Chronicles of Canada Volume 32 - The Railway Builders: A Chronicle of Overland Highways

Before planes, before modern highways, there was rail. And in Canada, rail was nothing less than the circulatory system of a young nation. This is the story of how a vast, fractured collection of provinces and territories became a country, stitched together by steel tracks that crossed mountains, prairies, and boreal forests. By 1914, Canada had pulled ahead of nearly every nation on Earth in railway mileage per capita, a remarkable achievement for a young country with a population smaller than New York City. Skelton chronicles the visionaries who pushed westward, the laborers who endured brutal conditions, and the political machinations that made it all possible. The Railway Builders reads less like a technical history than a frontier epic: a tale of ambition, connection, and the radical idea that a country could be forged not from shared culture but from shared iron. For anyone curious about how infrastructure literally built a nation.