After ground was broken in West Fort William (today Thunder Bay) in 1873 for the construction of the CPR, the citizens of Winnipeg realized, with concern, that the proposed route crossed the Red River well to their north, at Selkirk. Winnipeg quickly offered the CPR a generous grant of land and tax concessions if it would swing its line southward through Winnipeg. And so, in what would be a trend of accepting blatant inducements, the CPR agreed.
Because the CPR had too little capital to undertake the entire project, in 1881 the federal government passed the CPR Act, granting the railway twenty-five million dollars and twenty-five million acres of land, the sales of which would allow the CPR to raise the necessary funds. The railway then turned around and sold 2.2 million acres of that land to the Canadian North-West Land Company, with the right to buy five million more. The company proceeded to lay out townsites at intervals of twelve to fifteen kilometres — the distance that a farmer could haul a wagonload of grain in a day. Many of these sites are today’s prairie ghost towns.
Although the CPR’s original survey routed the line through the northern, more-fertile part of the Prairies, the railway opted instead to lay tracks farther south, partly in order to pre-empt incursions by American railroads.
Construction proceeded swiftly across the open prairies. At the end of rail, the work train included a pair of two-storey cars for the crew; an upper level was for sleeping, the lower for eating. Twenty flat cars held the ties and rails while inspection cars and workshops completed the consist. After the tracklayers came the station builders. The first crew erected the framing, the next did the sheeting and flooring, while the final crew finished off the plastering and painting.
It was not unusual for four or five stations to be under way at the same time. It was no surprise, then, that by 1881, trains were entering Brandon, and just two years later, Calgary. Finally, on November 1, 1885, the Prairies were linked to eastern Canada and train service between Montreal and Winnipeg began.
To further discourage American incursions, the CPR then constructed a line of its own into the U.S., namely the “Soo” line, which stretched from a point near Moose Jaw to the U.S. border at North Portal, where it linked with routes to Chicago.
Following the opening of the CPR to Port Moody and then Vancouver in 1886, rail construction in the Prairies, except for a few branch lines, slowed to a crawl. The CPR at that time suffered no real competition, creating a monopoly that left farmers paying high prices to move their wheat. Pressure mounted on Manitoba’s premier, Norquay, to provide competition by chartering new provincial railways. The MacDonald government, however, still very much in league with the CPR, disallowed any such initiative. George Stephen, president of the CPR, went even further and threatened to move the CPR shops from Winnipeg to Fort William. In response the provincial attorney threatened to subpoena Stephen along with Donald Smith, but, hidden in a CPR coach, they slipped out of the province before he could do so.
After an economic depression slowed railway construction in the early 1890s, the CPR returned to branch-line building and by 1897 had managed to lay another 3,500 kilometres of track, nearly half of it on branch lines. The province of Manitoba added another eight hundred kilometres of provincially chartered short lines. These included the Manitoba and Northwestern from Portage la Prairie to Yorkton (in what would become Saskatchewan), and the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway from Emerson to Winnipeg and from Morris to Brandon. Although the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal had been chartered to build from Gladstone to Sifton as early as 1889, it remained for the Canadian Northern Railway to assume control of the charter to begin construction. Within twenty years, Manitoba had tripled its trackage.
While rail lines were criss-crossing the Manitoba landscape prior to 1900, the western prairies had little to show. Although the CPR had laid tracks into Calgary by 1883, it was not until 1891 that it extended branches north to Strathcona, under the charter of the Calgary and Edmonton Railway (C&E), and south to Fort Macleod.
In 1891 the C&E arrived in South Edmonton (soon to be called Strathcona) from Calgary but remained on the south bank of the North Saskatchewan River, much to the chagrin of Edmontonians who were waiting on the north bank. But it was here that it laid out yards and built a modest wooden station. The C&E was, in reality, part of the CPR, which later built a more elaborate stone-and-brick station, still standing in historic Strathcona. It was not until 1913 that the CPR finally crossed the then-new High Level Bridge and entered Edmonton.
In 1889 the CPR extended a branch line from its main line near Medicine Hat to the coal fields near Lethbridge. Until then, the North Western Coal and Navigation Company had been barging coal from Lethbridge to the CPR at Medicine Hat, but the shallow water forced it to build a line of its own. In 1889 the CPR extended the Lethbridge line down to the American border at Coutts to link with the American railway network.
The only other line of note on the western prairies at this time was the Qu’Appelle Long Lake and Saskatchewan Railway (QLL&S), built in 1889–90 from Regina to the steamer landing on the North Saskatchewan River at Prince Albert. Although effectively owned by the CPR, it was built under a separate charter so that the QLL&S could obtain the land grants in that area. The contractors who built that line were none other than William Mackenzie and Donald Mann. Little could the CPR know that they would soon launch the line’s main railway rival — the Canadian Northern Railway.
The Canadian Northern Railway Empire of William Mackenzie and Donald Mann
Once they were finished with the QLL&S, Mackenzie and Mann began to create their own empire, which they called the Canadian Northern Railway. Together, their policy was to establish a national network by buying up unprofitable lines and unused charters, building lines as quickly and cheaply as possible to access as many areas as they could. Mann had previously acquired the charter for the Hudson Bay Railway, and as partners, he and Mackenzie began by acquiring the charters of the Winnipeg Great Northern Railway and the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company, both of which would be the beginnings of a main line that would stay to the north of the CPR. Completed in 1905, the route extended through Dauphin and North Battleford, where it kept north of the North Saskatchewan River, and then continued on to Edmonton.
Political pressure from Prince Albert would also lead to a second “main line” to that area. Although Mackenzie and Mann’s tracks reached Prince Albert from Dauphin in 1906, another decade would pass before the line from Prince Albert would join up with their first main line east of North Battleford. From North Battleford, Mackenzie and Mann had intended to build yet another line north and west to open the area north of the North Saskatchewan — an area which was already attracting large numbers of Ukrainian settlers. Construction began from North Battleford at one end and from Edmonton at the other, but the lines were still unconnected when the CNo went broke. It remained for the CNR to take over construction, although even it failed to complete the link.
During this time, the CNo concentrated on establishing a dense network of branch lines to reach as many farmers as possible. Always interested in encouraging more competition for the hated CPR, the Manitoba government leased more than 450 kilometres of track from the Northern Pacific and conveyed it to the two railway builders. Meanwhile, Robert Montgomery Horne-Payne, founder of the British Empire Trust Company, was raising money for Canadian ventures, and he awarded two hundred million dollars to Mackenzie and Mann. They promptly put it toward assembling another eight hundred kilometres of new line, much of it intruding into CPR territory. They then took over a pair of charters that allowed them to connect with Port Arthur via Minnesota. In 1908 they began work on another vital link, taking them from Saskatoon to Calgary by way of Drumheller, a route that they didn’t complete until 1914. In 1912 the CNo added yet another line to its empire by extending a resource route north from Edmonton to the Athabasca River.
By 1915, when the two empire builders had driven the last spike at Kamloops Junction, the CNo had laid more than fifteen thousand kilometres of track and created 550 new communities.
Despite this impressive feat, the financial woes that would ultimately defeat them were showing as early as 1907, when they failed to make sufficient earnings to cover their interest charges. Efforts to sell some branches to the provinces found no takers. Instead, they incorporated many of their proposed