But the bridge serves a dual purpose. The upper level or deck, 30 feet in width, carries two tracks for the railway’s need, but below this is another deck, 57 feet wide, which has a central carriage-way flanked on either hand by a broad pavement, so that the bridge provides vehicular and pedestrian accommodation between the opposite banks. In order to provide this improved connection between the two nations, a sum of about £100,000 ($500,000) had to be expended. The improved facilities it offered so appealed to the public on both shores that they celebrated its opening in 1897 by a three days’ carnival. As time sped by, the Grand Trunk railway gradually but surely swallowed its competitors, until at last it was left in undisputed possession of the Province of Ontario, from the railway point of view. To-day it has over 8000 miles of intricate steel ribbon stretched between the Great Lakes and the Atlantic coast, while between Montreal and Chicago the fastest trains in the Dominion hurtle to and fro over a double track 840½ miles in length, which is the longest continuous stretch of double track under one management in the world, and upon which some exhilarating speeds are attained. When the British capitalists committed themselves to an expenditure of over £9,000,000, or $45,000,000, for the construction of less than 500 miles of line through virgin territory, it is doubtful whether in their rosiest dreams they ever anticipated that it would grow into a huge organisation aggregating a third of the railway mileage of British North America within sixty years. Development is still being maintained; new territories are being conquered. A new long and sinuous arm, 3,556 miles from end to end, is being stretched out from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, to bring the eastern into direct touch with the western seaboard. The whole has grown from the insignificant little wooden road that was laid between La Prairie and St. John’s in the Province of Quebec eighty years ago. CHAPTER V THE FIRST TRANS-CONTINENTAL ACROSS THE UNITED STATES “There were difficulties from end to end: from high and steep mountains; from snows; from deserts where there was a scarcity of water, and from gorges and flats where there was an excess; difficulties from cold and heat; from a scarcity of timber and from obstructions of rock; difficulties in keeping a large force on a long line; from Indians; and from want of labour.” This was the terse story related to the United States Congress by Collis P. Huntington, one of the moving spirits of what, at that time, was a tremendous undertaking--the construction of the first railway across North America whereby the Atlantic was linked with the Pacific by a bond of steel. But that concise statement concealed one of the most romantic stories in the history of railway engineering: of grim battles every hour either against the hostile forces of nature or of mankind.