Grey, and Bruce (including south extension); Glencoe loop line, Welland; Brantford; London and Port Stanley; and Detroit and Milwaukee branches.
December 15, 1875, witnessed the completion of a new Great Western depot in Hamilton. It was a massive structure, thirty-six feet wide by three hundred fifty feet long, with the one-hundred-foot centre portion being two storeys high. The entire structure was built of red pressed Aldershot brick, with an ornamental roof of blue, red, and green slate shingles.
In 1870 work had commenced on the third Welland Canal, sponsored by the Dominion government under the auspices of the Department of Public Works. Railway-canal intersections had been the source of a number of railway mishaps over the years, with Desjardins Canal and Beloeil being the most tragic. To avoid this, the Great Western planned to dig a stone-lined tunnel only ten feet below the bottom of the canal. Commencing construction in 1875, the tunnel was completed in just one year. It was six hundred and sixty-five feet long and lined with limestone blocks shipped to the Queenston dock. It ran under locks 18 and 19.
The tunnel allowed only a single track. The line left the original alignment at Merritton, just east of the Welland Railway junction, and swung south in a downward arc, entering the tunnel. It emerged to climb up to the north and a connection with the original alignment near St. Davids. This single line became a traffic bottleneck and the tunnel was closed to traffic in 1915.
The London, Huron, and Bruce Railway was partially opened to traffic over sixty-nine miles of line in January 1876. Total cost was expected to be £170,000 ($828,000). In 1876 the conversion from pounds-shillings-pence to dollars-cents began in earnest in company financial documents.
The year 1876 saw a return to the rate wars of old between competing roads, leading to heavy losses in working the affiliated lines. Relations with the Grand Trunk continued to be unsatisfactory. Management of the Grand Trunk would not agree to any arrangement of fixed tariff rates and insisted on a pooling of traffic, which was not acceptable to the Great Western. Finally an accommodation was arrived at between the two lines, but it could not be depended upon until the disastrous rate war between the Grand Trunk and certain American lines came to an end. It should be noted that the Great Western directors were willing to pool traffic with the Grand Trunk, which was actually competitive. However, the Grand Trunk wanted, in the interests of some large Grand Trunk shareholders, to force the Great Western to accept a pooling of traffic over the entirety of the compact and reasonably prosperous Great Western and the entirety of the Grand Trunk, much of which it may be doubted had ever paid for itself. Of course, the Great Western could not agree to this. At this time, a few shareholders proposed to amalgamate the two companies, but this attempt was not successful.
An American railway trade journal in 1876 did not mince words about the precarious position of the Great Western:
Its revenue is insufficient to pay the interest on its mortgage debt by over £100,000 a year. It has the Canada Southern on its south, controlled by Vanderbilt. It has an internal cancer of its own in the form of the loop line, and it has the Buffalo and Lake Huron section of the Grand Trunk running side by side, while the Grand Trunk proper has the shortest line to the seaboard, viz, from Chicago to Montreal. The Great Western of Canada has felt some of the plagues of Egypt, not the least of which are a president and general manager [and a board of directors] who know nothing of American railway administration.
The Toronto Globe newspaper contracted with the Great Western in August 1876 to operate a special early morning train from Toronto to London via Hamilton for the exclusive delivery of the newspaper. The Globe set the rules, prohibiting passenger and mail traffic between Toronto and Hamilton and specifying the departure time from Toronto (0500 hours) and arrival time at London (1000 hours). The “Globe train” was the best-known of all of the Great Western “flyers.” Occasionally, passengers would be carried west of Hamilton. The “Globe train” always had a clear track!
Starting in 1876 and continuing into 1877, the Great Western began filling in the mouth of the Desjardins Canal with earth. There was great difficulty in finding a solid bottom (similar to the case near Copetown in 1853). When an attempt was made to build a bridge on wooden piles, it gained the nickname “bottomless pit,” for it was found that as fast as piles were driven down during the day, they would disappear during the night in the quicksand on the canal bottom. As a consequence, the old canal was filled in and a new one was cut through Burlington Heights to the west.
On the Toronto branch at the outlet of the Desjardins Canal into Hamilton Bay, the Great Western still had a wood trestle built in 1855. This had not been planned to be a permanent structure and the railway was determined to fill in the old canal and dispense with the bridge, thus securing a permanent line. Immense quantities of material were thrown into the gulch. By the end of summer 1877 the embankment had risen two-thirds of the height from the water to the rails (about eighty feet). The huge amount of fill caused some curvature in the trestle, which worsened as the fill amount increased over time.
On Wednesday September 19, 1877, while a large number of men and teams were at work under the trestle, there was a large subsidence of the fill which extended from the centre of the trestle for several hundred feet to the western edge near Hamilton. In only one hour, the embankment subsided twenty-two feet. A large mound was raised several feet from the bed of the adjacent marsh on the side of the embankment next to the bay. The trestle was left twisted, with a large bow into the bay. At one point the trestle sank two feet. Work began immediately on filling and repairing the wooden structure so as to allow trains to creep across the bridge.
On Saturday December 22, 1877, shortly after 2200 hours, the watchman at the trestle over the old canal discovered that another earth slide had occurred. The previous slide in September had occurred on the Hamilton side. This slide had occurred at the eastern (Toronto) end. Great Western personnel were immediately summoned. The amount of damage was impossible to ascertain in the dark of night. It was decided to not let the night train pass. Omnibuses were dispatched from Hamilton to transport passengers in the early morning. Although examination the next day revealed that a large slide had occurred, the actual damage was modest. Slowly, a heavy freight train with twenty full cars and two locomotives passed safely over the remaining wood trestle. Some 6,000 to 7,000 yards had given way, but since nearly 200,000 tons of clay and gravel had been deposited the actual proportion lost was quite small. It appeared that finally the fill had reached the bottom of the old canal/swamp and the embankment had become more stable.
The cut between the west main line at the west junction (Hamilton West Junction) and the Toronto line at Junction Cut (later known as Bayview Junction) was completed. Completion of the remainder of the work took about three weeks.
The winter of 1876–77 was extremely severe and, for weeks, the interchange of traffic with railroads in New York State was significantly compromised and even stopped on some days. As many as three thousand cars were, at one time, detained between Detroit and Suspension Bridge, resulting in a loss to the company of £28,000 ($136,000). The company continued to suffer as a result of the Grand Trunk versus American railroads rate war. The Brantford, Norfolk and Port Burwell Railway was acquired for £12,000 ($58,400), forming another connection between the main line and air line divisions (see chapter 3).
The Great Western in 1877 proposed to lease the Detroit and Milwaukee Railway and issue first mortgage bonds in the amount of $2 million and second mortgage bonds in the amount of $3 million, all guaranteed by the Great Western. In return, it would take up the entire indebtedness of the line. The proposition was laid before the English Detroit and Milwaukee shareholders who were “disposed to accept it.” The English Detroit and Milwaukee and Great Western bondholders owned a controlling interest and, acting together, would undoubtedly win.
John S. Newberry, on behalf of Detroit capitalists, offered to buy the Detroit and Milwaukee for $4.5 million ($500,000 in cash, $4 million as 5 percent bonds). In this case, the railway would end up with “home management.” The whole matter was referred to a committee
