The Canadian transportation situation after World War II
 Is someone else going to eat the CPR's lunch?

By 1946, the Canadian railways had "owned" most of the long distance passenger business for 60 years.

In total, the Canadian railway network included about 43,000 miles of track. Railways remained the most efficient way to move large numbers of people around a continent-sized country at reasonable prices. Personnel returning from World War II were keeping the railways busy during this period.

By this time, Canada had 125,000 miles of surfaced roads and over three times that in gravel and dirt roads. Even with wartime manufacturing restrictions on the production of new private automobiles, 11.5 million Canadians were driving 1.5 million cars on those half-million miles of Canadian roads. The completion of the the Trans-Canada Highway was over a decade away. In practical terms, you still couldn't get there from here.

However, it was another mode of passenger transportation that was in the process of eroding the railways' control over long distance travel.

In 1946, both the government-owned CNR and the exchange-traded CPR had their air transportation components : Trans-Canada Air Lines and Canadian Pacific Air Lines respectively. To quote an executive of the CPR regarding the railway boardroom attitude toward the airline in the 1940s and 1950s: " ... we expected to keep the railway operating profitably and were skeptical of the airline ever contributing much to the parent company's profits."

In an earlier time, those who built Canada's railways were daring  risk takers ... often with the Government's deep pockets backing up the enterprise. A new railway was good for local property values, good for business, and generally good for the country. In some cases, the risk worked out poorly, and a Government separated the entrepreneurs from their dreams - generally when the financial situation or political "optics" were not helpful to the Government's staying in power.

With the old "building in the wilderness from scratch" challenges long since dealt with, the shiny-shoed boardroom class which had since evolved on the railways was about to meet the ultimate risk takers ...


The Development of Aviation in Canada, 1914-1946

Sometimes to avoid the mud and death of the World War I trenches and often for the adventure, Canadians joined Britain's newly hatched Royal Flying Corps. Between 1914 and 1918, using rapidly evolving technology and combat tactics, some like Major W.A. Bishop, VC, DSO, MC ended the war alive and as Canadian heroes.

Billy Bishop, the kid who couldn't miss, Nieuport 17
Billy Bishop "a man incapable of fear" - according to one American ace - and a Nieuport 17

After World War I, this spirit of innovation and risk taking found its natural match in Canada's geography. Here was a country with vast expanses of unmapped wilderness in which untold mineral wealth probably lay. Certainly most of the country lay beyond economical reach of railway technology, and the centuries-old practice of travel by canoe and portaging was due for replacement.

First travelling in "flying canoes" (wooden-hulled flying boats) exploration, and later the systematic aerial photography and mapping of remote Canada, was begun by adventurous aviators. Floatplanes - ski-planes in winter - also ferried in geologists, engineers, miners, equipment and supplies.

They could land on water or snow - and Canada had an endless inventory of lakes to use as runways!


Canadian bush plane
A Canadian bush plane equipped with floats.

In 1928, surveys for a trans-Canada airway were begun - an aerial highway between east and west. The Depression put much of the more expensive development on hold, but unemployed workers were offered some of the more basic preparation work.

In 1937, Transport Minister C.D. Howe said that "Canadians were insistent in demanding the establishment of a direct Canadian [air mail] service" - rather than having western-Canadian airmail travelling aboard American airmail aircraft. So Trans-Canada Airlines (TCA) was born and the systems needed to support it (air fields, passenger terminals, training standards, navigation charts, meteorological services) were brought up to snuff.

While the CPR and its airlines might have been part of Trans-Canada Airlines at one point, things didn't go well : it seemed the government was determined to have a national air carrier, with break-even finances, working as a monopoly . The CPR-owned airlines were allowed to operate domestically in areas where the TCA had no interest.

By 1939, daily passenger, air mail and air express services were being operated by TCA between Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver with various stops along the way. Canada's involvement in World War II 1939-1945 changed priorities. Supporting the war by carrying vital priority freight, mail and key military personnel became the new mission of TCA.


During the Second World War, Canada became "The Aerodrome of Democracy" (thanks for that title, FDR) with the establishment of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP). Vast and far beyond the range of enemy planes, Canada was an ideal site for training aircrew. Over 130,000 aircrew, from pilots to air gunners, graduated from the 107 schools of the BCATP.

Besides Australia, New Zealand, Britain and Canada, students also came from the US (officially at war later in 1941) and the occupied countries of Europe. Canada paid for 75% of the program. The Canadians who graduated constituted about 25% of the strength of the RAF and also formed 45 Royal Canadian Air Force squadrons overseas.

Many of the RCAF personnel were assigned to RAF Bomber Command. The official figures were not known to them at the time, but these airmen had little statistical chance of surviving their 30 sortie "tours" in the deadly night skies of Europe.


RCAF 411 Squadron, Billy Bishop
Air Marshal W.A. Bishop, Director of Recruiting, Royal Canadian Air Force
visiting RCAF 411 Squadron (Spitfires) in England, 1942


After all this - after the Great Depression and World War II - there was one positive outcome ...


Canadians now had the ability to really get going on civil aviation:

Canadair Malton assembly line
At Canadair in Toronto, TCA passenger planes are assembled circa 1948.
Note the circular hole in the cockpit roof - a "glass" dome will be fitted here to permit celestial navigation.


