This book is published because readers have said they obtained from the chapters that were written for The Toronto Star Weekly sufficient knowledge about railway conditions in Canada, during forty years, to cause them to ask for the material in permanent form.
The third era of Canadian railway expansion, beginning with the unnoticed construction of a hundred and twenty-five miles of line in Manitoba, and issuing in the largest national system in the world, will sometime have its due place in the historical literature of the period. Though this was always apparent, it never seemed that one’s contact with the changes of a quarter of a century would ever reach the public except through the inarticulate narrative that is interned in annual reports and arid statistics.
What appears here is due to the ability of my old friend and colleague to take scanty and seemingly disconnected material, and fashion it into a story such as one scarcely supposed to be discoverable.
This book could only have been written by an author with an inside experience of railway administration; and an intimate knowledge of Western Canada. Mr. Hawkes was for several years the Superintendent of Publicity for the Canadian Northern Railway System. From the railway point of view, therefore, he was familiar with most phases of what I had to tell. His knowledge of the West is extensive and peculiar. He was going through the mill of homestead farming in the North West Territories before I ever saw Manitoba. His intimacy with pioneer conditions, is repeatedly reflected here, in a manner which it is a pleasure to acknowledge.
This much of explanation was necessary, to make it clear that an old railwayman is merely offering, through the only available channel, what little material a hardworking life affords for, perhaps, a friendlier appreciation of the railways’ part in developing Canada than is easily obtainable from official publications.
“Trains of Recollection” may be my story; but it is my friend’s book.
D. B. HANNA.
Toronto, May, 1924.