September 2005 ISSUE
feature
ribbons of steel, rings of iron
BY RON BAILEY, P. ENG.
APEGGA Life Member
Former Chief Engineer, Mountain Region
Canadian National Railways
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Working on the Railroad |
I grew up in the days when the railroads ran on coal, steam and tobacco juice — with perhaps the odd drop of Irish whisky thrown in. Coal was the essential ingredient to the operation of railroads in Western Canada, and Alberta was blessed with an abundance of it.
Travellers westbound on the Yellowhead Highway pass a side road to Miette Hot Springs, about 315 kilometres west of Edmonton. This minor junction is designated on the map as Pocahontas. Only an avid railway historian would be aware that this was once the site of a coal mine whose name is derived from its owners in West Virginia .
Nearby, immediately across the Athabasca River at Brule, lie the remnants of the fabled Blue Diamond Coal Company mine. This mine provided fuel for the Grand Trunk Pacific and Canadian Northern railways, as they struggled westward to reach the Yellowhead Pass in 1910.
The railroads to a large extent were instrumental in the evolution of coal mining in Canada and the two industries have been closely allied ever since. In those days mining and railroading shared a peculiar and indefinable mystique, because work in the mine or on the rails was not so much an occupation as an all-consuming way of life.
It was not unusual for the son of a coal miner or railroader to choose the same line as the father. This was not always highly recommended.
I am reminded of a coal miner’s admonition to his growing son, who was determined to pursue a career in the pits:
Seek not your future in a dark dreary mine
Where it’s damp as a dungeon and the sun never shines
A disease will consume you, and seep into your soul
Till the blood in your veins turns as black as the coal.
A railroad disease in those days was not dissimilar. For those so afflicted it too would seep into the soul and remain there forever.
As the son of a railroad engine man, it was not unusual that I should contract the railroad disease at an early age. I used to dream of sitting in the cab of a great steam locomotive like my dad, pulling 15 or 20 cars of the Confederation Limited through the mountain passes or across the Prairies.
My father did not dissuade me from such an ambition. Instead he tried to redirect my railway interest to a loftier goal.
Dad had a consuming and pioneering interest in reconnaissance and locating engineering, as it applied to the railroad — even though he never had the opportunity of a higher education.
His subtle influence must have worked. Although I never lost my fascination with the steam locomotive, I would spend some 38 years of my life pursuing a career in railway engineering.
Railway Engineering 101
Those of you in the engineering disciplines common today are more connected to my past than you might think.
Railway engineering has to do with track, bridges, tunnels, rock sheds, retaining walls, drainage works, water supply, signal systems, route surveying, building construction and what have you. An individual so involved copes with land slides, rock slides, snow slides, washouts, bridge fires, signal failures, wrecks and derailments, and almost every other calamity known to man.
Railway engineering used to be a separate faculty at many universities, such as Illinois, Iowa and Georgia. It may surprise you to learn the “ramblin’ wreck from Georgia Tech” we used to sing about in our undergraduate years was in fact a railway engineer.
It was a railway engineer referred to in Kipling’s immortal poem, The Sons of Martha, which forms the basis of the ritual calling to our profession.
The collapse of the great railway bridge across the St. Lawrence River at Levis , Que., is symbolized by the Iron Ring we wear today.
In an age before the advent of the helicopter, global positioning satellites, inertial surveying systems and the Pentium computer, railway engineering had its genesis with a hardy individual armed only with a pack horse, a rifle, a compass and an aneroid barometer. The reconnaissance and locating engineer possessed the uncanny ability of being able to stand on some high ridge, survey the vista before him, and determine whether this or that mountain pass would provide an acceptable route for a transcontinental railway.
These were the pioneers that bound our country with ribbons of steel.
A Few Good Names
For the most part the achievements of these early engineers have gone unrecognized and unrecorded. The odd place name survives, however, to remind us of their passing.
Dodge City, Kan., was once a survey station on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe. It’s named after General Dodge, the chief engineer.
Col. John Stevens pushed the Great Northern over the Cascade Mountains — via what became known as the Stevens Pass. His glory days were far from over. He went on to become the chief engineer of the Panama Canal and the Trans-Siberian Railway.
In the late 1880s when the whiskey traders made their way north up the headwaters of the Columbia River, they encountered the survey party of Major A.B. Rogers encamped in the shadow of the Selkirk Mountains, somewhere near present-day Golden, B.C.
Availing himself of a welcome bottle of boot leg booze, Rogers exclaimed:
For years o’re mountain pass and plain
I’ve squandered money, time and brain
And off from virtue’s path I’ve strayed
In search of a fifty-two-foot grade.
Alas, that ideal railway grade continued to elude Rogers. The CPR crosses the Selkirks on a gradient of 2.2 per cent — and people have been digging tunnels up there ever since in an effort to reduce it.
Charles Melville Hays, the dynamic general manager of the Grand Trunk Pacific, dreamed of building the finest railroad with the lowest crossing of the Continental Divide in North America. His dreams came to naught, however, on that fateful night of April 14,1912.
Hays placed his wife and little daughter in a life boat and waved farewell — from the deck of the S.S. Titanic, as it slipped beneath the cold, grey waters of the North Atlantic .
It fell to C.C. Van Arsdoll, the chief engineer, to fulfill Hays’ dream. Van Arsdoll, a gaunt and taciturn American who had learned his business in the Sierra Mountains, plotted a route from Edmonton to Prince Rupert through the Yellowhead Pass, with a westbound ruling gradient of four-tenths of one per cent.
So determined was he not to compromise that impossible standard that when he finally succumbed at his home in California, his head stone carried the terse inscription: “Here lies C.C. ‘Four Tenths’ Van Arsdoll — Chief Engineer Grand Trunk Pacific Railway.”
A few miles east of Edson is an abandoned railway river crossing. Two masonry piers protrude from midstream to this day. These are silent monuments to M.H. McLeod, chief engineer of the Canadian Northern, after whom the river is named.
Last but not least would be my mentor, Major John Leslie Charles, O.C., D.S.O., LL.D., P.Eng., the late chief engineer of Canadian National’s Western Region. Major Charles served in both world wars.
He was also a member of the Association of Professional Engineers of Manitoba and was its president in 1953. A life member of the Engineering Institute of Canada, in 1968 he was awarded its highest honour, the Julian C. Smith Award.
It was under Major Charles’ guidance that rail lines were built to Churchill, Flin Flon, Sherridon, Lynn Lake, Chisel Lake, Snow Lake and Thompson, Man.
Think of him, and all the other determined individuals of the coal and rail era, the next time you drive past a barely noticeable little junction called Pocahontas.