Winter Alternative To Montreal
The CPR completed its route from Montreal, Quebec to Vancouver, British Columbia in 1885. In the decades prior to the use of ice breaking ships in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and St. Lawrence River, the port of Montreal was closed from December to May, limiting any advantage that the railway might have over its competitors.
CPR's primary Canadian competitor, the Grand Trunk Railway (GTR), managed to avoid the winter ice problems in Montreal by using the ice-free port of Portland, Maine, accessed by a route constructed by the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad which the GTR had purchased in the mid-1850s.
The Delaware and Hudson Railway ran a feeder route down the valleys of Lake Champlain and the Hudson River to New York City. The Maine Central Railroad operated an arduous route over the White Mountains from St. Johnsbury, Vermont to Portland.
Looking 350 miles directly east from Montreal however, CPR surveyors saw the Canadian port of Saint John, New Brunswick, was underutilized (dwarfed by the growth of Halifax, Nova Scotia); and Saint John was accessible by a route across northern Maine which was less mountainous than other options for reaching the Atlantic coast.
Read more about this topic: International Railway Of Maine
Famous quotes containing the words winter and/or alternative:
“We know of no scripture which records the pure benignity of the gods on a New England winter night. Their praises have never been sung, only their wrath deprecated. The best scripture, after all, records but a meagre faith. Its saints live reserved and austere. Let a brave, devout man spend the year in the woods of Maine or Labrador, and see if the Hebrew Scriptures speak adequately to his condition and experience.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage “There is no alternative to victory” retains a high degree of plausibility.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)