Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway — BrandWiki

Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway

railroad name	Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway
marks	TG&BR
locale	Southern Ontario, Canada
start year	1868
end year	1883
successors	Ontario and Quebec Railway Canadian Pacific Railway Orangeville-Brampton Railway
gauge	from 1881
old gauge	until 1881
hq city	Toronto

The Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway (TG&B) was a railway company which operated in Ontario, Canada in the years immediately following the Canadian Confederation of 1867. It connected two rural counties, Grey County and Bruce County, with the provincial capital of Toronto to the east.

The TG&B suffered from engineering and financial problems throughout its existence, and its struggle to finance a gauge conversion from narrow to standard gauge led to a takeover by bondholders and subsequent acquisition by the Canadian Pacific Railway through its proxy, the Ontario and Quebec Railway. The bulk of the former TG&B lines were managed under Canadian Pacific's Bruce Division, which had its divisional point at Orangeville, the junction of the original TG&B lines to Owen Sound and Teeswater.

Background

Early development of railways in the Province of Canada, which consisted of Lower Canada (Quebec) and Upper Canada (Ontario), was delayed by lack of capital and industrial infrastructure. The first major national railway development was the construction of the Grand Trunk Railway of Canada on a gauge of from Portland, Maine to Sarnia, Canada West via Montreal and Toronto, with a branch from Richmond to Levis, near Quebec City.

Choice of narrow gauge, promotion, and financing

A charismatic Scots-born Toronto wharfinger and trader, George Laidlaw took up the challenge. He was a business associate of the powerful Gooderham and Worts Distillery interests, and other Toronto bankers and merchants. Laidlaw advertised in newspapers in London, England, for suggestions as to how railways might be built more cheaply in Canada. He received a reply from Carl Abraham Pihl, first managing engineer of Norway's Railway Construction Bureau. Pihl had worked on the construction, under Robert Stephenson, of the first Norwegian trunk railway the Hovedbanen from Christiania (today Oslo) to Eidsvoll, which opened in 1854 where the same issues of overbuilding a line in a small farming and fishing economy, had led to an unaffordable railway.

He now advocated the use of the narrow gauge of with all major construction in wood, which system he had developed since the early 1860s. Pihl's ideas had been noticed in Britain where the smaller Ffestiniog Railway in Wales was also proving a success. After a visit to Norway the gauge was taken up by Sir Charles Fox and Sons, the firm founded by the eminent engineer and constructor of the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Fox had a very influential consulting practice throughout the former British Empire and Colonies and was instrumental in gaining acceptance for the gauge in Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa.

The choice of the narrow gauge led to vigorous challenges in London, England and Canada. Zerah Colburn, the editor of the London technical journal Engineering, used its columns to violently criticise the advice of Douglas Fox, the elder son of Sir Charles Fox, to the promoters, which was taken up by the Hamilton, Ontario Spectator which supported that town's claim to be the hub (rather than Toronto) of railway traffic for western Ontario.

Abraham Fitzgibbon, the chief engineer of the Queensland Railways, came to the aid of the promoters with a speech in Toronto. The main opposition to the narrow gauge came from the Wellington, Grey and Bruce Railway in the west and the Port Whitby and Port Perry Railway in the east. Both lines were proposing to build competing lines on the "Provincial" gauge and claimed that the choice of the narrow gauge was a ruse to ensure that all the traffic of the districts would be exclusively trans-shipped at Toronto, rather than Hamilton and Whitby, Ontario. The opposition narrowly failed to defeat the narrow gauge, and Provincial Charters were granted to the Toronto and Nipissing Railway, and the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway, on March 4, 1868.

George Laidlaw sought to raise money to finance the construction of the narrow-gauge railways by the following means, in order of preference:

Laidlaw and other directors fanned out through the townships speaking at taxpayer meetings in support of bonuses for the railways. His messianic style at these meetings often generated so much enthusiasm that motions were immediately approved to grant large sums in support of the lines. On the morrow the local politicians often had second and more sober thoughts and sought to control the process themselves, trying to dictate where and when the money would be spent, and on what.

Long campaigns ensued with businessmen and progressive farmers whose lots would be near the line advocating large unconditional grants and those in more distant locations opposing the free bonuses of tax money. Generally, the response of the settlers, anxious to expand opportunities for trade and travel, was generous. However, when strongly opposed, Laidlaw's combative and insulting responses could generate such opposition that townships delayed contributing money for years or refused entirely.

