Much of the main line between Montreal and Vancouver is being double tracked; the mountain grades are constantly being reduced; tunnels are taking the place of construction exposed to the snows; branches and connections have been extended northward into new country, and southward to connect with United States lines. To pay its nearly seventy-five thousand employees takes almost eight million dollars a month. Its car shops at Angus, near Montreal, are one of the largest works of the kind on the continent, and they employ more than six thousand men. Its freight yard at Winnipeg is among the biggest in the world. Though the company is not fifty years old, its total assets were recently valued at a figure in excess of one billion dollars. It is, next to the government, the most powerful single organization within the Dominion, and its influence is felt in Europe and Asia. The success of the Canadian Pacific, and the development that followed, started in Canada the fever for railroad construction that burned itself out only a few years ago. The provincial and the Dominion governments and even municipalities eagerly backed almost any railroad project that promised to open up new territory. Not only were charters granted freely, but the obligations of the constructing companies were guaranteed, and cash subsidies advanced to the promoters of new lines. The actual transportation needs of large areas were discounted decades in advance, and competing lines were built parallel to one another in districts producing hardly enough traffic for a single railroad. In 1903 the Grand Trunk, the oldest railroad system in Canada, contracted with the government for the construction of a new transcontinental line from Quebec to Winnipeg and from Winnipeg to Prince Rupert, a new terminus on the Pacific Coast, a total of 3559 miles. In the meantime, another road, the Canadian Northern, starting in Manitoba, spread itself through the prairie provinces, crossed the Rockies, and entered into competition with the Canadian Pacific at Vancouver. By 1914 it had bought and built a total of 9400 miles of railway. The Grand Trunk also had grown, and it then had 7500 miles of tracks, a chain of hotels, steamship lines on the Pacific coast, and grain elevators and terminals in the Dominion and the United States. Both roads crossed the Rockies at the same point, giving Canada two transcontinental lines over the northern route where one would have been plenty.