RAILWAY NATION
Tales of Canadian Pacific
The World’s Greatest Travel System
For Pat and Gord
Copyright © 2020 David Laurence Jones
Foreword copyright © 2020 Doug Cass
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, audio recording, or otherwise—without the written permission of the publisher or a licence from Access Copyright, Toronto, Canada.
Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd. // heritagehouse.ca
Cataloguing information available from Library and Archives Canada
978-1-77203-349-6 (pbk) // 978-1-77203-350-2 (ebook)
Edited by Warren Layberry
Proofread by Lara Kordic
Cover and interior design by Jacqui Thomas
Ebook by Alexandra Santos
Cover images: Jacqui Thomas (front) and High Level Bridge, Lethbridge, Alberta (Author's Collection) (back)Section opener illustrations by Jacqui Thomas. Illustration on page 72 is based on the photo on page 126 (Omer Lavallée in CPR steam locomotive, Omer Lavallée Collection)
Heritage House gratefully acknowledges that the land on which we live and work is within the traditional territories of the Lkwungen (Esquimalt and Songhees), Malahat, Pacheedaht, Scia’new, T’Sou-ke, and WSÁNEĆ (Pauquachin, Tsartlip, Tsawout, Tseycum) Peoples.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.
It gives me great pleasure to write this foreword for David Laurence Jones’s new book on the history of the Canadian Pacific Railway. My association with David began in 2012, when he and some of his colleagues from the National Dream Legacy Society approached the Glenbow Museum with an offer to volunteer in some way that could advance the preservation of CPR history. I was the director of the library and archives at the time and was happy to oblige. I am glad I did, for that began a seven-year association with David, Doug Phillips, and Don Heron, all three of whom brought immense knowledge of the history of Canadian railways to the museum and worked on a succession of projects benefiting Glenbow and future researchers.
The library and archives at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum was a major regional collection of non-governmental publications and historical records documenting the development of southern Alberta and the Canadian West. A key priority from the beginning was the collection of company records, and as a result, for half a century, it has been one of the largest business archives in Canada. Among the earliest major acquisitions were the files of the Canadian Pacific Railway Department of Natural Resources, which was established in Calgary in 1912 and dealt with a host of company undertakings other than the actual operation of the railway, such as land sales, irrigation development, coal mining, and the promotion of immigration to the Canadian West. Over the years, the archives acquired nearly three hundred other archival collections dealing with the railway, and the library accumulated strong holdings of CPR publications, including the library of former CPR president D’Alton Coleman. All of this material is now available through the Glenbow Western Research Centre at the University of Calgary.
Through its work on a number of major exhibitions, Glenbow has had a long association with the railway. In the early 1980s, archivists Bill McKee and Georgeen Barrass developed a major exhibition on the history of the CPR in Western Canada and received extensive assistance from Omer Lavallée and the staff of the CPR archives. That exhibition ultimately resulted in a book Trail of Iron (Douglas & McIntyre, 1983) as well as a major conference on CPR history that led to the book The CPR West: The Iron Road and the Making of a Nation (Douglas & McIntyre, 1984). Portions of the Trail of Iron show were also on permanent display in the museum until 2007, when Glenbow re-developed all of the history galleries with the show Mavericks: An Incorrigible History of Alberta. That exhibition included a gallery on railway history focusing on several individuals, including William Van Horne, William Pearce, and Mary Schaeffer. Glenbow returned to the analysis of the impact of the railway in the 2009 exhibition Vistas, curated by prominent art historian Roger Boulet. That exhibit also resulted in book, this one put out by the archive itself in 2010 entitled Vistas: Artists on the Canadian Pacific Railway.
David and his colleagues noticed early on that the photograph identification in Glenbow’s online photo catalogue was incomplete or erroneous, so their first project was to update the information for several thousand images, some of which appear in this book. They also encouraged others to donate a number of archival collections—including Floyd Yeats and Ray Matthews—and worked diligently to catalogue these photos, which spanned the whole history of the railway. Glenbow also received a number of large donations of plans and drawings of CPR structures and equipment, many saved by Doug Phillips, which led to several other arrangement and description efforts. Their unique knowledge of railway history also helped Glenbow staff answer dozens of research inquiries over the years.
