Railway Empire

by Anthony Burton

  Robert Stephenson: the engineer responsible for one of the finest example of civil engineering on Canadian railways.

  The early years of railway building in Canada were entirely piecemeal and notably lethargic. In 1850 Britain had 6621 miles of track, but had already been overtaken by the USA with 9021: Canada could master a paltry 68 miles. There were reasons, some of them political – the Province of Canada was not formed until 1841 which delayed development as railway promoters were faced with a variety of different authorities. Then there was the problem created by the fact that so many Canadian settlements lay very close to the American border. St Andrews in Nova Scotia promoted a 250-mile-line to Quebec, a charter was granted and in 1836 the British Government promised a subsidy. But the line ran through Maine, an area being disputed by the British and American governments: the US formally objected to the line, and the scheme collapsed. It did not, however, dampen Nova Scotian enthusiasm for railway promotion. Joseph Howe was a man of vision who saw a railway from Nova Scotia as an essential extension of the transatlantic steamer trade – much as Brunel had seen his steamships extending the Great Western Railway from Bristol to America. Howe, with what was soon to appear characteristic optimism, named the proposed company the ‘European & North American Railway’. Knowing that he would never raise the necessary funds in Canada, he set off for England where the authorities showed not the least interest in his schemes and sent him packing, or so they imagined. They had underestimated Howe: if government would not listen, then he would appeal directly to the people. He held a series of public meetings in which he stressed the advantages to Britain of a soundly based immigrant route and a route out for Britain’s manufactured exports which would be balanced by the outgoings from the cornucopia of Canada’s rich farmlands. He was an outstanding orator and a press report of the time described his ‘lucid reasoning, startling facts, profound political philosophy and forcible eloquence’. His political philosophy was certainly unusual for the time: he wanted the government to own and run the railways; what is more he thought that railways, like roads, should be free for all. ‘Government ownership’, he argued ‘would keep down the rates and would save the people from the private greed which is at the time so manifest in the conduct of English lives.’ While the government of Victorian England was unlikely to listen to such ‘dangerous’ doctrines, they were at least forced, by public opinion, to take the European & North American Railway seriously. In 1851 they agreed to guarantee a loan.

  Howe had scarcely time to congratulate himself on a job well done before fresh problems appeared. A faction in New Brunswick still wanted a through-route that would include a section of the USA, as opposed to the northern, more Canadian line, favoured by Howe. There was a great deal more wrangling before an unfortunate compromise was reached. The new Brunswickians, at that time still detached from Eastern Canada, were to build their own line at their own expense: the Canadian provinces were to be responsible for their own individual sections. So there were to be provincial railways paid for by local government with the backing of the imperial government, whose only link would be via a private railway which might – or might not – be built in a neighbouring country. It was also a remarkably ambitious project, calling for the construction of 1400 miles of track through difficult country. How this bizarre project would have fared if work had begun, we shall never know, for other characters joined in who were to change the plot of the story.

  Victoria railway bridge across the St. Lawrence under construction. The design is based on Stephenson’s earlier bridge across the Menai Straits, in which the trains actually ran inside the vast box girder.

  Among the advocates of the European & North American Railway was Sir Francis Hicks, a senior minister in the Canadian government. In 1852 he met William Jackson of the great contracting company Jackson, Brassey, Peto and Betts who knew something of the scheme for Howe had already put his plans to Sir Morton Peto. The emphasis now shifted back from public financing to private money. The bankers Baring Brothers and Glyn Mills made it known that funds were available for railway construction, while at the same time the contractors offered to build the entire line. If ever there was evidence of the power and scale of operations of the great contractors then here it was: their terms were simple, but staggering in their magnitude. The government was to pay half the costs and for the other half Jackson, Brassey, Peto and Betts would accept a grant of six million acres of crown land and an annual payment by the railway company of £100,000 for twenty years. There now followed a long period of wrangling. There were local interests pursuing local ends, and a strong and growing groundswell in favour of a major – the major – Canadian Railway being built by Canadians, not by British interests, however eminent. In the clamour of argument, the grand vision of a main line sweeping majestically across Canada was lost. All was fragmented, and what emerged at the end was a line split in two: the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada, and the Grand Trunk Railway of East Canada. In the event the Grand Trunk was to be promoted in Britain with funds coming from Baring Brothers, Glyn Mills and Peto and his associates and other funds were supplied by the Canadian Government and Canadian shareholders. Of the 900 miles of railway to be built, the Peto consortium was to be responsible for 300. Standards were set high. This was to be, in the official language of the Charter,

  The completed Victoria Bridge.

  a first-class single-track railway, with the foundations of all the large structures designed for double track, up to the earth level, and to be superior to any Canadian or American railway now known or used, and equal to the first-class English railways.

