Product Description
Built for War: Canada's Intercolonial Railway tells the story of Canada's first attempt to assert its sovereignty, and how the railway, built with military and economic objectives in mind, served its purpose so well. ... Read more

Book Description
Most historians have given only incidental attention to the railway land subsidy policy of the Dominion of Canada. In breaking comparatively new ground Mr. Hedges has therefore depended to a large extent upon manuscript sources in the archives of the Department of the Interior at Ottawa. He traces the various steps leading to the adoption of the Canadian policy and discusses in detail its development in connection with the administration of the subsidy to the Canadian Pacific. In his final chapter he sets forth the broad outlines of the methods the railways pursued in the administration and disposition of their lands. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Modellers View
Quite a good book from a human interest point of view. not a useful as I had hoped from a modellers point of view ... Read more

Book Description

From its inception as a horsecar line in 1874, the Niagara St. Catharines & Toronto Railway is one of the foremost examples in Canada of an intensively developed and closely integrated transportation system. It operated local street railways, interurban lines, carload and lass-than-carload freight, lake steamers, a large motor coach system, and even an amusement park. The NS&T and predecessors include the first electric railway in Canada to have operated without interruption, and the last interurban passenger service. Each aspect of the company's operations was coordinated with others to form a transportation system which, while comparatively small in area, was very active in operation, and several distinct types of passenger service (local, commuter, inter-city and excursion) were developed. Author John Mills tells the story of all of them, with details on where the routes ran, maps of the line, stations, and connections with the many major railways that served the Niagara Peninsula. There are 256 pages of text, containing nine detailed system maps, a roster of the railway's rolling stock, and over 300 fascinating photographs, fifty in full colour. ... Read more

Book Description

The fascinating story of one of Canada's most interesting rail lines.

Book Description
This is a story of courage and adventure. It reveals how workers struggled through long days, enduring extreme weather, pests, and the often poor food and housing, as they built a railway through the difficult terrain of Canada's northern wilderness to Churchill, Manitoba. The book provides rare insight into the survey parties who explored this region of ice, snow, swamp and muskeg. The colorful accounts of surveyor J.L. Charles describe the hardships and adventures in mapping the route. Additionally, it gives a historical account of organization, such as the RNWMP (later RCMP) who helped bring order and discipline to the rugged life on the line, and Frontier College teachers, who assisted the workers in their labors and their education. The men who surveyed the Bay route, the workers who built it and the people who keep it alive have raised the level of human achievement in Canada. Their story is an important and colorful part of Canadian history. ... Read more

Book Description
This irreverent and witty book describes the building of Canada's railway. Author Ted Staunton serves up a saucy tour through the railway fiasco beginning in the 1850s with the first attempts at running a steam engine on a short length of track.
With cartoon-style illustrations on every page, this book uncovers the scandals about government financing, as well as the to-ing and fro-ing about the route around the Great Lakes and the arduous labour, rotten boots and hallucinations. In place of a tedious textbook, this is history designed to entertain. ... Read more

Book Description

When, in the late 1980s, the federal government initiated a plan to deregulate the Canadian railway system, lobby groups protested the betrayal of a national mandate.They asserted that the railway was founded to promote a sense of national identity, to provide access to isolated regions of the country, and to ensure a transnational exchange of goods and ideas.In The Philosophy of Railways, A.A. den Otter considers the relationship between nationalism and technology, and shows how the popular rhetoric surrounding the evolution of the Canadian Pacific Railway has mythologized the role of a private corporation and its technology.He questions the notion that the railways were built as an antidote to American manifest destiny, suggesting instead that the widespread adoption of railway transportation as a civilizing mission impelled Canadians to bow to technology's integrating effects, including confederation and closer ties with the United States.

The study begins by looking at the intellectual climate that spawned the Canadian railway idea, revealing that this idea was strongly influenced by a combination of British and American liberalism, a philosophy that saw technology as the means to destroy trade barriers.In fact, during the mid-nineteenth century, Canadians preferred to build transportation links to the American seaboard rather than to Saint John or Halifax, and this created a deep-seated alienation in the country's peripheral regions.Not only does den Otter include the Maritimes in his analysis, but he employs a careful reading of national documents including assembly debates, the private correspondence of major political figures, and newspaper commentary to contextualize the public debate.

By investigating the complex and ambiguous process by which the Canadian railway system both consolidated national identity and facilitated continental integration, The Philosophy of Railways establishes that isolationism, until relatively recently, was not the unilateral stance of those committed to the growth of the railway.

Winner of the Harold Adams Innis Prize 1997-1998 ... Read more