Engineering Wonders of the World
Volume I

... il.in il.i in. .. 1 ^—77——^—————— — 270 ENGINEERING WONDERS OF THE WORLD. built may be gathered from a story told by Mr. James Ross, general manager of the North American Railway Contracting Company: “ Two locating parties were sent to change the line between the river Saskatchewan and Calgary for a distance of 1,181 miles ; one party went ahead to determine the practica- bility of the route for the grade of 40 feet to the mile, and the second party to locate the permanent line. Though these two parties started from a point 74 miles west from the end of track, had. three weeks’ start of the graders, and were able to locate 4 to 5 miles a day, yet the graders were many times in sight of their back picket man.” In 1883, while the prairie section was being completed up to Calgary, the line was being pushed forward from Calgary up the Bow River Pass. Some of the lo- RockiX cating parties had to travel more than five hundred miles by cart or pack-horse to the scene of their operations. For construction, a more elabo- rate plant was required, there being heavy cutting, embankment, and bridging to be done. On this section, up to the summit of the Rockies, there are 2 miles 3,000 feet of bridg- ing, including eight crossings of the Bow River, one of the Kananaskis, three of Devil’s Head Creek, and one trestle 250 feet long by 80 feet in height. Yet 123 miles were completed in eighty days ! Meanwhile the line was being slowly pushed forward from the Pacific coast into the interior. From Port Moody to Kamloops the line was built by the Government, LabouT mostly with Chinese labour supplied by Wung Gee, the great Chinese contractor at Victoria. Each man received three shillings a day. This section of the line, 213 miles in length, with twenty tunnels cut through granite and hard crystalline limestone aggregating 1| miles, creeping along the ledges on the precipitous sides of the Fraser Canyon, and bridging the roaring torrent from promontory to promon- tory, provides some of the most dramatic engineering on the whole of the C.P.R. Yet it cost, exclusive of rolling stock and surveys, only £13,400 per mile. The gradient does not exceed 1’10 per cent. There were, however, others than China- men in the construction gangs, especially on the higher sections, when the Company pushed on beyond Kamloops. “ To a great extent,” says Dr. George W. Campbell, who was chief timekeeper on this western stretch, “ the labour problem on con- struction was solved by the bringing in of any kind of a human being who could handle „ ., a pick and shovel; and as the best of wages were paid, the line was flooded with some of the toughest characters on the coast, not a few of them being men who had done time at San Quentin. Police protection was an unknown quantity, Jack Kirkup being the one man who was to be depended upon to hold the lawless element in check. Of course there were gamblers and other loose char- acters hanging on the tail of the work, and as everything ran ‘ wide open ’ in Yale, the town was the scene of many a riotous night, and not a few men found death or injury as a consequence. The hospital for the whole grade was at Yale, and the transportation to that point of wounded men, especially from the upper divisions, was often attended with harrowing incidents.” Kamloops was on the line of the original route selected by Sandford Fleming over the Yellowhead Pass. But Jim Hill, then one of the leading Prospecting spirits in the new Company, ^or a Way j m • a t> through engaged Major A. B. Rogers, an th American engineer, to take Mountains, charge of the mountain division from Savona’s Ferry eastward, with instructions to find the shortest practicable route across the