  This insistence on excellence was not the result of careful thinking about the type of railway best suited to the terrain, but was intended to silence critics. Local interests were pandered to, so that not only was the line being built to join up with the still non-existent New Brunswick route but there was also to be an extension to Trois Pistoles on the south bank of the St Lawrence and the plans included what would inevitably prove an expensive river crossing at Montreal. All this was being justified by profit assessments that seemed to owe more to optimistic crystal ball gazing than to rational analysis. A major railway system that should have been considered as a long-term involvement was being promoted in terms of short-term gains. It was attracting the get-rich-quick speculators who had been such a prominent force in British construction – a group that was quick to invest funds – and just as quick to withdraw them. It was not a good beginning.

  The English contractors were responsible for the line from Toronto to Quebec, and things went wrong almost from the start. The surveying team travelled on horseback to select the line, and controversy soon arose. It was in the contractors’ interest to make the line as cheaply as possible; it was in local community interest for it to reach as many towns as possible. The selected route included some heavy gradients and missed some towns along the way by several miles. The contractors’ argument was that this saved the huge expense of cuttings and embankments. Local people replied that cuttings and embankments had been allowed for in the estimates, so could they have their line please? Sometimes the contractors won, sometimes the locals triumphed as at Port Hope where the rails were brought to the town on a viaduct across the river.

  The early work of laying rough track for contractors’ trains went largely to Canadian sub-contractors, but skilled men –masons, quarrymen, engine drivers and fitters – were brought out from England at good pay, ranging from 4 shillings a day for the navvies to 10 shillings for the highly skilled, twice what they could expect to get at home. Expenses were mounting, and funds in Britain were being hung on to very tightly in the uncertain times of the Crimean War. But a war which was bad news for Britain brought good tidings to Canada. As the suppliers of Balkan timber and Ukraine grain were brought to a halt, so the lumber camps and grain fields of Canada prospered. And the steadily advancing lines were constantly bringing fresh opportunities for development. There should, it seemed, have been ample fund
s in Canada, but local opinion was turning against the British contractors. At first, it was taken as a matter of pride that the line was to be built to the exacting standards of the very best English routes. Americans simply spiked their rails down to the sleepers; the British held the rails in metal chains and used wooden wedges for a firm grip. The American system had a certain spring to it, whereas the British was altogether more rigid, and hence there was a strong tendency to cracking in very cold weather. What once looked like quality now seemed more like extravagance. American engineers used materials that were available locally, and were providing ever grander and more complex timber viaducts. The Canadian line was passing through forest almost throughout its length, yet prefabricated iron parts were being sent over from the specially established Canada Works at Birkenhead on the Mersey. Rumours flew that Canadian officials had been bribed with share offers to hand out all this lucrative work to the men from England. Had they known just what lay ahead, Brassey, Peto and Company would probably have bribed officials to be released from their contracts.

  At first, the idea had been to rely on local workers, but there were simply not enough. Brassey came over in person to inspect the works and suggested that French Canadians should be recruited from Lower Canada. English and American gangers were given a guinea a week for each man they signed up and there was soon a good sized workforce. They were not, it soon appeared, an especially useful workforce.

  They could ballast, but they could not excavate. They could not even ballast as the English navvy does, continuously working at ‘filling’ for the whole day. The only way in which they could be worked was by allowing them to fill the wagons, and then ride out with the ballast train to the place where the ballast was tipped, giving them an opportunity of resting. Then the empty wagons went back again to be filled; and so, alternately resting during the work, in that way, they did very much more. They could work fast for ten minutes and they were ‘done’. This was not through idleness, but physical weakness. They are small men, and they are a class who are not well fed. They live entirely on vegetable food, and they scarcely ever taste meat.

  Even so, they were extra labour, when extra labour was desperately needed. Without their help, many of the experienced navvies could easily have packed up and gone home. Towards the end, mechanical power was brought in to help muscle power. Steam excavators were commonplace in America, but were scarcely used at all in Britain, and the man on the spot in Canada, Mr Rowan, clearly never warmed to the steaming beasts.

  Towards the last, in consequence of the extreme cost of labour, we employed steam excavators, not because they were cheaper than men, but because they supplied the want of labour, and enabled us to get on faster. A steam excavator is found to be profitable only in very hard material, such as hard pan, in which a very large force is required to excavate. In lighter materials such as sand or gravel, it is more expensive to use than men at five or six shillings a day.

