Then, as if these difficulties were not aggravating enough, the entry of the United States into the war, at a time when wages across the line had soared almost beyond trade unionist dreams of avarice, threw the railways into a Government pool, with a confounding result on Canadian railway administration. The McAdoo wages award on the railways which came under control of the Secretary of the Treasury raised expenses on all Canadian railways to a point which, though they compelled rate increases, still could not adequately be met by any charges which the Railway Board deemed fair to the public interest. The policeman’s lot in the Pirates of Penzance was indeed a happy one compared with the Canadian railway executives’ job towards the end of the war, and during the period of re-construction immediately following the armistice. In such circumstances it was fated that we should carry through one of the strangest phases of the history of transportation--to change two great systems of privately projected and privately controlled railways, into public ownership properties, to join them with a network of Government railways already in existence; and to prepare the way for the speedy incorporation with these three main ingredients, of the senior system of Canadian railways--the Grand Trunk. One had travelled a long way from the tiny line between Gladstone and Dauphin, although it was less than twenty-two years from the day I left the old Manitoba North Western to the period during which the new directors of the publicly-owned Canadian Northern Railway took over the Intercolonial and the National Transcontinental, and “Canadian National Railways” was first used as a name that was to represent the legal unity of the largest system in the world. Perhaps, if we were hunting for records here, something unique might be discovered in one’s service. A little pioneer railway came into existence; grew to a system of nearly ten thousand miles, passed from private ownership to a national enterprise; carried on for four years under its former statutory identity, during which period there were associated with it, first all the Government railways whose building was fundamental to Confederation; and, secondly, the Grand Trunk Pacific, launched as a semi-public enterprise with the intention of dwarfing its existence. Only one general officer was concerned with every phase of that kaleidoscopic story. His experience involved a multiplicity of responsibilities which, viewed from a comparatively restful contact with less exacting business, seem now to be chiefly remarkable for the fact that they did not entirely swamp his sense of personal identity. An advantage of being away from it all is that one may obtain a clearer perspective of what happened, and of the trend of its public importances, than was possible when one was encompassed by administrative labour.