The piercing of the Rocky Mountains and the construction of the line through 800 miles of mountainous country down to Vancouver was one of the most audacious and successful pieces of railway engineering ever done. British Columbia was worthless before the railway; to-day Vancouver City has a population of 100,000, risen from 5,000 in less than twenty years, and Victoria, the capital, on Vancouver Island, is even larger, and one of the most beautiful cities of the world. It was a wonderful revelation to see freight trains of a hundred wagons laden with the lumber of British Columbia, and equally long trains on the prairie laden with grain. Most of the grain is shipped at Fort William and Port Arthur, the “twin cities” at the north-west angle of Lake Superior. It is carried on ships rising from 12,000 and 15,000 tons through the chain of the Great Lakes to the great distributing centres of the Dominion and the United States. A journey across Canada by the C.P.R. gives the finest bird’s-eye view of the Dominion. Space fails to tell of experiences in the sleeping-cars, and the dining-cars, which serve first-class hotel menus, with such native specialities as turkey and cranberry sauce, prairie chicken, and trout and white fish of the lakes. But it takes an English visitor, to whom a journey from London to Edinburgh is an adventure, some time to get used to stages of 1,400 miles, 890 miles, and 1,110 miles, which are samples of those we took. The Grand Trunk Railway was never a financial success until it was taken in hand by Mr. Charles Hays, one of the victims of the _Titanic_ tragedy. Mr. Hays was trained in the United States. It was a fortunate day for the Grand Trunk when, at the period of the reconstruction of the company in 1895, Mr. Hays, then Vice-President and General Manager of the Wabash Railroad, was appointed General Manager with headquarters at Montreal, and given the fullest freedom to go ahead. He began by acquiring various local lines which were incorporated into the Grand Trunk system. Many English capitalists were interested in the Grand Trunk, and it has been very heavily financed with English money. Mr. Hays completely revolutionised the whole system, had the single line doubled, struck out branch lines in all directions, linked the Grand Trunk up with other systems, and induced the company to follow the example of the C.P.R. and strike straight across the continent to the Pacific. By 1908 the Grand Trunk system included 5,192 miles of line. Its Grand Trunk Pacific route lies partly in Canada and partly in the United States, and the Pacific line is fed with passengers and freight from both countries. The Grand Trunk struck into the Prairie Provinces with depots at Fort William, Port Arthur, and many other strategic centres. Mr. Hays had a great idea of the value of bridges. One of his conceptions was a single-span double-track bridge crossing the Niagara Gorge. This was opened in 1897, replacing the suspension bridge opened