  There was one other factor which the British had failed to take into account, the severity of the Canadian winter. In Ottawa the average temperature between the end of November and the beginning of March is only 16°F (— 10°C). Rivers freeze, the ground freezes, snow falls and stays where it drops and outdoor work on railways comes to halt. Costs worked out in the comfort of England looked very uncertain in the ice-locked forests of Canada.

  There were difficulties all along the line, but by far the greatest task was the construction of the bridge across the St Lawrence at Montreal. The consulting engineer for the project was Robert Stephenson who had built two bridges in Wales to his own revolutionary design, the first at Conwy, then one across the Menai Straits between the Welsh mainland and Anglesey. Strength and rigidity was provided by the tubes themselves, in effect very long iron boxes; the novel feature was that whereas with most bridges the trains run over the girders, here they ran inside them. Piers were prepared, the two tubes were assembled on site from prefabricated sections, then when all was ready they were floated into position and jacked up. Both the Welsh bridges were a triumphant success. There was, however, a difference in scale. The Menai bridge, the larger of the two, was 1800 feet long; the St Lawrence Bridge, later to be named the Victoria Bridge, was to be 6512 feet long. The St Lawrence itself offered one advantage: the river was shallow and ran over a bed of rock, so there were good foundations for building the piers. Balanced against that was the great winter freeze, and when the thaw set in the builders had to contend with a swift current running in summer at around 8 knots. But engineering difficulties counted for little when set against the human difficulties met by the men who came to build it. The whole story was told in detail by James Hodges who was present throughout the construction period.

  A replica of John Malsom. The original was built in 1847 for the Montreal & Lachine line in 1847 by Kimmonds, Hutton & Steel of Dundee.

  The idea for the bridge had first been suggested by a Canadian, John Young, who approached Alexander McKenzie Ross who had been involved in the building of the Conwy bridge. Ross prepared plans which he then took to England to show to Stephenson in the spring of 1852. That autumn Stephenson visited the site himself, approved what he saw and made arrangements for Ross to be appointed as resident engineer. Stephenson himself returned to England to prepare the detailed plans. The tube was to be built in twenty-five sections which were to rest on twenty-four stone piers, and the bridge was to stand 60 feet above the high summer water level at the two spans crossing the navigable channel. The approach at either end was to be along stone-faced embankments. The Victorians were great lovers of accumulated statistics, and on this occasion the figures really do give a notion of the magnitude of the operation:

  Total length of the tubes, 6,512 feet

  Weight of iron in the tubes, 9,044 tons

  Number of rivets in the tubes, 1,540,000

  Number of spans, 25; viz. 24 from 242 to 247 feet each, one 330 feet

  Quantity of masonry in piers and abutments, 2,713,095 cubic feet

  Quantity of timber in temporary works, 2,280,000 cubic feet

  The force employed in construction included 6 steam boats and 75 barges, representing together 12,000 tons, and 450 horse power

  3,040 men

  144 horses

  4 locomotive engines

  The iron work was prepared at Birkenhead and drilled ready for assembly under the supervision of Robert’s cousin, George Robert Stephenson. To pile on a few more statistics: the centre tube consisted of 10,309 separate pieces, drilled with half a million holes and each piece fitted perfectly and every hole was in place. Human and natural elements were not so easily controlled.

  The forces which any bridge across the St Lawrence has to withstand are immense. Ice begins to appear in December in places where the flow is gentle. Then as winter cold deepens the ice begins to accumulate in great masses several feet thick which at any moment, perhaps caused by a temporary thaw, may be released from their resting place to thunder down the stream. Gradually the ice packs together to form a solid immovable mass that spreads from bank to bank and there it stays until the thaw. Then, once again, it breaks up and the floes continue their crashing journey downstream until the thaw is complete. The piers of the bridge had to be designed to take the pressure of the tubes, the equally strong pressure of winter ice and the impact of the careering floes. They were given substantial masonry centres to withstand the pressure and needed well-shaped cutwaters to deflect the ice-packs. A very obvious first requirement was a source of good stone. The best stone turned out to be in Indian land, so a meeting with the Indian occupants was arranged for a Sunday afternoon. Thirteen chiefs arrived, in full regalia of paint and feathered head-dresses, but the British engineers found them to be a rather sorry sight – old, careworn and dirty. Colonial expansion had not been kind to the country’s original inhabitants. The Indians in their turn were equally unimpressed by Hodges, the principal negotiator, who they considered to be far too young to be taken seriously – he was in fact over forty
years old. Agreement, however, was reached and quarries opened at Point Saint Claire, 16 miles west of Montreal but only half a mile from the line of the railway. Work could begin.