Canadian Pacific Railway

Canadian Pacific Railway, the railway, assembled from various lines but mostly constructed between 1881 and 1885, that ran between Montreal, in eastern Canada, and Vancouver, on the west coast. Unique among railways, it is responsible for the existence of a country: it is the instrument with which Canada broke out of the lowlands of the Great Lakes and St Lawrence valley and became a transcontinental nation, by opening up the prairies to settlement and agricultural development, and by providing British Columbia with a link to the rest of the country, which had been that colony's condition upon agreeing to join Canada in 1871. Apart from its political importance, it was also the most technically difficult and daring railway to have been built to that time, and perhaps since.

The impetus to build a transcontinental railway in British North America came from many sources: fears that an expansionist United States would move to fill a vacuum in the prairie region, or persuade British Columbia to join it, thus cutting Canada off from the Pacific; desire to develop the resources of the interior; and the desire of the country's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, to give the young nation a sense of national identity by physically binding it together. The explorer, surveyor, and engineer Sandford Fleming first proposed a route, crossing the Rockies at the Yellowhead Pass (near present-day Jasper, Alberta), in the 1860s, and over a period of ten years from 1871 this route was painstakingly surveyed. Successive governments that were unwilling and private consortiums that were unable to make the huge financial commitment, however, ensured that no sustained construction effort was ever made. In addition, there was constant pressure to use a route through the United States south of the Great Lakes, both to pick up American trade and also to avoid the far more difficult (and hence more expensive) terrain on the northern, Canadian side of the lakes.

In the early 1880s, however, circumstances came together to bring the project to fruition. Macdonald's second government gave the project over to a new business consortium headed by George Stephen and Donald Smith, prominent Montreal financiers, with generous grants of land and tax incentives as encouragement. To oversee the construction they hired as general manager the American William Cornelius Van Horne. Ultimately it was only the personal determination of Stephen and Van Horne that ensured an all-Canadian route was used, but the compromise was made of using a more southerly route, closer to the US border to guard against competition from American railways. Winnipeg and Calgary grew up overnight along the new route, which crossed the Rockies at the Kicking Horse Pass (near present-day Banff, Alberta), and followed the gorge of the Fraser River to the Pacific, where Van Horne decided to build a completely new settlement at the terminus, which he named after the British sailor and explorer George Vancouver, who had first surveyed that coast.

At every point the feats of construction were prodigious: in the summer of 1881, 800 km (500 mi) of track were laid across the prairie, and in 1883 10.5 km (6.5 mi) were laid by one crew in a single day; three dynamite factories were built in Ontario to supply the crews working north of Lake Superior, where the route had to be blasted out of solid rock; along the Fraser the track had to be laid on a ledge chipped and blasted from the sheer sides of the canyon; hundreds of tunnels and timber viaducts had to be built through the mountains to maintain a level grade; and because a new route was being used, it had to be surveyed almost as it was being built—the last link in the chain, the Rogers Pass through the Selkirk mountains, was not discovered until the rails were rapidly approaching from either side.

When the company was in financial trouble in early 1885, the railway proved its worth by transporting soldiers from the east to combat the Metis uprising in Saskatchewan, and the government gave it the loan necessary to complete the construction in November of that year; regular services began in 1886. To make the trains run on time over the 4,652 km (2,891 mi) from Montreal to Vancouver, Sandford Fleming had proposed in 1879 the creation of standard time—the division of global timekeeping into the 24 time zones that we use today—and his plan was adopted by 25 countries at the beginning of 1885. Eventually the Canadian Pacific Railway became a worldwide travel company with cruise ships and an airline as well as the railway and the grandiose hotels along its route, such as the Banff Springs Hotel and the Chateau Frontenac in Quebec, which have become famous in their own right.