Another member of the first Borden Cabinet regarded an exclusively private car as a necessary aid to his departmental efficiency. Soon after being installed he asked us to procure him one, giving his assurance that it would be promptly paid for. This assurance was requested because I knew of another Cabinet Minister who once borrowed a car from the C.P.R. and never returned it, even when he left the Government. After awhile, and following repeated enquiries from the Minister, reflecting the urgency of delivery, a converted Pullman was ready for him, on receipt of word that the order-in-council authorizing payment had been passed. The car was kept at Chicago for a fortnight, and was then brought as far as Sarnia and held for several weeks more. The order-in-council was never passed; the car was re-named, and was used for several years by the third vice-president of the Canadian Northern. Many will remember the Toronto. CHAPTER XIII. _Recounting midwinter episodes of location and operation in empty country._ The average outsider of railway travail may envy the official who, he thinks, continually revels in the luxuries of a private car; but nobody has suffered the pangs of jealousy because he could not share in some of the midwinter pleasures of the railroading pioneer in a Western Canada which, when all’s said and done, is not a banana belt in the earliest and latest months of the year. Between the Lake of the Woods and the Rocky Mountains winter develops more rigours than the poets sing; bracing though it undeniably is, and so dry, before and after prohibition, that you don’t feel the cold. In railway operation some of the more recent mechanical arrangements of trains have made a day on the rail vastly superior to a day on the trail. Engines don’t die as often as they did when the Canadian Northern was an infant of days. Perhaps it should be explained how engines go dead, lest some reader be as bare of railroad lore as the director of a famous company was who, going on a trip to England, asked the general manager of his line to prime him with a few interesting facts about the system. If investors and others became inquisitive over there, what would he say? “Oh,” replied the manager, “tell them that we have a fine line with first-class equipment--all eighty-pound rails.” “Good point,” agreed the director, “eighty pounds to the mile, I suppose?” In these days, locomotives are equipped with automatic fire-box doors, which operate without producing the intermittent glare that used to light up the sky at night when the fireman opened the door to shovel in fuel. Then, with the temperature down to thirty or forty below zero, the opening of the firebox door would let in such a rush of air that, if the boiler tubes were becoming thin, they would begin to leak.