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When we tell this to visitors at railway sites, many recall relatives who have worked on a railway or refer to others who went west on the annual "Harvest Specials" to find advertised work on farms in the Prairies.
Mothers and grand-mothers were noted for cranking up the telephone calling Eaton’s or Simpson’s to order catalogue items that were shipped by trains.
Travelling Salesmen would arrive by train with their trunks of samples to promote to the area's stores.
In the earlier days of automobile travel, numerous rail lines were recognized as being the only means of ensuring “getting to town” during periods of heavy snow in the winters, as well as, over the muddy roads of early spring.
Like the rest of Canada, New Brunswick (NB) had its share of people interested in the development of railways. Their reasons too often ranged from out-and-out greed to personal benefits in helping their business interests. Others implied that they were more public-minded, wanting to “help The Country” by building a railway for the Government, ---- expecting, of course, plenty of financial help from this same Government.
However, NB was also quite unique in that a number of its railways resulted from events and decisions made or directed from outside its territory.
British Military interests had wanted a railway to join an Atlantic Ocean port to the Canadas, especially during the winters. Efforts to build from St. Andrews to Quebec resulted in an international border dispute that saw the border between New Brunswick and the State of Maine changed per the Ashburton Treaty of 1842. This rail line would become known as the New Brunswick and Canada Railway, and did later get built from St. Andrews to Woodstock, with a couple of branches.
The Americans considered they needed faster exchanges with Europe. NB was on a Great Arc * between the New England States and Europe, and Americans wanted the shortest route “time-wise”. Since ships, even sailing ships, were faster than trains at that time, the 1850 Portland (Maine) Convention was called to discuss the various alternatives in competition. The choice favoured the route from Shediac Bay to the American border at McAdam. Connecting with existing American railways in southern Maine, the Americans built through Maine to Vanceboro.
The opening of this bi-country rail line (the European & North American Railway) in the fall of 1871 was considered important enough for the then American President, Ulysses S. Grant, to come to Vanceboro to celebrate, together with Canadian Provincial and Federal politicians.
While many don't realize it, the above route provided the first rail link from New Brunswick to Montreal, via Portland ME, some 6 years before the Intercolonial was opened in Canada. It was The Grand Trunk Railway which had connected Montreal with Portland, ME by 1853.
A well-known New Brunswicker, Alexander “Boss” Gibson, born near St. Andrews, could have been well aware of the original attempts to connect a seaport of New Brunswick with one in Quebec. He entered the lumber business in the Nashwaak area, near Fredericton, and was surely soon thinking “railways”, as a convenient method of getting logs to his mills. He also surely imagined building a rail line from the lower Saint John River via Edmundston to Rivičre-du-Loup as he eventually did build the New Brunswick Railway from Gibson (now part of Fredericton) to Edmundston. The Government of the day favoured him, as was the practice, with large tracts of forests for his efforts …
About 1890, the New Brunswick Railway, plus the portion of the European & North American Railway west of Saint John, together with the New Brunswick and Canada Railway were all three acquired by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). These formed the majority of CPR lines in New Brunswick until there was abandonment of portions and sale of the remainder to the current New Brunswick Southern Railway.
As part of the Canadian Confederation, it was decreed that there should be a railway to connect “the Canadas" and the maritime provinces. The Grand Trunk had been extended east to Rivičre-du-Loup with a gap remaining from there to Moncton. As E.B. Chandler of Dorchester had pushed a rail line from Painsec Junction near Moncton (in a partly circuitous as opposed to the usual straight line) to better serve his interests in Dorchester, this line also went on to serve Sackville. Sir Sandford Fleming would begrudgingly build a rail line from there to connect with Halifax.
The newly-formed Canadian Government had retained Sir Sandford Fleming to oversee the construction of the new route that would join Halifax with Rivičre-du-Loup. A number of possible routes for a railway had previously been surveyed for the then pre-Confederation British colonial powers whose priorities reflected a railway route as far away as possible from the Canadian-American border. As well, in order to obtain extra support from Quebec, and particularly from Sir G.-É. Cartier, it was proposed to adopt the “Robinson Route” previously surveyed, via Ste Flavie (Mont-Joli) and closer to the east coast of NB. The new Government and the British agreed, and the line was therefore built from Rivičre-du-Loup to Moncton.
American parties had been looking for another direct route from a northern New Brunswick seaport for access to the American markets. The result of this plan was the construction of the International Railway of New Brunswick that connected Campbellton across the Province to St. Leonard to join up with the Bangor & Aroostook Railway in Van Buren, ME.
There were two other substantial railway projects in New Brunswick that either had or appeared to have had outside forces. The battles between the Canadian Northern and the Grand Trunk railways to form their own transcontinental rail networks saw projects in New Brunswick. The Grand Trunk (Pacific) Railway project saw the federal government take over and finance the National Transcontinental Railway from Winnipeg east to Moncton. From Edmundston to Moncton, this line is still owned and operated, in NB, by CN (Canadian National).
The second rail project under the influence of outside forces resulted in the eventual construction of the Saint John and Quebec Railway, which had been proposed to go from Saint John to Grand Falls. Because of competition at the time between some of the American promoters involved (with their own interests as priorities), and various Canadian Northern Railway promoters (with similarly inclined priorities), all of their scheming resulted in a railway to nowhere! World War 1, government financing, etc. helped create this dead-end railroad that would become the CNR’s “Valley Line”.
Beyond these major railway projects, there were many local railways built, often just short lines in areas without much in the way of real traffic potential. The Province of New Brunswick even had a rail line that was paid for twice!
The end result of all this endeavour was that the Province of New Brunswick had the most miles of railways, per square mile, as well as, per capita, than anywhere else in North America!
In conclusion, peeling back the various layers of the history and development of NB railways reveals the impact outside forces, such as promoters, had on the development of the province’s territory. By opening and developing lands that they had been granted, promoters of railroading not only benefited their business interests, but they also encouraged the establishment of villages and towns with the development of industries whose products they shipped, and they contributed to population growth by transporting immigrants to settle in these newly developed pockets of the territory and to seek employment with the new industries established there. The province of New Brunswick, thereby, became what it is today in large part due to the development of railroading.
* Great Arc --- Term used to express distance on a meridian relating to land topography experimentation conducted in India and widely reported in British scientific journals of the 1847 period.
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