The average outsider of railway travail may envy the official who, he thinks, continually revels in the luxuries of a private car; but nobody has suffered the pangs of jealousy because he could not share in some of the midwinter pleasures of the railroading pioneer in a Western Canada which, when all’s said and done, is not a banana belt in the earliest and latest months of the year. Between the Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains winter develops more rigours than the poets sing; bracing though it undeniably is, and so dry, before and after prohibition, that you don’t feel the cold.

In railway operation some of the more recent mechanical arrangements of trains have made a day on the rail vastly superior to a day on the trail. Engines don’t die as often as they did when the Canadian Northern was an infant of days. Perhaps it should be explained how engines go dead, lest some reader be as bare of railroad lore as the director of a famous company was who, going on a trip to England, asked the general manager of his line to prime him with a few interesting facts about the system. If investors and others became inquisitive over there, what would he say?

“Oh,” replied the manager, “tell them that we have a fine line with first-class equipment—all eighty-pound rails.”

“Good point,” agreed the director, “eighty pounds to the mile, I suppose?”

In these days, locomotives are equipped with automatic fire-box doors, which operate without producing the intermittent glare that used to light up the sky at night when the fireman opened the door to shovel in fuel. Then, with the temperature down to thirty or forty below zero, the opening of the firebox door would let in such a rush of air that, if the boiler tubes were becoming thin, they would begin to leak.

Cold air seems to have a faculty of doing damage, even inside a glowing firebox, possibly on the principle which preserves the heat of a ray of sunlight, as it passes through an intensely cold atmosphere, so that it will penetrate thick glass, and warm a room. The leaking tubes put out the fire, or reduce its vehemence so that steam cannot be maintained at driving pressure. The stricken engine coughs herself into impotence, and the train stalls. Only in a roundhouse during weather that begets such a casualty is there hope of resurrection for the dead iron horse.

It has been told how the superintendent of the Lake Manitoba Railway and Canal Company almost lived on the line, nursing business with the solicitude of a mother doing her best for difficult twins. No spacious private car tended to make him feel like a monarch of all he surveyed. The nearest approach to winter luxury was the stove in the freight conductor’s caboose. If the superintendent wanted to make the most of his operating force, he could count some of the section men twice—first as maintenance-of-way men, and secondly as way freight agents at the sidings which, as already remarked, furnished more stops than stations.

One bitterly cold night in February, 1897—our first winter on the baby road—we were coming down from Dauphin to Gladstone and Portage La Prairie, when, as we approached Glenella siding—a place whose hopes were linked with the name of Lady Mann’s sister—the engine’s sighing betokened a probable halt, for which force would be no remedy. Billy Walker, our first and faithfullest engine-driver, was at the throttle, and managed to induce his leaking horse to crawl into the siding. We were thirteen and a half miles from Plumas and from the possibility of wiring to Portage la Prairie for a fresh engine. The other locomotive of the system was at Dauphin. It was thirty below zero in God’s free air, and the witching hour of midnight was written on the watch. It was unsafe to sing “We won’t go home till morning”.

Near the siding was a recently-arrived settler who, we knew, had a team of horses. We roused him and he promised to drive me to Plumas. Sitting in the bottom of a wagon box, set on a home-made jumper sleigh, we drove off, over the trailless snow, with never a star overhead to give us a pointer; the driver saying he knew the way, and his passenger muffled to the forehead, solemn as the grave.

The driver gave signs of being almost as dead as the engine; but as he re-asserted that he knew the way to Plumas, he was allowed to pursue unquestioned the wiggling tenor of his way across the flat and hoary plain.

Doubt arose in the passenger’s mind. Somehow, it seemed that instead of going southeast towards Plumas we were making southwest for Neepawa, and that, after awhile, instead of being on the open prairie we should enter hilly, timbered country where the going would be more difficult, and direction impossible to maintain in the leaden gloom. To my doubts the farmer was indifferent, probably not being awake enough to appreciate what was said. After about three quarters of an hour I charged him with heading for Neepawa, and then he threw up his hands and confessed he knew not where we were.

