admittedly a great feat
Smallwood said the completion of the highway was “a dream come true’ for Newfoundlanders. While that is fair to say, from the advantage of more than 50 years and long-time familiarity with the highway, we can see that he sharpened the deprivations of our past so as to raise up the highway (so to speak). Ready to keep you travelling once you crossed Newfoundland and entered Port aux Basques was the ferry MV William Carson. She was nimble among the rocks but not so good in ice.
He wrote that for centuries we had “borne the scourge of isolation” and most of our ancestors “lived their lives within a radius of a few miles of the place of their birth.”
An urge to travel is a rare thing to find in Newfoundland history. But when they travelled abroad, people of the sea went by sea. I feel certain most outport people would not have pined for a highway; a boat would have been preferred to travelling by a relay series of one horse team after another on a mud road like travel in the early American west. If the outport person’s Mecca was St. John’s, once arrived by local schooner, that person could have boarded a boat to Halifax, Montreal, Liverpool or even Kingston, Jamaica. Smallwood noted that the stormy Atlantic annually took its toll of Newfoundland fishermen and travellers. True, and the highway too, exacts a toll.
Our TCH came in good time. And while we may have been dreaming of it for some time, dreaming was all we could do. The reality of Confederation brought the big bucks.
Celebratory literature in the fall of 1966 looked back at “the way we were”. At the point of Confederation (itself now nearly 70 years ago) we had 2,000 miles of “motorable roads”. About a half of those miles were on the Avalon Peninsula. But additionally there were some 3,000 miles of local roads, community-to-community. And I’m assuming that in addition to that there were woods roads and the like. Pavement? We had about 100 miles of it at the time.
People loved it!
In his introduction to the booklet “Highway to Progress”, Premier Smallwood reported that “the tens of thousands who came to Newfoundland in 1966 (Come Home Year) “told us repeatedly (and apparently with sincerity and truth) that this road equals anything they travelled over in North America. Some of them said, with perhaps more patriotic enthusiasm than sober truth, that it was better than any road they travelled on that year.
“Anyway,” Smallwood said in summary, “it’s a beautiful road!”
NOTES
Source: 1966 booklet “Highway to Progress”.
My thanks to Scott Sheppard, St. John’s, for his help.
In kilometres, 565 miles is just over 909.