The Last Spike: The Great Railway, 1881-1885 (53 page)

The
Globe
, always waspish where the
CPR
was concerned, wrote that summer that it would be a miracle if the road reached Kamloops before 1886; but Van Horne had a schedule and he meant to keep to it. He had told Stephen that the job could be completed by the end of 1885; Stephen had translated that advice into a pledge to the government. They could not afford to let the work lag. Fortunately, they had some remarkable generals at the head of that mountain army. The contractors in the Rockies included men whose names would, in the ensuing years, come close to being household words in Canada. The
CPR
was a spawning ground for an amazing generation of entrepreneurial talent whose influence became world wide.

They sprang from varied backgrounds, these future captains of industry. The 36-year-old James Ross, a short, compact man, thickly bearded and good humoured, was the son of a Tyneside shipowner and had had engineering experience on both sides of the ocean. Van Horne had enormous confidence in him. When the job was done the general manager went so far as to write personally an account of Ross’s work and send it to the
Manitoban
. In it he said that he regarded Ross as one of the ablest builders on the continent, probably unequalled by any other man. He asked that he be quoted on the matter because “I am particularly anxious in view of some criticisms upon him to make my opinions public.” Ross became one of the most successful financiers in Canada, a kind of capitalist’s capitalist – a coal and steel baron, a tramway king, a yachtsman, commodore, and philanthropist.

Herbert Samuel Holt, a huge Irishman who walked with a rolling
Galt and spoke as little as possible to anyone, went on to become the richest man in Canadian history. Holt hated publicity and had no intimates: in the twenties and thirties he became a mystery man who controlled an unprecedented empire of three hundred companies on four continents – a kind of Canadian Basil Zaharoff. Knighted in World War I for planning the railway system for the army in France, he was, in the words of the
Daily Express
of London, “the business brain of Canada … certainly a more important figure in the Canadian world than the prime minister is in that of Britain.”

Two other mountain contractors, whose names were to become familiar after the turn of the century, were William Mackenzie and Donald Mann. Mackenzie, who held several bridging contracts along the Kicking Horse, had begun his career as a school-teacher in Kirkfield, Ontario. His future partner, Mann, was a powerful figure with dark brooding eyes and arms like hams, capable of picking up a man and holding him at arm’s length, feet off the ground. He had struggled up the hard way, starting out with an axe in his hand, cutting ties in the tamarack swamps of Manitoba. (He had once waded all night through the deep snow with two hundred pounds of flour and a side of pork on his back to bring aid to a starving camp.) Mackenzie and Mann became railway promoters, capping a long career by constructing the Canadian Northern, a transcontinental line designed to rival the Canadian Pacific, but one which went gloriously bankrupt at considerable expense to the Canadian taxpayer.

There was another future tycoon working along the line that year but in a more humble capacity, “a young raw Highland Scotch boy” from New Westminster named Jack Stewart. Young Stewart, shy but eager, was low man on the staff of John F. Stevens, assistant locating engineer for the mountain division. He learned the railway business well. Thanks to his
GPR
experience he came out of World War I a major-general and went on to become the largest contractor in the West, helping to build another ill-fated transcontinental railroad, the Grand Trunk Pacific, and founding, for the Liberal Party of British Columbia, a lively newspaper, the Vancouver
Sun
.

After the turn of the century these men spearheaded the great wave of Canadian “utility imperialism” (as one historian has called it) – building power plants, railways, and streetcar lines all over Latin America and two more transcontinental railways in Canada. William Mackenzie helped to launch in São Paulo the gigantic Brazilian Traction corporation, a firm that was to grow almost as big as the
CPR
itself. Herbert Holt built a railway in Peru, financed a pipeline across Colombia, and controlled banks in the West Indies. James Ross became president of the vast Mexican Light, Heat and Power Company. (Van Horne, in his turn, went on to build a railway across Cuba.) In the 1920’s and 1930’s these men also virtually controlled the private utilities and transportation systems of Canada – an unexpected by-product of the launching of the
CPR
. It can be argued, however, that their skills belonged to another era. While the Canadians were absorbed with railways and power plants, the same generation of American entrepreneurs was building automobiles and airplanes.