He was bidden to turn around the team, and let them go where they supposed their stable to be. After half an hour of this exhilarating travel I perceived a red light away to the east, and knew it to be the gleaming tail of the stricken train. We reached it at half-past one. I bade the farmer good morning, asked the conductor for his replenished kerosene lamp, requested him to stay with his train till another engine appeared, and started to walk the ties to Plumas.

Nothing is comparable to a situation like that to make a man rely on his own resources, and to exalt meditation into a consoling art—especially when he finds himself exactly where Moses was when the light went out. Something special was in the conductor’s kerosene—the anti-freeze was frozen. After less than a mile’s walk the lamp was as functionless as the helpless engine. Stumbling along, I reached the bridge over the Jumping Deer River, the ties on which were covered with a perfect film of perfect ice. It was soon proved to a demonstration that the foot cannot say to the hand: “I have no need of thee.” I am not sure whether the feet and hands did not have to rely more on their neighbours, the knees, than was customary in most spheres of transportation. With the combined cumbrousness and comfort of a fur coat, fur cap, and mitts that would have done honour to Greenland’s Icy Mountains, the treacherous trestle was safely and thankfully negotiated; and the hope of Plumas flickered once more in a lonely human breast.

Thanks to a pair of fairly long legs, and the remains of an Original Seceder’s faith in final perseverance, I made Plumas station at half past five, woke the agent, wired Portage, whence the Manitoba North Western superintendent sent an engine to Glenella, while I slept until noon in the hotel across the way.

After twenty-seven years, the adventure looks rather entertaining from the meridian of King and Yonge. Then it was regarded as part of the evening’s work—a chore that might have to be done any day of the week—a commonplace which takes a long time to assume the hue of frosty romance.

Comparatively, the zero hours of railway operation are less perilous than their counterparts in the life of the constructor who has to spend winter days and nights in empty country, far from his sheltered base. The general local administration of Canadian Northern construction was mainly in the hands of Rod Mackenzie, eldest son of the President. He was not technically an engineer, but had been almost continuously on his father’s work since boyhood. I believe he spent some time in the mountains when The Farmer Outfit was building snow sheds for the C.P.R. To my knowledge, he was in charge of contracts from 1898, when the first 125 miles guaranteed by the Manitoba Legislature was completed by extending the line 25 miles from Sifton Junction to Winnipegosis.

Rod Mackenzie was one of the most likeable men in railway service. He had a good deal of his father’s remarkable driving force, and attracted to himself a larger quantity of genial companionship. He was a member of Mackenzie, Mann, Limited, though it was not generally known that the firm included more than the two senior principals. My own official relationship was entirely with the railway company, so that I did not come as closely in contact with him as with the chief engineer of the Canadian Northern, who became general manager.

Some day, perhaps, fitting tribute will be paid to the railway engineers who have wrought so magnificently to transform the face of Canada. They scarcely ever seem to think of their work as, in any degree, romantic, or bookworthy. What more prosaic than a blueprint? unless it be a blue-stocking? But what goes into many a blueprint which shows how a river is to be crossed, or a bridge is to be built?

At this writing, the City of Toronto is concerned over a viaduct along its waterfront, which was the subject of a Railway Commission order ten years ago, and is now the subject of a revision by an engineer of whose highly distinguished career the public knows little. The scheme to build the viaduct east of Yonge Street as originally planned, and to construct bridges west of Yonge, instead of the Moyes viaduct, is the work of Mr. M. H. MacLeod, officially the special consulting engineer of the Canadian National Railways with headquarters at Toronto.