TCA covered any domestic route it thought was worthwhile, as well as trans-Atlantic, Pacific and service to the Caribbean. Where permitted, TCA would also fly into the US.

This is what things looked like right after World War II. You can probably assume that many of the "other Canadian airlines" were owned by the CPR.

TCA, Trans-Canada Air lines 1946 scheduled airways,
Aerial "highways" in Canada, 1946


Canadian Pacific airlines DC-3
Canadian Pacific Airlines in the bush.
Take it easy with the dynamite, boys.



In 1946, according to the Government of Canada:

"Thousands of miles are interpreted as hours of distance; far flung communities have been drawn close together. TCA has brought to Canada a new vision of unity, a new vision of the future."


TCA Trans-Canada airlines DC-3
A TCA Douglas DC-3 in flight in 1946. The first prototype had flown in 1933.

From wood, cloth and wire - to brushed, stressed-skin aluminum carrying 14 passengers coast to coast 25 years later.

But what was happening on the rails?

Canadian Pacific Railway's "The Canadian"

(I'm giving the ending first for dramatic effect and pathos.)

Only 16 years after its birth, the final great effort by the CPR to save its eroding long distance passenger market would be abandoned by corporate executives, unloved, at the doorstop of the federal regulator.

And for almost a decade, the feds booted the foundling basket containing The Canadian back to the curb - and told CP Rail to keep the train rolling.

Canada's last great long distance passenger train was genuinely Canadian Pacific and Canadian in many ways.

Ironically for proud Canadian nationalists, its inspiration and principal manufacturing were American.


The Zephyrs and Shotwelding

Passenger trains in the 1920s were pulled by heavy, black, smoke-spewing locomotives which left a layer of black dust on the window sills of the trailing passenger cars. The windows opened because most of the cars had no cooling systems. Air conditioned sleeping cars often used circulating meltwater from large ice blocks and little electric fans so summer travellers might be less uncomfortable.

The new streamlined shapes used in aircraft design were capturing the public's imagination in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Among railroad executives in the US, the less complacent saw the potential threats to their passenger business from aircraft and autos ... and the potential marketing opportunities if they played to this desire for silver, streamlined vehicles.

Railways and locomotive builders were working on using diesel-electric technology in locomotives.
The Budd Company of Philadelphia had patented a process for welding stainless steel.

An innovative result was the Pioneer Zephyr (ZEF fer).

Pioneer Zephyr
In May 1938, this Zephyr trainset is averaging 78 mph on a special speed trial run between Denver and Chicago - 1015 miles.


Shotwelding - some details
The Pioneer Zephyr - some details

"Zephyrs" proliferate

Luxurious, standard coupling, smooth riding, electrically air-conditioned Budd-built passenger cars were used on the train named the California Zephyr, operating between Chicago and Oakland (2500 miles) beginning in 1949. Special observation "dome cars" were included in this train consist and it travelled via several different railroads on its route. Silver streamlined "zephyr equipment" was common and quite famous in the late 1940s, and the 1949 California Zephyr is seen by many as the high point of the zephyr era.

California Zephyr
The California Zephyr in California's Feather River Canyon.
Notice there are 4 "Vista-Dome" cars behind the Western Pacific locomotives.
On its westbound trip, the train travelled mainly on the lines of the Burlington; Rio Grande; and Western Pacific -
with the eastbound California Zephyr covering these roads in reverse order.


The CNR and CPR had nothing like it.



The CPR's gamble

Early in 1953, the Canadian Pacific Railway did a "me too", called up Budd in Philadelphia and ordered 173 stainless steel cars for a new train named "The Canadian". (The first choice for a name was "The Royal Canadian" but perhaps there was malice at the palace about the idea. It would have been a violation of protocol to use such a name without young Queen Elizabeth II's permission.) The CPR also added to their roster of diesel locomotives to get the project rolling.

At Stoney Creek Bridge, here is a typical CPR publicity photo of an eastbound train of the new zephyr, I mean Canadian , equipment with a dome car on the tailend.

CPR The Canadian at Stoney Creek Bridge

Near the headend, at the far end of the bridge, are three old sleeping cars with ordinary painted steel sides and old-style clerestory roofs - but they are dressed up with the special Budd stainless steel plating. They are doing their best to adapt and be "modern".

As a "North American Zephyr", this train was unique in the sense that it was operated "across the continent" - Montreal to Vancouver - by and on one single railway. The CNR operated trains on the same transcontinental scale, but they didn't buy brand new equipment in the 1950s to create a completely "new concept" as the CPR did.


Railway infrastructure is capital intensive - a physical "road" must be built and carefully maintained forever.

Particularly during the two world wars, aviation technology developed very quickly.
 Canadians became proud of the bush pilots, the RCAF, and Trans-Canada Airlines
as part of their modern national identity.

It was easy for the federal government to throw its full support behind aviation in Canada.
It was politically attractive to support magically fast travel on modern equipment.
In addition, those symbolic contrails in the sky from sea to sea and far into the arctic
would be much cheaper to finance than the steel rails had ever been.

In the 1950s, the diehard railroaders of the CPR gambled,
giving transcontinental passenger rail service
the brilliant sunset they felt it deserved.



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