Trains of Recollection Drawn from Fifty Years of Railway Service in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes

Hanna, D. B.

Published by The Macmillan Company of Canada LTD., 1924

About this Item

1st edition hardcover in ruled blue cloth boards with color loss to bumped spine ends and still fairly sharp tips. Barely legible pencil owner's signature on front blank free endpaper. Not exlib. 340 pages with edges untrimmed. Few newsclippings laid in. Delicate gold on cream illustrated botanical endpapers. Hinges fine, page block tight. This book was published because readers have said they obtained from the chapters that were written for The Toronto Star Weekly sufficient knowledge about railway conditions in Canada, during forty years, to cause them to ask for the material in permanent form. The third era of Canadian railway expansion, beginning with the unnoticed construction of a hundred and twenty-five miles of line in Manitoba, and issuing in the largest national system in the world, will sometime have its due place in the historical literature of the period. Though this was always apparent, it never seemed that one's contact with the changes of a quarter of a century would ever reach the public except through the inarticulate narrative that is interned in annual reports and arid statistics. What appears here is due to the ability of my old friend and colleague to take scanty and seemingly disconnected material, and fashion it into a story such as one scarcely supposed to be discoverable. This book could have only been written by an author with an inside experience of railway administration; and an intimate knowledge of Western Canada. Mr. Hawkes was for several years the Superintendent of Publicity for the Canadian Northern Railway System. From the railway point of view, therefore, he was familiar with most phases of what I had to tell. His knowledge of the West is extensive and peculiar. He was going through the mill of homestead farming in the North West Territories before I ever saw Manitoba. His intimacy with pioneer conditions, is repeatedly reflected here, in a manner which it is a pleasure to acknowledge. 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. Seller Inventory # 45857

Bibliographic Details

Title: Trains of Recollection Drawn from Fifty ...

Publisher: The Macmillan Company of Canada LTD.

Publication Date: 1924

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Very Good

Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket

Edition: 1st Edition.