Browse "Transportation"

On September 3, 1962, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker arrived at Rogers Pass to preside at the official opening of the Trans-Canada Highway. This section of pavement through British Columbia's Selkirk Mountains was the final stretch of the highway to be built.

Throughout the period of the historical fur trade, water routes were the natural “highways” of the voyageurs and coureurs des bois. Canoes (later boats — principally York boats) were the principal vehicles. The location of trading posts depended on the presence of Indigenous peoples willing and able to trade, and on the ease of transportation to and from them.

Grand Portage was a fur-trade depot and route of the voyageurs at the western extremity of Lake Superior.

The Grand Trunk Pacific Railway was a 4800 km system whose main line ran from Winnipeg via Melville and Edmonton to Prince Rupert, British Columbia.

In late 19th Century, the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada was the major railroad in the Province of Canada (Ontario and Quebec), connecting Toronto to Montreal.

Great Divide Trail is a long-distance hiking trail, paralleling where possible the CONTINENTAL DIVIDE of Canada's Rocky Mts range. Some 560 km of the trail lies within the boundaries of Banff, Kootenay, Yoho and Jasper national parks, extending from Palliser Pass in the S to Mt ROBSON in the N.

  The London and Gore Railroad Co, incorporated 6 May 1834, changed its name to the Great Western Rail Road Co in 1845 and to the Great Western Railway in 1853. Promoted by lawyer-politician Allan Napier MACNAB and more significantly by Hamilton merchants Isaac and Peter Buchanan, R.W.

Two of western Canada's earliest railway charters, granted in 1880, authorized construction, with government help, of railways parallelling old water transportation routes to Hudson Bay. The projects were amalgamated in 1883 and the first 64 km built northward into the Manitoba interlake region.

I'm Alone, a rumrunner based in Lunenburg, NS, one of several hundred vessels that supplied illicit liquor to a PROHIBITION-bound US during the 1920s. In March 1929 a US Coast Guard cutter sighted it when it had engine trouble in the Gulf of Mexico.

The Intercolonial Railway was a rail line that operated from 1872 to 1918, connecting Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Québec and Ontario. The line was Canada’s first national infrastructure project. Plans for its construction date to the 1830s, but the project only gained momentum during the Confederation conferences of 1864 in Charlottetown and Québec City, where construction of the Intercolonial Railway was negotiated for the Maritime colonies’ entry to British North American union. Construction began shortly after Canada became a country in 1867, with most lines completed by the mid-1870s.

​The Lachine Canal passes through the southwestern part of the island of Montréal, from the Old Port to the borough of Lachine, where it flows into Lake Saint-Louis.

Liard Highway is an all-weather road linking northern British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. Beginning 27 km north of Fort Nelson on the Alaska Highway, it runs 400 km north to join the Mackenzie Highway a short distance south of Fort Simpson, NWT.

Lions Gate Bridge, which officially opened on 29 May 1939, spans Burrard Inlet at the First Narrows, connecting Stanley Park and Vancouver’s city centre to the North Shore.

 The first locomotive to be constructed in Canada was built by the James Good family (1853) of Toronto. Named Toronto, the locomotive had a set of 4 driving wheels and 4 small front wheels for better travel through curves.

Eighty km northwest of Enterprise, a ferry connects with the highway to Yellowknife, and connecting roads to the east serve Fort Resolution and Fort Smith. The section from Enterprise to Hay River is now a separate highway. First built as an all-weather road, some of its length has been paved.

The Mackenzie-Grease Trail represents the final 350 km link which Alexander Mackenzie followed in the first recorded crossing of continental North America in 1793.

Mackinaw Boat, a strong flat-bottomed boat, pointed at each end and with a hold in the middle, was used by fur traders during the French regime for running downstream. It was later adapted for open water by the addition of 2 sails and a steering oar. By the 1870s a distinctive type, 6.7 m to 8.

The Montreal metro opened on 14 October 1966. The second Canadian subway system after Toronto’s, which opened in 1954, the Montreal metro was the first subway in North America to run on rubber tires instead of metal wheels. Extensions to the Montreal metro were built on Montreal Island over the two decades after it opened, and then to the city of Laval, on the island of Île Jésus, during the 2000s. The system runs entirely underground, and each station has a distinct architecture and design. The Montreal metro consists of four lines running a total of 71 km and serving 68 stations. In 2018, its passengers made more than 383 million trips.

Numerous tragedies have unfolded on Canadian roads and highways, the deadliest being a bus crash that killed 44 people in Quebec in 1997. Despite the death toll in such headline-grabbing disasters, Canada’s motor vehicle fatality and injury rates are steadily declining, thanks to engineering improvements in vehicles, and the increasing promotion and awareness of safe driving practices.

The NTR's development was rooted in the power play between railway entrepreneurs and politicians of the early twentieth century.