By late 1874, when the TG&BR was open to Owen Sound and almost complete to Teeswater, the approximate total of the capital account, excluding minor receipts and expenses, since the start of construction in 1869, was:

Receipts ($)

Total Receipts 2,573,000

Expenditures ($)

Total Expenditures 2,562,000

Contrary to the hopes of the promoters, the proceeds from bonuses, grants, and stock sales fell short of paying for construction of the roadbed and structures by over $400,000. This deficit and the cost of purchasing iron and equipment had to be made up by issuing bonds whose guaranteed interest payments were a heavy burden on the income of the TG&BR and ultimately were to prove fatal to its prospects.

The Act empowering the Toronto, Grey and Bruce specified that the railway should extend from Toronto via Orangeville, to Mount Forest and Durham, where it would split into a northerly branch to Southampton and a southerly one to Kincardine. Another branch north to Owen Sound was to commence at Mount Forest or Durham. A line from Toronto first had to get to the Humber Valley at Weston by means of a third rail in the 5 ft 6in gauge track of the Grand Trunk Railway, proceed up the Humber Valley to Bolton, Ontario and then traverse the Caledon Mountain to gain Orangeville via the Credit Valley. The line would then go west to Arthur, and then north to Mount Forest.

On the lower part of the line, as far as Orangeville, municipal bonuses were generally given freely and generously, but beyond that place Garafraxa and Luther townships did not contribute towards the 15 miles of the line along their township borders. At first blocked from reaching Owen Sound via Durham, the TG&BR eventually soundly trounced the Wellington, Grey and Bruce Railway in bonus elections in Grey County, and reached Owen Sound via Shelburne and Dundalk, Ontario. The TG&BR lost most of its battles with the WG&BR in Bruce County. Eventually it abandoned any hope of reaching Kincardine and settled for a western terminus at Teeswater.

Bonuses approved by vote of taxpayers from each township and county on the route of the line
Provincial government grants per mile of track built, under the "Aid to Railways Act"
Sale of Stock
Sale of Bonds
Loans

Municipal Bonuses 869,000
Government Grants 232,000
Calls on Stock 271,000
Sale of Bonds 1,201,000

Engineering 206,000
Right of Way 47,000
Construction 1,649,000
Iron and Fastenings 368,000
Rolling Stock 392,000

Operation

Passenger and freight traffic on the Toronto, Grey and Bruce Railway grew strongly at first, challenging the ability of the line to carry all that was offered. The TG&BR directors reacted tardily, causing many complaints about the backlogs of traffic. Eventually they did buy substantial numbers of new locomotives and freight cars, just in time to suffer the devastating effects of poor grain harvests and the business recession of the mid-late 1870s. This weighed heavily on the line's ability to pay a return on the capital invested, and the TG&BR entered a period of constant insolvency, and recurrent efforts to re-structure the debt.

Lumber and firewood gradually declined and was not compensated for by the expected increase in agricultural produce. Operating ratios (costs/receipts) were worse than the T&NR, but not substantially different from those of other small Ontario railways of the period. They were substantially worse than those of large railways such as the GTR and CPR. The gross TG&BR profit was barely equivalent to 4-5% on its outstanding bonds, which had been sold with a guaranteed return of 7-8%. This left nothing for renewals of equipment and trackage or for the stockholders. The Grey extension to Owen Sound carried a vigorous traffic in passengers and freight, for onward carriage to the Lakehead by steamers. The Bruce extension to Teeswater was very sparsely used in the 1870s and there were continuous efforts to devise an economic passenger service to suit the circumstances.

The typical passenger service consisted of two trains per day each way between Owen Sound and Toronto; there was only one return trip each day from Teeswater to Orangeville. Orangeville had three trains a day to and from Toronto. Freight traffic over the Caledon Hills and the heights near Dundalk required powerful 4-6-0 and 2-8-0 locomotives, which seem to have handled the traffic comfortably, although trains often had to be divided between Mono Road and Charleston (Caledon). The small narrow-gauge engines were able to cope with normal winter weather, but there were major blockages of the line in the 'snowbelt' country above Orangeville, which sometimes closed the line for several weeks. The TG&BR was sometimes unable, for many months, to pay the overtime wages for manually clearing these drifts. There were few public accidents, but a severe toll of industrial fatalities to the operating staff.

The most dangerous job was brakesman, with many young men being crippled or killed when walking along the tops of vehicles to manually screw down brakes and when manually coupling cars using the highly dangerous link-and-pin couplers. The worst incident on the TG&BR occurred at Arthur when a passenger was killed by shots fired at a train crew by drunken members of the Orange Order on July 12, 1872.