> COYLE’S CANADA Engineering an act of union
When Sir John A. Macdonald was looking for someone to lead his first national infrastructure project — a rail line joining the Maritimes and central Canada — he turned to Sandford Fleming
What a godsend it would be to have a chap like Sandford Fleming around today to address Toronto’s perennial subway woes, or any other infrastructure challenge across the land.
With the150th anniversary of Confederation in 2017 comes reason to recall the myriad acts of union across decades, and the names and accomplishments that were the glory of their times.
Fleming was such a one. As was the Intercolonial Railway, the route of which he plotted through the wilds of Eastern Canada to connect the Atlantic provinces with Ontario and Quebec.
It was called “The People’s Railway” and was, in effect, Canada’s first national infrastructure project and one of the young country’s first Crown corporations.
That railway was one of Sir John A. Macdonald’s chief enticements to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick and one of the conditions of Confederation, agreed to with the signatures of a few dozen Fathers of Confederation in 1867.
To make that happen, Macdonald and associates turned to Fleming, a prolifically imaginative and energetic émigré from Kirkcaldy, Scotland, just across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh.
Though a plaque in Fleming’s name now stands on the grounds of the War Memorial Gardens in Kirkcaldy, fittingly close to the local railway station, his townspeople in 1845 could hardly have imagined what mark the then17-year-old setting out for Canada would make in the new world.
By the time Macdonald’s Canada project was getting down to the crunch in 1864, Fleming had become a well-known surveyor, draftsman, cartographer, stamp designer, civil engineer and engineer-in-chief of an Ontario railway.
He was dispatched to survey and recommend routes for the long-dreamed-of Intercolonial Railway to link existing terminals in Truro, N.S., and Rivière-duLoup, Que., enabling Maritime folks and goods to join the Grand Trunk Line, by then the longest railway in the world.
As Fleming laid plans in spring of 1864, he acknowledged the government’s urgency and, in a letter to Canada’s provincial secretary, said he intended “to prosecute the survey with vigor,” getting four teams in the field as early as possible.
“A survey of this nature can, I think, be completed within the present year.”
Trains had first come to Canada in Quebec, then Nova Scotia in the 1830s, where horse-drawn trams and wooden steam engines worked the coal fields around New Glasgow and Sydney Mines.
With expansion of the lines, Eastern Canada was opened up. There was a Halifax to Truro line in Nova Scotia. There were lines on P.E.I. and in Newfoundland. The New Brunswick and Canada Railway ran from St. Andrew’s, N.B., to Woodstock, N.B. And the railways, as always, produced some notable characters.
In 19th-century New Brunswick, one man figured large, and literally so. Alexander “Boss” Gibson was born to poor immigrant parents from Ireland. He grew to six-foot-six in height and sported a red beard until it turned white later in life.
Gibson also had decided streaks of entrepreneurialism and wilfulness, starting as a labourer, becoming a lumber baron, owning sawmills and gristmills and, eventually, railways. A line along the Saint John River would become known, in fact, as the “Gibson line.”
When the “Boss” died at 94 in 1913, he was lavishly eulogized as “a man who had all the good points of Rockefeller and Carnegie with none of their defects.”
(In 2012, moving at a pace Sandford Fleming and the Macdonald government of Confederation would perhaps have found snail-like, the federal government unveiled a plaque in Fredericton to recognize Gibson as a person of national historic significance.)
But back to Sandford Fleming. Fleming, though he had a winning personality, was a decisive, demanding task- master with no small self-confidence.
By early 1864, he had done a reconnaissance of Eastern Canada. As soon as snow cleared, four crews set out that May — each led by an engineer and including experts in levelling, surveying and barometric observations, “a full complement of axemen and packmen,” according to Fleming’s report.
They worked until November through vast stretches of “dense unbroken forest” and challenging terrain. In all, with the crews aided in exploring the wooded districts by “Indians and others,” about 100 people worked on Fleming’s survey.
“This force, with little change and no intermission, continued to work in the woods until the close of field operations in late November,” he reported.
And it appears Canada’s unofficial national creatures were as much of an inconvenience then as now.
“Various kinds of flies were more than usually troublesome during the first half of the season,” Fleming noted. “The parties engaged in the northern sections of the country suffered very much.”
By year end, Fleming proposed three routes and favoured the one that was eventually chosen — the Chaleur Bay route that ran farthest from the American border. The project would include numerous bridges and trestles, which at Fleming’s insistence were to use iron instead of more flammable, less durable wood.
Fleming shrewdly concluded that any line through the underpopulated route would be a long time turning profit and had better be built right in the first place in order to last.
Construction began soon after Confederation in 1867 and the ICR, headquartered in Moncton, N.B., operated from the mid-1870s to 1918, when it became part of Canadian National Railways.
When sesquicentennial tourists go east this year, they will find railway museums in Stellarton, N.S., and Hillsborough, N.B., and Elmira, P.E.I. And should wayfarers to the Island find themselves strolling, hiking or biking along the Confederation Trail, it would be well to consider the history in which they walk.
P.E.I. began building a rail line of its own in about 1870. This was not as straightforward as one might think. There was pressure, of course, to reach all possible communities. So the line was eventually 180 kilometres long, running between terminals only 120 kilometres apart.
One of Canada’s enticements to have P.E.I. belatedly join Confederation in 1873 was completion of the line. This was duly accomplished and the line opened in 1875.
By 1915, the P.E.I. railway had joined the Intercolonial — with ferry service running the rail cars to the mainland and back. But the auto age did its inevitable work and passenger service on the island ended in 1968. The CNR line was abandoned and the tracks removed in 1989.
Today, as has happened along other old Atlantic railbeds, most of the old P.E.I. railway route serves as the highly popular Confederation Trail, 435 kilometres where locomotion is by foot, bicycle or other environmentally salubrious means.
It is all fond history. On joining Confederation, P.E.I. got a deal so favourable — financial plums, its railway paid for, a guaranteed ferry service to the mainland — that the governor general of the day, Lord Dufferin, observed that Islanders seemed to be under the impression it was the Dominion of Canada that had been annexed to Prince Edward Island. This is one in a series of weekly columns by
Jim Coyle leading up to the country’s sesquicentennial.
Sandford Fleming was a well-known surveyor, draftsman, cartographer, stamp designer, civil engineer and engineer-in-chief of a railway