ad was rebuilt from Chippawa to Niagara-on-the-Lake, and operated
by steam. It was later extended to Fort Erie and absorbed by the
Canada Southern.

More ambitious schemes were under way--the planning of the St Lawrence
and Atlantic in Canada East, and of the Great Western and later the
Northern in Canada {41} West. These roads were all designed to secure
for Canadian routes and Canadian ports a share of the through traffic
of the West. They were all links in longer chains; the time of
independent through roads had not yet come. The St Lawrence and
Atlantic was built to secure the supremacy of the upper St Lawrence
route by giving Montreal a winter outlet at Portland. The Northern,
running from Lake Ontario at Toronto to Georgian Bay at Collingwood,
was a magnified portage road, shortening by hundreds of miles the
distance from Chicago and the upper lakes to the St Lawrence ports.
The Great Western, connecting Buffalo and Detroit, was the central link
in the shortest route between New York and Chicago. Not only were
these roads important in themselves, but the experience acquired in the
endeavour to finance and construct them largely determined the policy
of the great era of railway construction which began with the
chartering of the Grand Trunk.

The St Lawrence and Atlantic was the Canadian half of the first
international railway ever built. At the outset much more than half of
the enterprise and activity was centred in the United States, for the
Canadas {42} were still apprentices in railway promotion and
construction. The ambition of an American seaport prompted the
planning of the line, the untiring energy of an American promoter made
it possible, and American contractors built the greater part.

The little city of Portland possessed the most northerly harbour on the
Atlantic coast of the United States. Mr John A. Poor, whose lifetime
was devoted to the extension of railways in northern New England,
dreamed of making it, by a road to Montreal, the outlet of the trade of
the West, at least so far as freight traffic went. Passengers and
mails, he conceived, could best be carried to Europe from Halifax,
nearly six hundred miles nearer than New York to Liverpool, but the
railway connecting Halifax with the large American cities should pass
through Portland, and thus make it an important divisional point, if
not a terminus. His enthusiasm fired his fellow-citizens: the city
subscribed for stock in the prop