THE “LAST WEST.”

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2765, 21 March 1910, Page 2

THE “LAST WEST.”

A NEW RAILWAY ACROSS CANADA.

(By a Canadian Engineer.)

The building of the new railway from Atlantio to Pacific, the. Grand Trunk Pacific, is of the greatest undertaking in the history even of Canada. Let me give some idea of the magnitude of the task, the method of itg accomplishment, and its significance to the Empire. Formerly it has been our practice to build hurriedly and cheaply, and to bring the lino up to the standard later as til© revenue justified the. expenditure. In the case of tho Grand Trunk Pacific, however, the read has been designed as a first-class line, and it is boing built and finished ns such in the first instance. Realist what this means. Very much to the surprise, even of the enthusiastic promoters, the engineers have been able to lay down a line with a grade of four-tenths of one per cent., giving a rise of only twenty-one feet to the mile from the Atlantio to the Pacific Ocean. The cost of construction will, of course, exceed the. cost per mile of any other transcontinental railway, but, when the last spike is driven the road will be finished. Express trains can ho put on almost immediately. As a matter of fact, more than 800 miles of line west from Winnipeg is now being operated. —The Great Track.— Glance now along the line. This new world-highway begins at Halifax, crosses Nova Sootia and New Brunswick, traversing the storied land of “Evangeline,” and enters the province of Quebec, at Edmunston. Tho St. .Lawrence River will be crossed at Quebec over one of the biggest bridges in the world. West of Quebec the work is not unusually heavy, as it passes through an agricultural country for the first fifty miles; then, however, it enters the broken country, passing through the famous asbestos mining region, and entering the great pulp wood forest of Northern Quebec. Here the work is very heavy—mostly rocky woik—but nearing the boundary line which separates the Province of Ontario from Quebec a vast level stretch of clay land is encountered. . This clay belt is 150 miles wide from north to south, and 300 miles long. So level and uniform is the country that here, in this hushed wilderness, are some of the longest tangents on the line. Passing out of this clay belt, west-bound, we come into that gnarled and twisted territory common to the north shore country where it is almost continuous rock work. Thousands of square, miles that were actually regarded as worthless have been tested here and proven to be not only fit for settlement, but exceedingly rich and' fertile. - Thus is written the history of progress in Canada. From Fort William, on Lake Superior, the railway company have built a branch up the main line at a point called Superior Junction. Tho line is 200 miles long. Some idea of the difficultv of the work may be gathered by the statement that the contract price for the finished line from Winnipeg to Superior Junction was over £2,000,000. Although there are no mountains here, a number of tunnels had to bo made through the rocky humps of this broken wilderness. —The Prairie Section.—

Winnipeg is almost exactly midway between Halifax and Prince Rupert, the Pacific "Grand Coast terminus of tho Grand Trunk Pacific. Although the road from Winnipeg to Edmonton, a distance of 792 miles, is called the “Prairie Section,” it entailed a great deal of what might reasonably be call'd “mountain building.” The prairie west of the province of Manitoba is broken by deep valleys, creeks, and coulees. One short cut, I remember, !u Id 130,000 yards of dirt, and at the end of it a canyon 150 feet deep had to be bridged.

Then, too, keeping the line to a fourtenths grade necessitates the bridging, net only of the rivers and streams, but. of valleys as well. The Battle River, in Alberta is not 100 yards wide, but the steel bridge by which the train crosses it is 18G feet high and more than a mile long. Another great bridge takes them ever the North Saskatchewan, near Edmonton. Eighty-six miles west of Edmonton the Pembina River is crossed by a steel structure 20G feet high and 900 feet long. Naturally, one would imagine this a broken and hilly country, but it is not eo. The land is comparatively level, rich, and fertile all the way from Edmonton to the PemIrna River and some distance beyond. The grade has been completed for 100 miles or more west of Pembina, whore another steel bridge is being put in across the McLeod River. Beyond the McLeod we enter the real mountain section, and the grade hero is the same as that of the prairie province. This is the marvel. Railway rnen find it difficult to believe that a. transcontinental railway can cross from ocean to ocean, passing at the foot of Mount Robson —the highest mountain in the Dominion —travelling along dank canyons in deep gorges, skirting the shores of great lakes and mighty rivers, and yet this is an established fact. Bc_ tween the end of the dump at the eastern ends of the eastern foot of the Rockies and the end of the grade now finished, 100 miles east of Prince Rupert, some five or six hundred miles cf mountain work remain® to he. done. Perhaps the most- important feature in connection with the construction of the Grand Trunk Pacific is the part it will play ,in the transportation of the ever-increasing crops of tho Canadian West,