The Fall of the Canadian Train System – Cars
“Since we can’t export the scenery, we’ll have to import the tourists.”
- William Cornelius Van Horne: General Manager
of the Canadian Pacific Railroad
After the Second World War the giant manufacturing power of the big car companies went from making tanks, jeeps and ships back to cars for the families blossoming families. In less than ten year hundreds of thousands of miles of roads were built and paved all over North America giving the automobile a range of freedom that had been thought impossible only ten years earlier. In addition the trucking business took off and much of the freight that used to travel by rail began instead going by truck.
This affected travel and tourism in North America in a big way. Many of the movies of the 1940′s showed big bands, circuses, tour groups and baseball teams traveling by train. Buses were shown taking routes that trains never serviced, and they were seen a s slow slow and bumpy, and the roads were dusty. Highways solved the dilemma of the buses and soon a new generation of tourist travel was born.
When the Canadian Pacific Railroad , or CPR, was completed in the late 1800′s it had done so by the skins of many politicians’ combined teeth and the fall and unbelievable second rising of a government. Needing other sources of income besides immigrants and mail Canadian tourism as we all know it was born.
William Cornelius Van Horne, a transplanted American railroad man and new general manager of the CPR extorted, “Since we can’t export the scenery, we’ll have to import the tourists.” He immediately set about to attract the peoples of money from Europe and the United States to see the wilds of western Canada. And to house them he built a chain of “mountain castles,” the gem of which was the Chateau Lake Louise. Passengers traveling from Calgary through the Rocky Mountains were treated to open-air cars so they could embrace the awesome, rugged beauty of the huge mountains and the abundant wildlife.
As cars became more popular in the 1950′s people could drive to Banff and Lake Louise without having to wait for people on the trains to embark and disembark. They also could trvel on their own timetables. However, car tourists could only go for a part of the day without find a place to sleep so the motel was born and this created a who;e new indutry in North America separate from hotels called “the motor inn.” These types of accommodations were a cross between the freestyle motel and the classy but rigid hotel. Car travelers could enjoy a good restaurant, lounge and nicely-appointed hotel suite while basking by an outdoor pool and having their mode of transportation waiting right outside the door.
As more cars were made and sold more train tickets were not. Soon the schedules of the trains in large cebters were being cut back from once an hour to twice a day. The train was still the driving forve in transportation but cars, buses and a nuisance called an airplane wwere slowly chipping away at the engines that built a nation. In the 1960′s passenger trains began disppearing from small town Canada. You could still take a train from Vancouver to Halifax but service was not every day.
Today, while the other countries of the world are increasing their train systems canad and the U.S. stand firmly behind their cars. However, I for one would love to take a train to Montreal on Friday stay two nights and come back Sunday night. Or take the Express from Halifax on Monday morning and get into Vancouver on Saturday afternoon.
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