Mr. MacLeod is the quietest man who ever devised a solution for a troublesome and expensive problem. He had no previous official connection with this matter; but, returning in the autumn of 1923 from a trip to Europe, he saw in the press that it was once more eruptive. Without seeing a plan, or knowing more of what was proposed than any non-technical outsider could gather from the newspapers, he walked over the ground, alone, using the eyes and experience of the builder of more miles of railway in Western Canada than any other man, and the deviser of the entrance into Winnipeg of the Canadian Northern and Grand Trunk Pacific railways, and of their great Fort Garry Union Station.

The waterfront scheme as adopted by the Canadian National and Canadian Pacific Presidents is the MacLeod scheme, worked out on his own study of the problem on the ground. I have been told by one who was present at a meeting of prominent business leaders which discussed it closely, that Sir Edmund Walker, who was there, told his colleagues that he had known Mr. MacLeod for twenty-five years, as an engineer, and his bank would back any scheme he devised up to ten million dollars.

It was one of the constant satisfactions of twenty-two years out of twenty-six of a Canadian Northern and Canadian National railway experience to be a colleague and friend of Mr. MacLeod, as it is one of the deepest pleasures of a period of reminiscence to draw upon an episode of his service of the Canadian Northern which, on the whole, I think, typifies, better than any other that comes to mind, the quality of that distinguished service.

MacLeod is a Hebridean, from the Isle of Skye. He came to this continent as an infant, and went to school mainly in the United States. His early engineering experience was gained in the vicinity of Toronto. He has recently told of his first meeting at Kirkfield with Sir William Mackenzie, over forty years ago, when he was sent to look over the country through which it was proposed to build a railway from Lindsay to Bracebridge. He was working on the Superior division of the C.P.R. in 1883. He built the line up the east shore of Lake Temiskaming; and was in charge of construction in the Crow’s Nest Pass.

MacLeod became chief engineer of the Canadian Northern in the spring of 1900. We had the line from Gladstone to Erwood, on the way to Prince Albert, with a branch to Grandview, westerly from Dauphin. We also had the South Eastern, on which the Muskeg Express hauled firewood to Winnipeg from the Lake of the Woods. When MacLeod came to us from the C.P.R. our mileage was 600. Before he asked for relief from strenuous duty his jurisdiction as Vice-President of the National Railways, in charge of construction, covered over 17,000 miles.

So far as the scheme for a main line connecting Winnipeg with Edmonton had been developed in 1900, it was intended to make the route via Prince Albert. MacLeod’s view was that a really big line must be built where the C.P.R. main line had first been projected; and that our track from Grand View should be extended to where the old and still used telegraph line to Prince Albert from Qu’Appelle ran from the station at Humboldt towards the South Saskatchewan River, fifteen miles north of and below Saskatoon, then a little station mainly used for traffic to and from Battleford, the former capital of the North West Territories, eighty miles from any railway.

During the summer of 1901 it was determined to prospect the route from Prince Albert to Edmonton, and also to apply for a charter for a main line to be built from Grand View via Humboldt and the Battleford country, keeping to the south of the North Saskatchewan River west of Battleford. While the preliminaries of the application to Parliament were proceeding in the East, MacLeod was to find river crossings—one of the South Branch, about fifteen miles below Saskatoon, and such crossings of the North Branch, in the Battleford country as might seem desirable.

So, on December the fifteenth MacLeod and C. R. Stovel, our right of way man, who was married to a half-sister of Sir William Mackenzie, drove out of Prince Albert to prospect a line to Battleford and beyond, and to locate crossings. To-day a branch line connects Prince Albert with North Battleford, and covers almost precisely the ground that MacLeod and Stovel examined in very hard weather. Very few people were in the country; but it was possible to find a stopping place every thirty or forty miles. They carried their own bedding, mainly of rabbit robes. They came through the wooded country to Shellbrook, then through the Thickwood Hills, traversing parts of two Indian reserves.

A settler with whom they stayed told them he hauled his grain eighty miles to Battleford—a three days’ journey. They came round the north of Redberry Lake, and after dark on Christmas Eve were descending the slope to the North Saskatchewan River about where Brada now is. They could see the dim lights of the old capital, across the valley, on the tongue of land just above the confluence of the Battle and Saskatchewan rivers. Between untrailed snow and tired horses, it was nine o’clock before they reached the town, intending to rest the team over Christmas.

