1 - ON THE RIGHT TRACK

Canada, March 2001

THE railway that crosses Canada coast to coast has a history and a symbolism that is second to none.

It is a thread of steel which binds together the second largest country on the planet (Russia, despite all its recent upheavals, is still the biggest).

It is - in a land where there are more telegraph poles than people - often the only way that folk in some of the world`s most remote areas can get to see their relatives and friends or buy the groceries.

More controversially, it is - as some political analysts tell us - the only reason why Canada is not part of the United States. It is also - as history tells us - a fountain of stories involving double-dealing, intrigue and general chicanery.

It's passengers have included British Royalty, film stars, explorers, prime ministers and men in beaverskin hats from the backwoods of nowhere.

And it runs on time (or 2 minutes early for a 72-hour journey if you really want to be precise).

When Canadian Pacific, a private company, was given the job of completing the trans-continental railway in 1881, it was on a hiding to nothing. The government had given up on its own efforts; others had tried, and failed. The task was to connect up existing track by building "missing links" across boggy muskeg land above Lake Superior and to go up over the Rocky Mountains in the west where the acquisitive Americans were looking to move in.

Sir John Macdonald, the nation's first prime minister and a loquacious, charismatic Scot who sometimes took more port than both his legs would stand, resigned amidst a finacial scandal involving the funding of the company. And worse...mandated by HM's government in London to Confederate the provinces of its vast North American colony, he had only been able to win British Columbia's agreement to join up with a promise that they would be connected to everyone else by the railway within 10 years.

It was a promise - which in those days anyway - the politicians felt duty-bound to keep.

Swathed in hardship, frostbite and tales of derring-do, thousands of labourers (mostly Irish and Chinese) toiled to dig and dynamite their way through the Rockies after surveyors had searched for months to map out a route.

In Ontario, a land of quick-sinking muskegs, frustrated track-layers often awoke to find their efforts of the day before simply vanished overnight into the gooey depths of a shifting bog.

Despite it all, such was the national pride and importance of the project, the work was nonetheless completed, not in the promised 10 years, but in just 4½. And the first passenger train ran coast-to-coast six months later.

Today - symptomatic of the new era of privatization - the trans-continental is run by an outfit called Via, which rents the track from Canadian National Railways (CN).

With connections, it is possible to travel the full 4200 miles coast to coast from Halifax in the east to Prince Rupert in the west, but Via's smart, stainless steel "Canadian" - which proudly carries the legend Train #1 - is still one of THE great train journeys of the world. It covers the 3000 miles between Toronto and Vancouver and runs three times a week.

Main halts in between are Sudbury, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Jasper and Kamloops although, remarkably, it will also make request stops for passengers - even singletons - to get on or off at one-moose towns in the back of beyond.

When Canadian Pacific's first passenger train hissed and puffed its way across the country and into history in 1886 it took nearly 6 days. Now it takes half that time to trundle across the vast wateryness of Ontario, the glaciated fur-trading lands of Manitoba, the wheatfield prairies of Saskatchewan and the cattle ranches of Alberta.

In the Rockies, the line follows much of the original path through the Yellowhead Pass with spectacular views of snowy mountain tops and icy rivers, before snaking down into British Columbia through the forested lower peaks of the Caribou, Monashee and Columbia ranges.

Although it has mostly back-tracked out of railways since the 1960s, Canadian Pacific is one of the wealthiest companies in Canada. Its name is practically an institution and its history is entwined like ivy round the progress of the nation.

At one time or another it has owned more than 36 million acres of the place (that's roughly equivalent to the size of......... ) and part of its brief in those early days was to act more like a government development agency in bringing out settlers to the now-prosperous west coast.

Over the years its tentacles have stretched by vertical integration into most things connected with travel, shipping and freight.

Today, probably its most public face is through the chain of Canadian hotels - all sumptuous and picturesque - which it owns in places like Quebec city (Chateau Frontenac), the Rockies (Chateau Lake Louise), Toronto (Royal York), Ottawa (Chateau Laurier), Victoria (Empress) and the Hotel Vancouver.

Guests have included royalty, heads of state from far and yon, and the rich and famous. John Lennon, the late Beatle, recorded Give Peace a Chance between the sheets with Yoko Ono in suite 1742 at CP's Queen Elizabeth hotel in Montreal during his week-long anti-Vietnam bed-in protest in 1969. (You can still hire it for just Can $599 a night).

Through its purchase of control of the Fairmont chain, its hotel collection now also stretches into Mexico, the Caribbean and throughout the USA.

CP's "Mr Hotels" was Charles Melville Hays who had previously built up the Grand Trunk Pacific Railroad and sold it to them. A former US citizen who moved to Canada, he was on his way back there in 1912 aboard the Titanic when...well, he didnt make it.

In fact CP had a difficult time with boats. Around the turn of the century they accumulated big fleets of passenger liners and coastal freighters, but disaster struck in 1914 when their Empress of Ireland collided with a collier in fog in the Gulf of St Lawrence.

The boat sank in just 14 minutes and the dead totalled 1012 passengers and crew - more even than the Titanic or the Lusitania.

Four years later, there was another horror when all 360 aboard their coaster Princess Sophia perished after it hit a reef in a snowstorm off Alaska.

Like its passenger trains, CP pretty much bailed out of passenger boats in the l960s and now makes its money from hotels, cargo ships, fuel, rail freight and running luxury train tours (a la the Orient Express) round bits of the old trans-continental track it still owns at prices in the O-O-O guage.