It Took a While, but We Got There!

The company that owned the locomotives pictured on the front of this post card was chartered as a private company in 1912. It was known as the Pacific Great Eastern Railway (PGE); it was acquired by the provincial government of British Columbia in 1918. The Pacific Great Eastern Railway (PGE) was incorporated on February 27, 1912, to build a line from Vancouver north to a connection with the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (GTP) at Prince George. Although independent from the GTP, the PGE had agreed that the GTP, whose western terminus was at the remote northern port of Prince Rupert, could use their line to gain access to Vancouver. Upon incorporation, the PGE took over the Howe Sound and Northern Railway, which at that point had built 14 kilometers of track north of Squamish.

By 1915, the line was opened from Squamish 283 km north to Chasm. The railway was starting to run out of money, however. In 1915 it failed to make an interest payment on its bonds, obliging the provincial government to make good on its bond guarantee. In the 1916 provincial election campaign, the Liberal Party alleged that some of the money advanced to the railway for bond guarantee payments had instead gone into Conservative Party campaign funds. In the election, the Conservatives, who had won every seat in the legislature in 1912 election, lost to the Liberals. The Liberals then took the railway to court to recover $5 million of allegedly unaccounted funds. In early 1918, the railway's backers agreed to pay the government $1.1 million and turn the railway over to the government. When the government took over the railway, two separate sections of trackage had been completed: A small 32 kilometer section between North Vancouver and Horseshoe Bay, and one between Squamish and Clinton. By 1921, the provincial government had extended the railway to a point 130 km south of a connection to Prince George, but it was not extended further. Construction of the line between Horseshoe Bay and Squamish was given a low priority; however, the railway had an agreement with the municipality of West Vancouver to provide passenger service. In 1928 they paid the city $140,000 in support of its road-building programme and the last trains on the line ran on November 29, 1928. The line fell into disuse, but was never formally abandoned. For the next 20 years the railway would run from "nowhere to nowhere". It did not connect with any other railway, and there were no large urban centres on its route. It existed mainly to connect logging and mining operations in the British Columbia Interior with the coastal town of Squamish, where resources could then be transported by sea. The government still intended for the railway to reach Prince George, but the resources to do so were not available, especially during the Great Depression and World War II. The unfortunate state of the railway caused it to be given nicknames such as "Province's Great Expense", "Prince George Eventually", "Past God's Endurance", "Please Go Easy", and "Puff, Grunt and Expire". Starting in 1949, the Pacific Great Eastern began to expand. Track was laid north of Quesnel to a junction with the Canadian National Railways at Prince George. That line opened on November 1, 1952. Between 1953 and 1956 the PGE constructed a line between Squamish and North Vancouver. The PGE used their former right-of-way between North Vancouver and Horseshoe Bay. This was to the dismay of some residents of West Vancouver who, mistakenly believing the line was abandoned, had encroached on it. This part of the line opened on August 27, 1956. By 1958 the PGE had reached north from Prince George to Fort St. John and to Dawson Creek where it met the Northern Alberta Railways. And this is the event that is being commemorated on the front of the post card. The post card was printed by Smith Lithograph Company out of Vancouver, British Columbia. I found this in my search on the internet: Companies that provide flyer printing services in Vancouver may want to keep the memory of one of their own alive. A longtime member of Vancouver’s printing industry, Dell Fraser recently passed away at the age of 82.

Fraser began his long career in Vancouver’s printing industry back when he started working for Hazeldine Press; subsequently, he then began working for a company by the name of Smith Lithograph. Smith Lithograph eventually changed its name to Smith Grant Mann, which is today located in the nearby city of Richmond.