Battleford’s Christmas joy did not please them; and at noon they decided to pull out and look for a crossing up the river. The original C.P.R. survey was kept south of the North Branch, to take in Battleford. But MacLeod had learned that this meant crossing twenty lateral streams, with expensive bridging of each, and most of them on land that was too slippery to afford comfortable economical safety. His idea was to make two crossings of the North Branch, one near the Elbow, where the great current sharply changes its direction from southeast to northeast, and the other above Battleford—which has been done advantageously from every point of view, as everyone knows who is familiar with the country on both sides of the river.

Christmas Day, then, MacLeod and Stovel left Battleford. Twenty-five miles west was Bresaylor postoffice, their objective for more information. The postmaster was Mr. Taylor. He and his neighbours, Bremner and Saylor, had trekked all the way from the Portage Plains, looking for a good location, and had settled thus near the great Saskatchewan because the country was the most like the Portage Plains they had seen. The postoffice name was a compromise—the first syllables of Bremner, Saylor and Taylor, as the Canadian National time table of to-day discloses.

But what about the river valley to the west, which must be explored for many miles for a suitable crossing? Beyond Bresaylor the only habitation was a shack in which two boys were living while wintering Bresaylor cattle on hay which had been put up during the summer, near the Big Gully; the tributary beyond which it was not desirable to bridge the Saskatchewan. The shack was about thirty-five miles west by north of Bresaylor, and almost straight north of the present town of Maidstone. A trail to it was visible in the deep snow. But it had scarcely been travelled, and the going was heavy, and slower for horses than a used road was for a walking man.

The two pathfinders spent Christmas night in Bresaylor postoffice. All next day they drove for the shack. Darkness fell with no indication of dwelling or cattle. For five more hours the weary team was driven over the scarcely discernible trail. Between nine and ten o’clock MacLeod and Stovel stopped, intending to endure the cold of a very bad night, in the petty shelter of a poplar-and-willow thicket. As they were making ready they heard a bark—it was the ranchers’ dog; and comfort and food for men and beasts were assured.

Next morning the search for a crossing must be made by MacLeod alone. There was no way of getting the team and sleigh through the river bottom, two hundred feet below the plain. Off the ice the bush, brush, tortuous banks of the stream, and drifts of snow would make the travel tediously slow. Driving on the ice was impossible. Where the current was extra-swift—and the Indian name of the Mississippi of the North means “Swift-flowing-water”—the ice was far too thin to carry anything as heavy as a pair of horses. So, Stovel must drive along the southern edge of the river valley for, say, fifteen miles, and watch for his chief coming down the ice. Then he could keep pace with him, for a meeting at dusk, and Bresaylor could be made for the night.

MacLeod left his fur coat with Stovel, and taking a couple of bannocks for lunch he travelled in moccasins and a heavy pea jacket. The day was intensely cold. Speed was doubly of the essence of the programme—to cover the ground in the time allotted, and to keep from freezing. At the turn of the year, in the Battleford latitude daylight is done about four o’clock.

Once more, the day’s work seemed commonplace enough to the men who did it. From fireside and radio, twenty years afterwards, it looks what it was—a daring adventure, in an empty country, with a temperature that made lonely human travel more hazardous than most people ever know, and the possibility of a blizzard starting without warning, to the extremest risk of life and limb. Indeed, only a few days after MacLeod all alone, with a walking suit, two bannocks, a box of matches, a compass and a jack-knife, his only exterior defenses against disaster, hurried down the valley looking where to place an imagined bridge, a C.P.R. engineer named Bass, who was making a trial line for the C.P.R. below Battleford, was frozen to death quite near his camp.

