Moncton's historic link to 'Canada's least-necessary major railway'
CBC News | Posted: January 11, 2025 10:00 AM | Last Updated: January 11
A piece of land near Centennial Park is a link to the failed National Transcontinental Railway
A plot of land near Centennial Park in Moncton is the site of a little-known piece of this country's history.
It was the terminus of the doomed National Transcontinental Railway — Canada's third national rail line, which was completed in 1913.
"It turns out we didn't necessarily need three transcontinental railways, two was actually kind of a good number for that," said James Upham, an educator and contributor to Information Morning Moncton.
"This was probably not necessarily entirely necessary."
It's not hyperbolic to say that Canada was built on the railroads, or at least the promise of them.
British Columbia joined confederation specifically on the promise of being connected to the rest of the country via a railroad, and much of the provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta were either settled, or colonized, because of the tracks.
Canada already had two transcontinental railroads, the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian Northern Railway, so why not a third?
There were two main reasons the government of Sir Wilfrid Laurier wanted to build a new railway, which it committed to in 1903.
The first had to do with the booming western agricultural sector which needed to get crops to market.
"It seemed obvious that this heavy traffic must be moved in large part by the railways, and that it must move east," wrote G.R. Stevens in his 1962 book, Canadian National Railways Vol. 2, Towards the inevitable, 1896-1922.
There was also another, more political reason, for the railroad: the imminent ascension of Saskatchewan and Alberta to the status of provinces, previously being part of the Northwest Territories.
"They might be expected to name as blessed any government which gave them a competitor of the Canadian Pacific," said Stevens.
It was decided that the government would build the railroad from Winnipeg to the east, and the Grand Trunk Railway, a smaller regional rail company, would build the line to the west.
Routing issues
There were issues on both sides of the line.
To the east, there were debates in New Brunswick about where the line should end.
"The citizens of Saint John saw in Moncton a terminal that was no terminal at all, since it was not an ocean port … they demanded that the National Transcontinental Railway be diverted," said Stevens.
While the government finished the eastern half of the railroad in 1913, the western half was never completed, meaning this transcontinental railroad ended in Winnipeg, coming up 1,800 kilometres short.
There were plans to have a terminus on the west coast, at Bella Coola, a community of a little over 2,000 people today, sitting 430 kilometres northwest of Vancouver.
"Bella Coola is lovely and everything, but it's not necessarily the place that needs to be the western terminus of a national transcontinental railway," said Upham.
One major loser in the railroad would turn out to be Laurier himself.
"The significant cost overruns of the railway's construction opened Laurier's Liberals to public scrutiny, subsequently leading to their downfall in 1911," said T.D. Regehr in The Canadian Encyclopedia.
It wouldn't be fair to call the railway a total loss.
Much of the line in New Brunswick became Canadian National's, which is still in use today.
The terminus was later turned into a rail yard for CN in Moncton and was used for decades.
"It becomes a really integral part of what CN was around here, but originally starts off as the eastern part of probably Canada's least necessary major railway," said Upham.