It is only fitting that Railway Nation is able to draw as heavily as it does from the photographic archives of the Glenbow Museum after the excellent contributions of David Laurence Jones and his colleagues helped make the collection what it is today.
Doug Cass Director, Library and Archives at Glenbow Museum
The stories in Railway Nation: Tales of Canadian Pacific, the World’s Greatest Travel System were largely inspired by my early years at Canadian Pacific, when I worked in the company’s Corporate Archives, which was part of the department of Public Relations & Advertising (later Communications & Public Affairs).
The Canadian Pacific Corporate Archives collection was established in 1974, more than ninety years after the incorporation of the company—so we had a lot of catching up to do.
At the time, a number of factors contributed to the decision to start a formal archival program. The primary function of the company’s Windsor Station headquarters building was on the wane, with fewer and fewer train arrivals and departures using the Montreal terminal facility. Much of the vault space below the station was being refurbished for uses other than storage. While many records were being microfilmed and then discarded, some original materials were retained for their intrinsic and historic value. The CPR president’s vault, as well as those assigned to the company secretary and the legal department, was “rediscovered” to contain letters, engineering plans, advertising items and other materials of great historic interest, dating back to the railway’s formative years in the 1880s.
With the approaching centennial of CPR’s incorporation, public interest in the company’s history was on the rise. The most overt example of this renewed fascination was the enthusiastic reception of popular historian Pierre Berton’s bestselling histories of the company—The National Dream and The Last Spike, as well as the airing of an accompanying CBC television series.
Around the same time, CP was exiting several business ventures that were no longer viable, among them passenger rail service and passenger steamship service. Before long, the company would systematically divest of other assets, including its airline, much of its trucking interests and several hotels, to concentrate on core railway operations. Many of the closed businesses would forward their critical bookkeeping and ephemera to the head office.
For the next several decades, the staff of Canadian Pacific Corporate Archives, under the guiding hand of highly respected and knowledgeable historian and archivist Omer Lavallée, would accept and organize new acquisitions of legal and potentially historic significance. While the vast majority of these records came from a variety of company departments, additional material was acquired, where appropriate, from individual employees, collectors, and private dealers.
Although the corporate archives was a private collection, with the primary function of serving the business requirements of Canadian Pacific, members of the public could make special arrangements to consult the archives for research or commercial purposes. Upon submission of a written request, access was provided at the discretion of the company. And, indeed, over the years hundreds of people took advantage of the opportunity to produce research papers, magazine articles, books, and movies from the information contained within the various records groups that were made available to them.
It was during my fourteen-year tenure with the archives that I encountered most of the stories and images that are presented in this compilation, while organizing, preserving, and cataloguing boxes full of letters, accounting records, engineering plans, advertising brochures, promotional posters, photographic negatives and prints, and much more. Though my father had been a CPR employee, and I grew up in a family that often took train trips to visit relatives during the summer months, I had not been aware of the full extent of Canadian Pacific’s enormous contributions to the settlement and development of Canada.
But I did know that I liked tales about the golden age of passenger trains, luxury steamships, fancy hotels, and the people who were lucky enough to frequent them. The more I discovered about the endless connections between the transportation activities of Canadian Pacific and the vast army of immigrants, travellers, tourists, and others who have been guests of the “World’s Greatest Travel System,” the more I though others would like these tales, too.
Note: Canada did not adopt the metric system until 1970. As the lion’s share of the stories in this book take place prior to that date, imperial measurements have been left in place. Due to the nature of the material explored, units of measurement come into play quite often. Rather than belabour the narrative with scores of parenthetical conversions throughout, miles, feet, pounds, and tons have been allowed to stand on their own.