was appointed with the mayor and eight aldermen, and the president and thirteen fellow members of the Common Council. This committee reported:
in their opinion, the time has come when the Great Western Railway of Canada may be completed, provided that the parties who are interested on the American side, will lend them aid by a subscription of stock to the amount of one million dollars.
This pronouncement appeared to be a virtual carbon copy of Forbes’ May 5 comment. The consistency in the message should not be lost by the reader.
These appeals brought a favourable response from American capitalists in Detroit and elsewhere and, within a year, private subscriptions totalled over £210,000 ($1 million U.S.). Together with the $800,000-plus in aid from interested U.S. roads, the longstanding financial woes of the Great Western were finally over. For their assistance, three Americans were admitted as directors: Erastus Corning, John Forbes, and John W. Brooks (the latter being superintendent of the Michigan Central).
It was time to build a railway!
Chapter 2
Construction and Operations
Work on the section between London and Hamilton began in early 1851. By May, fifteen hundred to two thousand men were at work. Parties involved felt that trains would be running by December 1, 1852, an extremely optimistic prediction, indeed.
Westward from Paris, Ontario, most of the construction work was performed by an American company, Ferrell and Van Voorhis. The contract for the eastern portion was given to Farewell and Company, in which the dominating figure was Samuel Zimmerman. Zimmerman, from Pennsylvania, had come to Canada “having no capital but his own energy and farsightedness,” and gained construction experience during construction of the Welland Canal. Aggressive, unscrupulous, and, ultimately, notoriously wealthy, Zimmerman was the subject of controversy among his contemporaries and later writers (see Introduction). The contractors’ interest in the railway was sustained by the $800,000 in stock that they held as partial payment for their services. The actual work was done by local subcontractors and transient labourers. The latter frequently went on strike for higher wages and resorted to violence to prevent non-strikers (“scabs”) from working. As early as February 1851 a petition from Hamiltonians to the government reported that
already many of the men engaged on the work have twice left their employment on a demand for higher wages, and armed with bludgeons and threats of violence have drawn off and effectually prevented the peaceable and industrious laborers from earning a livelihood for themselves and their families.
The petition requested that the government send troops to maintain order. The government recognized the problems in Hamilton and did remedy the situation with additional troops. However, problems arose and/or continued elsewhere. On April 10, 1851, the editor of the Dundas Warden indicated the deep concern of a small community subjected to unruly labour thugs.
We deeply regret to state that our peaceful town has again been the scene of strife. Some further difficulty having arisen between the contractors and laborers on the Great Western, a portion of the latter came into town yesterday, armed with bludgeons, and drove off those employed on the works hereabouts. Two or three of the overseers were brutally maltreated and abused. We have no knowledge of the grounds of difficulty between the employers and employed … but this we must say, that the frequent repetition of scenes of violence is positively disgraceful.
Within a week, the municipal council of Paris would forward another petition for military protection to the government.
There is no reason to believe that labour strife was more serious on the Great Western than on other railway or canal projects of the era. No doubt, feuds among the many Irish immigrants were partially responsible. Workers took advantage of the difficulty the company had securing labourers. The boom period, with its extensive railway building, not only caused wages to soar but made it very difficult to obtain the quantity and quality of men needed. There is evidence that some of the supervisory personnel ruled with an iron fist and tried to take advantage of the immigrant workers. Regardless of who was at fault and to what extent, labour strife certainly delayed construction, increased costs, and left an unpleasant legacy in many southwestern Ontario communities.
By the end of 1852 progress, as measured by grading alone, had occurred on only a few very small and detached portions of the line. This was despite the request by company officials that the contractors start much earlier in the year (as early as February). The Hamilton-to-Twenty-Mile-Creek section had only been lightly graded and the procrastination of the contractors assured that it would be May 1853 at the earliest before rails could be laid.
Grading on the section from the Detroit River to one hundred miles east had also commenced. The original plan to build pile trestles over fourteen miles of the wet prairie west of Chatham was slow in its initiation. As engineers re-examined this plan they decided to modify it substantially. Instead of temporizing with pile trestles, the area was permanently graded using fill removed adjacent to the line and/or by hauling beach sand from nearby lakes.
Grading and masonry work on the eastern division, both east and west of St. Catharines, were problematic. Temporary grade and wooden pile trestles were to be used at Ten and Twelve Mile creeks. West of Hamilton there were more problems: the gorge of the Desjardins Canal, the ascending grade out of Dundas, and a deep quicksand deposit near Copetown. Costs skyrocketed due to the massive amount of overburden that had to be moved or excavated, by the huge and continuous earth slides in the deep cuts, and by the number/depth of wooden piles necessary to protect the foot of the slopes. In section 11, the sinking of an embankment into a deep morass or subterranean lake, not unlike muskeg, forced adoption of a new tactic. An extensive platform of coniferous trees and bushes, interwoven with earth so as to prevent the loss of ballast by its own displacement, proved the solution.
The area around London had but two cuttings with which to contend. West of London work proceeded around the clock.
Copetown was the most problematic site on the entire main line. The quicksand swallowed everything placed in it, and was so deep that a twenty-foot-long rod did not reach bedrock. Work was frustrating. After excavation of the roadbed to a depth of five or six feet during the day, the excavation would be reversed overnight by the weight of the adjoining banks. By the next morning it was as if nothing had been excavated the previous day!
This area led to the first major delay in the construction schedule for 1853. Roadbed was graded and rail was laid in a westerly direction from the edge of the quicksand. On Saturday May 14, 1853, with approximately 2.5 miles of line laid from Copetown westward, the first impromptu excursion was held. The directors and significant others arrived by carriage along the Governor’s Road to attend. The excursion train was locomotive #4, Niagara. Participants rode in the tender. Several round trips were made over the line and all proceeded to celebrate with food, drink, speeches, and toasts. Rails would be laid to Fairchild Creek and then Harrisburg, a full seven miles, by the end of the week.
July 1853 saw work progressing at full speed, in some locations around the clock, and Sunday alone brought rest. Tracks had been laid out of Hamilton, along the waterfront, for one mile, intersecting the Desjardins Canal. The plan had been to bridge the canal on its old route but, after the expenditures of many hours and a large sum of money, a bridge of permanent structure proved elusive. The canal was described as a “bottomless pit.” Engineers and officers decided to cut a new channel for the canal through the heights and built a beautiful suspension bridge for carriage traffic across this new gorge. The old channel was to be eventually filled to create a solid roadbed.
The route now wound around and started its ascent of the Niagara Escarpment toward Dundas. At Dundas, a gorge approximately six to seven hundred feet long and one hundred feet deep had to be crossed. A masonry culvert costing
