Sleeping Car No. 3538 for his private use, with a salon and shower.8 On one trip, the Prince claimed he was in Vienna consulting a physician for a chronic ear problem, when His Highness and friend Major Edward “Fruity” Metcalfe were seen at the Viennese night spots Chat Noir and Cocotte, and rumours spread that they were meeting with prominent Nazis. Edward VIII had no liking for either Sandringham or Balmoral, and did not use trains as much as his father or grandfather, choosing to isolate himself in his residence at Fort Belvedere, which could be reached only by car. Even a Mediterranean cruise had unfortunate results: the hostility of the Italian Fascist government prevented him from embarking on the yacht Nahlin in Venice, and his party had to travel by train to Yugoslavia, “an indescribable journey that I subjected myself to,” he wrote (blaming the Foreign Office for this inconvenience), to meet the yacht at the little fishing village of Sibenik.
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Visit of Their Majesties King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. Her Majesty is accepting flowers from a little girl. The royal party has just alighted at Beavermouth, B.C., July 1939.
One of the rare occasions when Edward VIII did use a British train was on November 18, 1936, when he toured depressed areas in Wales. Scorning the royal train — and even the red-carpet treatment — His Majesty travelled in a special GWR carriage, arriving bareheaded in the freight yards, and completing much of the tour by car. His flair for public relations asserted itself this one final time and, moved at the plight of the destitute miners, he declared, “something must be done.” However, Edward knew he would not be the man to do it, and had already told his brothers, his mother, and the prime minister of his intention to abdicate. After his abdication, there were no more royal trains and the new Duke took the Orient Express from Austria to France to be married at the Château de Candé, near Tours. This time, a retired Orient Express employee recalled, to escape the media circus, or “hounds” as Wallis Simpson termed the press, his meals were taken by tray into an ordinary compartment, where the former king ate off two suitcases balanced between the seats.
During her son’s brief reign, it was Queen Mary who kept the old LNWR Royal Train in use, and after Edward’s abdication, it became a perfect means for King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and the two little princesses to vacation at Balmoral. The children were thrilled at sleeping on a train that had been built for their beloved grandfather, who had doted on little Elizabeth. As soon as he acceded to the throne, as if exorcising his brother’s irresponsibility, George VI immediately paid visits by train to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
Unlike his brother, the new king had always enjoyed trains. As Duke of York, he had travelled on the Orient Express to Belgrade in 1922 to attend the marriage of King Alexander of Yugoslavia to Princess Marie of Romania. Shortly after his own marriage, the Orient Express had taken him and his bride, the Duchess of York, to Belgrade for the christening of Crown Prince Peter. In 1925, they attended the centenary celebration of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway, the first passenger railway in Britain. On August 6, the following year, His Royal Highness drove the first train on the fifteen-inch-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway in Kent. On October 20 he visited the Southern railway works at Ashford and even rode on the footplate of the locomotive Lord Nelson. Little did he know of the marathon railway adventure to come.
Through the winter of 1938-39, London and Ottawa were busy working out the details of a royal visit to North America. As Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had just returned from Germany with Hitler’s assurance that there would be no war for at least a year, it was considered safe to allow Their Majesties to leave the country and drum up support from Britain’s closest Dominion and its mighty neighbour. The royal train trip would be from one coast of Canada to the other and back, with a side trip to Washington and New York. The plan was that Their Majesties would visit every province and provincial capital, with day trips in large cities and whistle stops in smaller ones. The train would pull off into quiet (and secret) sidings at night so that all on board could sleep. If the city to be honoured was in the riding of a powerful Liberal politician, so much the better, for then, as now, the photo opportunity for a politician of greeting Their Majesties at the station was worth thousands of votes. This precipitated local politicians, mayors, Rotary clubs, and society hostesses to badger the Prime Minister’s Office for a few precious royal minutes and to warn of dire consequences in the next election if that did not happen. Where the train could not stop, the plan was that it would slow down and Their Majesties would drop everything and rush out to the platform and wave, affording the throngs of locals who had been waiting for hours a quick view of the King and Queen on the rear platform.
It was a heavy schedule, exhausting for everyone involved with the royal party —the Mounties, the press, the ladies-in-waiting, the hairdressers, the postal workers, and everyone on board. But no one was to work harder than Prime Minister Mackenzie King, who at every stop got off the train first and then rushed over to the royal car to greet Their Majesties, welcoming them to whichever city they were in and introducing them to the local politicians, their wives, and the aldermen.
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Joyce Evans, daughter of the Port Arthur City Clerk, presents a bouquet to the Queen, as W.L. Mackenzie King and C.D. Howe look on, May 23, 1939.
The grand railway tour was to begin on May 18, when Their Majesties would be driven from the Citadel at Quebec City to the railway station. Engineer Eugène Leclerc of Quebec, who had worked on the Royal Train in 1901 and had been in CPR service between Quebec City and Montreal for forty-eight years, had the honour of being the first engineer. The Royal Train would leave for Montreal, making sure it stopped on the way at Trois Rivières, Quebec, Premier Maurice Duplessis’s hometown. After Montreal it was on to Ottawa, then Toronto, with a brief stop at Kingston and Cobourg on the way. Through the Ontario highlands it would go, and then along the north shore of Lake Superior to Port Arthur, C.D. Howe’s riding. The train was to stop at Raith, Ontario, for servicing but only slow down at Kenora before arriving in Winnipeg. The Prairies would follow, with stops at Brandon, Regina (named for the King’s great-grandmother Victoria Regina), Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Medicine Hat, Calgary, and Banff, where the royal party was to rest. Through the Rockies they were to stop at Craigellachie, Salmon Arm, and finally Vancouver. On the return east, it was Vancouver to New Westminster, through the Fraser Valley to Jasper for a rest, and then on to Edmonton. They would stop at Wainwright, Biggar, Saskatoon, Waitrose, Melville, Portage la Prairie, and Sioux Lookout, then travel through to Toronto and then west to Guelph, Kitchener, Stratford, Chatham, and finally Windsor, where the royal party would stay overnight — quite a coup for up-and-coming local MP Paul Martin. In the evening the royal train was to arrive at Niagara Falls. Then it would traverse the undefended border into New York State, go down to Washington, and then make for Manhattan. At the New Jersey shoreline, the train would halt to allow Their Majesties to take a United States naval vessel to The Battery, Manhattan. The train would be waiting for them at Hyde Park Station, where the President’s home was, to take them back to Canada. Across the border, they would go through Levis, Rivière-du-Loup, and on to New Brunswick. They would reach Prince Edward Island by a destroyer, and then the royal train would be picked up again at New Glasgow. The last stops would be Truro and finally Halifax, where a liner would wait to take them home.
There were only two organizations in Canada capable of planning and executing the logistics of such a complex visit: the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian National Railway. Both railways were already proficient at VIP tours across Canada. CPR President Sir Edward Beatty set out on one annually, in his luxurious carriage “Wentworth” — named, like his golf club, with his middle name — to inspect his domain. More frequently, the CNR would take the Governor General about in his private carriage. With the first company private — and most of its shareholders British — and the second wholly owned by the Canadian government,
