History of rail transport in Canada

The Canadian railway system saw several expansion "booms" throughout history, as well as a major change from broad to standard gauge which occurred in the 1870s.

The Great Depression led to a decline in rail traffic, and the sudden reversal of this during the Second World War left railways with overtaxed, aging, and poorly-maintained infrastructure.

The earliest recognizably railway-like system in recorded Canadian history was an industrial tramway on Cape Breton Island, which is said to have been built around 1720.

[1] The existence of a tramway, as opposed to simply a road, is poorly attested in written and archaeological records, but was present in local oral history in the early 20th century.

[1] This tramway has been cited in various sources as an example of a pre-steam railway in North America,[2][3] despite a lack of evidence confirming its existence.

The first was a combined wagonway and incline tramway near Niagara Falls along what is now the American side of the Canada–United States border.

The British ultimately retained control of the portage and continued to use and maintain its tramway until their surrender of the land to the United States following the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The tramway was powered by a stationary steam engine and was a permanent structure that operated until the late 1840s, when it was shut down due to its inconvenient location.

This led to rapid expansion of railway in the Canadas, sometimes excessive growth as uneconomic lines were built since the government guaranteed profits.

The federal government itself built the National Transcontinental Railway, a line from Moncton to Winnipeg, passing through the vast and uninhabited hinterland of the Canadian Shield.

This aggressive expansion proved disastrous when immigration and supplies of capital all but disappeared with the outbreak of the First World War.

The years after the First World War saw only moderate expansion of the rail network and the age of the great railways were over in Canada.

9000, built by the Canadian Locomotive Company using diesel engines imported from Britain, was used on the International Limited, the flagship train of the former Grand Trunk Railway.