A GREAT RAILWAY ENTERPRISE.* Tars is an age of "
records " in things sportive and things serious ; such in the railway line the surveyors, engineers, and bridge builders of the Grand Trunk Pacific may fairly claire to have accomplished, or to be on the point of aecomplishinge - The mechanical difficulties were enormous: some have been overcome by men, money, and explosives ; somehave been most ingeniously avoided; and, apart from the strictly mechanical obstacles, there was one yet more formidable—the arduous task of organizing the supplies along the route. What this has meant the railway builders of Europe, and even of Asia, can have but little idea; in North America itself other lines have not had the same number of rivers and swamps to cross. And there is something here to be said. The line is not as other lines. Throughout the grading of it the engineers have. had two aims ever in view—the obtaining of a grade which shall not exceed a rise of twenty-one feet in the mile against west-bound or east-bound traffic and the plotting of curves which shall not be under a -certain radius. These ideals have - been practically attained, but the attainment has cost the • promoters three times as much as if they had been content with the steeper mountain grades to be found on other American lines. This ie, indeed, a great feather in the com- pany's cap ! As for the Government they, too, have a " feather " of their own. It was Sir Wilfrid Leerier and 'his Cabinet which abolished the pernicious land-grant system, the plan of giving to railway corporations immense tracts of land. It is to be hoped that Canadians will not forget the goat deed.
Mr. Talbot might, we think, have brought us more into- touch with the personnel of this great undertaking. We have much, perhaps too much, of figures ; we have not a little. repetition ; yet, with all, we miss some facts which we should like to have—the dimensions of a tunnel, for instance. He has plodded on many a weary bush trail himself ; perhaps he does not think that the story would be interesting; still he would have done well in giving a closer knowledge of the men who made the new trans- continental line first a possibility and then a fact. Bat he
helps us to realize the difficulties of the mountain section. Who would believe that for as much as sixty miles inland from Prince Rupert actually through the coast range the line is positively level P The track has simply been chiselled
• The Making of a Great Canadian Railway. By F. A. Talbot. London: Seeley, Service and Co. [16e. net.j'
out of the mountain face which forms the northern bank of the Skeena River or carried across indented bays on cause- ways. Yes ; this has been, indeed, a "great railway enter- prise," a veritable wonder of the world.
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