MacLeod strode over the ice till noon, seeing no place where a railroad might advantageously be brought down the north bank, a bridge built over the wide current, and conducted up the southern escarpment. He ate his bannocks, resting long enough to be warned by Thirty Below that further repose was impermissible. He trudged again till three o’clock, and then, tired enough, he sat on the ice for a smoke. Seeing Stovel and the team, on a bare knoll, overlooking the vale, about three miles behind him, he assumed that all would be well.

He resumed his walking; and as dusk was falling began to leave the river bed. But a wolf’s bark, which seemed to give notice to a pack, warned him to keep somewhat longer on the ice. When he did climb up a partially wooded ravine, and reached the top, the seeing was not good. Evidently he and Stovel must each be searching for the other’s tracks.

MacLeod found nothing, and being very weary, and among bluffs where dry wood was, he tried to light a fire. The wind, which was moving the snow in the wreathing gusts which every driver and walker over the uncharted wintry plain knows so well, prevented any such consolation, and the cold prohibited a stop in one spot for more than two or three minutes. So MacLeod walked for warmth in the darkness, searching as well as he could for a sleigh track, and finding nothing, and bearing eastward towards Bresaylor. At last he came to a fence, and vainly tried again to make a fire.

The night before, Stovel and he had been saved by a dog. Providence was again to use the friend of man; for, as the isolated engineer was in motion to avoid being frozen stiff, and was longing for the moon to rise so that he could read his compass, a dog barked; an indubitable dog. In a little while MacLeod was inside a house, the good lady of which set food before him.

Stovel had been there about two hours before, very much excited, and saying that he had lost sight of his friend, and failed to find him. Afraid something was amiss on the ice, he had gone to Bresaylor for a fresh team, and human help.

An hour later there was a knock at the door—it was Stovel and the postmaster’s son; and all was clear for another night alongside Her Majesty’s mails.

Next morning the examination of the riversides was continued, the team again following the Saskatchewan’s southern skirt. About nine miles above Battleford, in the afternoon, MacLeod reached the mouth of a wide and wooded ravine, which seemed to offer prospect of the only good crossing he had seen in a tramp of nearly fifty miles.

While he was exploring the ground, he saw Stovel above him, making all sorts of frantic appeals for company. Thinking that some calamity had befallen, MacLeod abandoned his job, to render aid to his distressed and distressing colleague. Nothing was the matter, except that the solicitous Stovel was afraid MacLeod would stay too long below; and he himself was determined to run no risk of recent history repeating itself with a dog’s bark.

The two drove into Battleford, and stayed at the hotel then kept by Albert Champagne, who became Battleford’s first mayor three years later, sat a term in the Assembly of the North West Territories, and was M.P. for Battleford from 1908 to 1917. Next day the team of horses rested; but the team of men sought no repose. They walked up the river to the ravine where the search had been stopped overnight. The site of the great crossing was there and then determined. Stovel used to say he never walked so fast, in snow or out of it, all his life, as he did on that eighteen mile trip before dinner. Twenty years ago MacLeod was in splendid condition, and a terror to go when his walking mood was on. Stovel had a notion that MacLeod was giving him a silent admonition not to repeat the fears of the day before. Stovel was a good guesser.

On the same trip the Elbow crossing and the one on the South Saskatchewan, at Clarkboro, just east of Warman, were located. On the best available information Armstrong’s surveying party was working on preliminary surveys for a bridge about thirty miles below the Elbow. But as soon as MacLeod had found the crossings that best met the demand for economical grading and bridging, and for good farming country alongside the location, he drove to Armstrong’s camp, and moved the party south, up the valley.

It was the fifteenth of January when MacLeod and Stovel forsook their horses for the train, after a full month of hardship which they didn’t regard as hardship. Indeed, if MacLeod sees this account probably he will wonder why so much has been made of so ordinary an expedition.

The transference of Armstrong’s party contains the genius of MacLeod’s genius. The information that took them thirty miles below the Elbow to survey a crossing was the best information available—until MacLeod himself looked over the ground. What his unassisted eye discerned, the blueprints, the finished bridge, the grades and the daily trains confirmed. It would be the same in Toronto.