The nature of the mountain environment conspired to produce men of strong will and ingenuity. The contractors were forced to improvise to push the line through on time. Since it was impossible to take heavy drills down the dizzy inclines of the Kicking Horse, all blasting holes had to be punched out by hand. One man held a hand drill in position while four more swung sledges in rhythm to produce what was known as a coyote hole. This was loaded with powder and lit by a long fuse. The resultant explosion sometimes hurled heavy boulders a hundred yards into the foaming river. The men hid behind trees or took cover in shanties, returning to clear away the debris – hammering the larger rocks into smaller pieces and shovelling them into carts and barrows. In spite of such primitive techniques, Ross’s work force managed to move a million and a half cubic yards of earth and rock and, in addition, drill half a mile of tunnels during the 1884 season.

Van Horne had decreed that all bridges – pile, trestle, and truss – be made of timber rather than of iron and masonry, in order to save money. Even without the cost factor, the necessity of pushing the line through on time would have dictated this swifter method of construction. There was no way in which iron girders or quarried stone could be transported down the gorge of the Kicking Horse until the rails were laid. By using timbers cut on the spot the bridging crews could keep ahead of the track gangs.

It was a considerable feat to cross an unfinished bridge, as hundreds of men were forced to do. Along the cross-pieces lay stringers, placed on edge and at varying distances, some close together and some so far apart that a man could scarcely leap from one to the next. These were lying loose, unbolted and trembling with every movement. Some fifty feet below the water could be seen swirling around the sharp rocks. If a man fell, nothing could save him, especially if he was carrying a load, for there was nothing below to seize hold of save the great timbers of the under-structure.

In order to get around the face of some of the bluffs without drilling tunnels or making expensive cuts, the railway resorted to “grasshopper trestles,” so called because the outer posts extended far down into the gorges, standing in steps cut in the rock, while the inner posts, like a grasshopper’s forelegs, were very short and sometimes non-existent. Later on these trestles were replaced by walls of masonry, built by Scottish stonemasons.

On its queasy descent from the Great Divide, the road switched back and forth across the Kicking Horse by truss and trestle eight times. Before the right of way could be cleared, a tote road had to be constructed to replace the dangerous surveyors’ trail cut into the cliffside. This in itself was a major construction job. The tote road ran a few feet above the bed of the railway, winding in and out along the face of a slope that topped the almost sheer cliffs above the river. In one place it was notched right into the cliff above the stream bed. It was almost as perilous as the Golden Stairs, which had scared the wits out of Grant and Fleming the summer before; often it was that same pack trail, slightly widened. On their first journey down the hazardous thoroughfare, men involuntarily hugged the upper side and uttered a sigh of relief when the journey was over. Herbert Holt was almost killed on the tote road in 1884 when his horse slipped on a stone and fell over the edge of a perpendicular cliff seventy feet above the river. The future mystery man had a miraculous escape; he plunged twenty-eight feet, turned a complete somersault, and landed on his stomach on the trunk of a dead tree caught in the canyon’s wall. Had the tree not been present to break his fall, the financial history of the nation in the early twentieth century would have been considerably altered.

The choice of the Kicking Horse Pass had presented the
CPR
with a considerable dilemma. The river drops eleven hundred feet in the first three and a half miles of its headlong race down the western slopes of the Rockies. Under the terms of its contract with the government, the
CPR
was pledged to a maximum gradient of 2.2 per cent, or about 116 feet to a mile. Major Rogers had so located the line down from the summit of the mountains to the Columbia River by way of the gorge cut by the Kicking Horse. But to build the line as Rogers had located it, the railway would have been forced to cross several extensive boulder slides, all of them highly unstable, and to pass under an immense, unpredictable glacier. In addition, it would have been necessary to drill a tunnel fourteen hundred feet long through solid rock. That, the engineers predicted, would delay the railway for almost another year. Sandford Fleming suggested to Van
Home that the company build a temporary line dropping quickly down from the summit into the comparative level of the valley of the Kicking Horse by means of a grade of 232 feet per mile – twice as steep as that allowed by the contract and four times as steep as the ideal maximum. Fleming’s suggestion was accepted, and thus was born the “Big Hill” between the stations of Hector and Field. It was an eight-mile horror.

