Different Role of Rails in Two Countries

Canada and the US are both crossed by rail lines, but these played different roles in the development of the two countries. Visits to key rail museums in each make this clear.

The video in the entry hall of the California State Railroad Museum (Sacramento) shows early US railroads as an extension of mail order catalogues: bringing consumer goods to American homes. Obviously they were much more, shipping for heavy industry as well as carrying travelers.

But in American history, they sprung up as local and regional enterprises for a country already under development, whose first settlers had travelled west on trails and wagon trains.

The first US transcontinental railroad, Union Pacific, was an amalgam of a number of shorter lines. It was brought together by Union preparations for the Civil War (hence the name), 19 years after California entered the Union and 90 years after Independence.

Canada, on the other hand, was built by railways politically and culturally as well as economically and geographically. Though the first railways here were local enterprises like American ones, Canada would not exist as a country without the longer lines.

1867 Confederation of the Maritime and inland Saint Lawrence provinces was sealed by the Inter-Colonial Railway, now part of CN Rail. British Columbia’s choice to join Canada rather than the US was made on the promise of the Canadian Pacific Railway.

“My politics is railways” an early Canadian cabinet minister said. He was talking not of building projects like the ICR and CPR but of railways as a distraction from the tensions that threatened the new federation. As long as public attention was focused laying steel and shipping goods it did not turn to the divisive issues of language, culture and religion.

When it was completed in 1885, Canadian Pacific was the longest rail line in the world. It was later surpassed by the formation of Canadian National Railways after World War I.

US railroads collectively had many more miles of track but this was divided among a large number of carriers. This required frequent interchange of freight loads across company as well as state lines. It was also a contributor to the success of the Pullman Palace Car Company. Pullman’s luxury sleeping cars were also interchanged between rail lines, permitting American passengers to travel cross country without changing trains.

In Canada an innovation such as Pullman was unnecessary as the major Canadian railways were transcontinental ones.

It was not until the amalgamations last third of the twentieth century that American railroads equaled and surpassed the size of the two main Canadian lines.