My old friend and colleague is a born, incurable, unconquerable pathfinder. We proved it over and over again. He would go out to look for country well adapted for settlement, and a settlers’ railway, and not only find what he wanted, but on the way would discover some improvement in his staff’s locations of other lines that saved thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars in construction.

From the interior of our organization, it has been extracted by a faithful memory that MacLeod was later than he expected, returning from an observatory trip in this same Battleford country, where outfits were waiting to begin grading. The few days’ delay meant changed locations over fifty miles of track, on the strength of his overlook of other men’s conscientious and able work. They had the efficiency of training. He had the insight of genius. In instance after instance the stakes that were driven on his observation were found to be in the very spots where the precise levels determined the final location.

One who has been chiefly devoted to operation does not regard himself as an authority on construction. But, in a long generation of experience one learns something of the fundamentals of railway engineering in a country as vast as ours. For finding a road and for building it with the least possible expense and the greatest possible efficiency MacLeod may have had an equal, though I have never met the man who met him. MacLeod certainly has had no superior.

The winter of 1906-7 was one of the worst in western railroad history. It didn’t linger in the lap of spring; it pushed the spring out of its place. Long after the time for the singing of birds had come, an extra-special sleetstorm covered one section of track with so thick a glaze of ice that the only way to get trains over it was to pickaxe the ice from the rails.

Immigration was at the flood that spring. Cities and towns everywhere were preparing for big construction programmes. Something of a blockade was inevitable; but a breakdown in one part of our organization let us into more trouble than honest men deserve. An effort was made to clear up a congestion that was worsening every day, by picking out from as many congested sidings as possible, cars that were most urgently wanted, and making up special trains to meet special urgencies. The result was congestion worse congested, because it took longer to segregate the cars required than to move the whole multitude. Our bill for per diem charges on foreign cars held by us was appalling.

When our interior trouble was fully understood, primarily as the outcome of Mr. Mann and the third vice-president going to Winnipeg to probe the situation, we changed the managerial method, put our superintendents and men on what may be called a course of inter-emulation; with ten days as the time set for abolishing the blockade.

In eight days all was clear, through a zeal on the part of the whole staff which was beyond praise, and almost beyond belief. I never saw such a mess, or such a recovery. In fourteen days the Northern Pacific at Emerson was shouting for us to dam the tide of empties that was flowing back to their American owners.

This blockade precipitated the appointment of M. H. MacLeod as general manager, without relinquishing his other post. There was, of course, some outside surprise at so unusual a fusion of offices. It was even said that MacLeod hadn’t force of character enough—by those who did not know what can come from the lone sheiling of the Hebrides. But MacLeod was all there, all the time and all the way. He was sometimes like electricity—hardly noticeable till you touched him. He seldom kicked; but when he did there was no misunderstanding the stroke.

Shortly before he died Sir William Mackenzie was asked what he thought of the revised Toronto viaduct scheme. He replied that of course it should go through, because it was MacLeod’s; and being MacLeod’s the saving of millions, which it showed on paper, would be a saving of millions on the contract. Sir William’s latest estimate of MacLeod was only in keeping with long experience. He may not have kept them as Major Rogers kept the C.P.R. cheque, but he was given more than one letter by Sir William, signing as President of the Canadian Northern, authorizing him to spend on betterments sums running beyond seven figures, on his sole discretion and authority. Similar instances of executive confidence may be recorded elsewhere, but I scarcely think so.

The quality of the railway pathfinder is essentially the same whether he walks alone, in the depth of winter, on Saskatchewan ice, looking for a place to build a steel bridge a thousand feet long, or whether he is poking around a waterfront littered with shipping warehouses, and considering how to get twenty trains an hour into and out of a station. It works with a seeing eye and a building hand. MacLeod has them both. He is in his own class; but he is of a great company of engineers to whom ungrudging tribute is richly due, and too seldom paid.