In his submission to the Minister of Railways, Van Horne dealt airily with the problem. The ruling gradient on the
CPR
had been set at one per cent. But on the Big Hill the gradient for almost four miles would be 4.4 per cent. This would be followed by a comparatively level stretch and then, for an additional three and a half miles, the gradient would run between three and a half and four per cent. In his memorandum Van Horne claimed that the Northern Pacific had used a heavier gradient without difficulty pending the completion of a long tunnel and that similar gradients had been used across western American mountain ranges on one or more other railways. The heavy gradient, he said, occurred in a section where traffic – mainly local – would be light for a number of years; only three or four trains a day would pass by. It would be cheaper to wait for a time when wages were not inflated by the railway’s labour requirements and the pressure of time would no longer be a factor.

Van Horne was scrupulously correct, but he was leaving a great deal unsaid. The Northern Pacific and Santa Fe lines had built temporary switchbacks of the same grade, but these had been used for comparatively short periods. There
was
one short, scenic railway that operated on grades as high as seven per cent, but this was a freak. No major line, even those crossing the Great Divide in Colorado, exceeded a four per cent grade; nor did the lines that crossed the Andes out of Peru. The grades on the Big Hill would be the steepest ever regularly operated for any considerable period of time by a standard-gauge railroad. Van Horne’s “temporary line” – an eight-mile diversion from the original location – would last for a quarter of a century. It was, in the words of a later
CPR
executive, “a heavy cross to bear through the years.”

It was the beginning of a twenty-five-year nightmare for the railway’s operating department. Even a 2.2 gradient can cause runaways. The first train that tried to descend the Big Hill – a construction outfit consisting of two locomotives and three box cars – ran away, climbed the rails on a curve, and plunged to the river below, killing three men. Safety switches were installed every two miles and manned twenty-four hours a day so that if a train got out of control, the man in charge of the switch could turn the
track onto a spur, which would lead the runaway up the side of a hill until it came to a halt. These precautions did not always work. A second construction train lost control after passing over a safety switch and headed straight into a tunnel where sixty men were working. The engineer slammed the engine into reverse, set the whistle, and jumped. When the tender derailed, the train came to a stop.

The various rituals established by the railway to ensure safety held up operations in the mountains. At the top of the Big Hill, every passenger train was required to stop to have its air brakes and sanding apparatus tested and inspected. The retaining valve on every car was closed so that when the engineer released the brakes momentarily to recharge the auxiliary reservoirs for a fresh application, a pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch would still be retained in each brake cylinder. Brakemen jumped off at intervals and trotted beside the train to make sure the wheels were not sliding or heating unduly. Box cars and flat cars, always difficult to manage, were restricted to a speed of six miles an hour. All trains were required to stop at the safety switches and start up again after the switchman re-aligned the track onto the main line. The bigger engines were limited to seventeen loaded cars in daylight and twelve at night; smaller engines could not even pull these loads. Every car was set by hand, the brakeman using a pick-handle for extra leverage to apply the brake as tightly as possible without causing the wheels to slide. Powerful water brakes were brought into service when the steeper inclines were reached and the trains began to slide downhill like toboggans. The air brakes were retained as a last resource. In spite of these precautions, and in spite of the safety switches and a complicated system of whistle warnings, runaways continued to occur. One train lost a forty-ton wing plough, which plunged three hundred feet into the river. And there were several cases of locomotives roaring down the slope so fast that the men tending the safety switches could not operate them in time to save train or crew.