A group of Bathurst townspeople involved in the lumber trade imagined that the area around Tracadie could serve to feed their industry if only a suitable form of transport could be arranged.
In 1889 there was a major scandal when the shareholders accused Burns of fraudulent schemes and false representation in regard to the construction and the issuing of shares.
Burns was the beneficiary of governmental largesse in the form of railroad subsidies and cutting licences for timber on New Brunswick crown lands.
[1] In May 1918, the Dominion government offered $200,000 to purchase the railway, but the owners were somewhat reluctant because the capital invested to date was on the order of ten times that sum.
[1] But the C&GS had been built by government programmes,[3] so the Minister of Public Works could be firm: "We offered the owners $200,000.00 for the railway; they cannot make 200,000 cents out of it in the next ten years.
[1] McCarthy (1997) relates a tale of how, during the great blizzard of 1935, men were employed at a rate of $2 a day to clear a path in the snow down to the rails.