Asian Dream, The by Donald MacKay Pacific Rim and Canada's National Railway

$11.44

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HARD COVER WITH DUST JACKET

EX LIBRARY BOOK

For hundreds of years the vision of a western sea route to the riches of the Orient haunted European adventurers. By the 1840s, thwarted by the Arctic in their efforts to find a Northwest Passage, merchant-explorers turned instead to an overland route, and the great age of railway building in North America began.

This is the story of how two ancestors of Canadian National Railways - the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern - raced to build rail lines across Canada's northern prairies and open new trade routes to the Far East. Their lives before amalgamation were brief, hectic and economically precarious, but between them they unlocked Canada's northwest and laid down routes which became a land bridge between East and West.

Here are the men who risked fortunes in the belief that Canada must become a Pacific as well as an Atlantic nation: Sir Edward Watkin of the Grand Trunk, who bought out the Hudson's Bay Company in order to open the way for a railway to the Pacific; William Mackenzie and Donald

Mann, the backwoods entrepreneurs who built a rickety "farmer's railway" into the powerful Canadian Northern; Charles Melville Hays, who fathered the Grand Trunk Pacific and created the port of Prince Rupert, meant to rival Vancouver - and who went down aboard the Titanic before his hopes could mature; Sir Henry Thornton, the larger-than-life railway genius who unified CN and encouraged a commercial network in the Orient; Donald Gordon, the Scots banker turned exuberant railwayman who put CN back in business in the Pacific after World War 1I, and his successors who built up a billion dollars of annual trade with Pacific Rim countries.

This richly detailed chronicle of vision, frustration and success intersperses a lively text with vivid photographs of the railways that went to make up CN and the men who believed in the Asian Dream.

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