Trains of Recollection

A railwayman's intimate account of building modern Canada, written by a man who arrived in 1882 as an immigrant and spent four decades watching a nation's transportation infrastructure transform from fragile beginnings into a government-owned marvel. D.B. Hanna didn't just ride the rails, he helped lay them, manage them, and witness the extraordinary evolution from private enterprise to national ownership. His memoir captures something no official history can: the sweat, the ambition, the humor, and the quiet heroism of ordinary men doing extraordinary work. He writes with disarming humility about a career he insists was unremarkable, yet the details he gathered over fifty years of service in Scotland and Canada tell a different story. This is the romance of the commonplace, the texture of building a country one track at a time, one immigrant's view of the nine million Canadians who suddenly found themselves owners of something vast and vital.