This much of explanation was necessary, to make it clear that an old railwayman is merely offering, through the only available channel, what little material a hardworking life affords for, perhaps, a friendlier appreciation of the railways’ part in developing Canada than is easily obtainable from official publications. “Trains of Recollection” may be my story; but it is my friend’s book. D. B. HANNA. Toronto, May, 1924. Trains of Recollection CHAPTER I. _Suggesting a typically Presbyterian background of Scottish migration to Canada._ It seemed that one’s ability to identify a joke was being tested when one was asked to set down something of what one had seen of the development of Canada during forty years of railway experience. The work I have been doing since coming to Canada in 1882 is the same kind of service that has been well rendered by thousands of men. How could there be anything of public interest in a career that has had only an average share of incident and romance, and more than an average of exacting toil? But it has been said that the commonplace is the greatest romance of all; and that it often requires the lapse of years for an apparently ordinary event to acquire its true perspective in the things which impart the liveliest interest to life. After all, one was very closely associated with the growth of a great railway system from a feeble and unpromising beginning; and one saw the most extraordinary change from private enterprise to Government ownership that has taken place in the history of transportation. Nine millions of Canadian people are financially interested in the effects of that transformation, and it may help some of them to appreciate the significance of their unexpected proprietorship if one tries to throw a little light upon the evolution of Canada, as it has been affected by four decades of rapidly changing transportation conditions--forty years in which every sensation of success and disappointment has been known to the most fascinating country in the world. One must find the romance of the commonplace in harking back--it cannot be done by looking forward. There is no joy in the anticipation of a certainty. No surer way of discounting pleasures has ever been invented than to describe them in advance. Everybody knows the bore who ruins any good story he proffers by his assurance that it is very funny indeed. Turnings in our personal roads which have no special interest when they are taken, years afterwards disclose themselves as the most fateful passages in our lives. Sometimes when we have wanted to turn aside from a beaten path, and have been foiled, we have not known how much was bound up with keeping awhile longer the even tenor of what was then a commonplace way indeed.