By Frederic Blount Warren

From Technical World Magazine 1910 (Abridged)

It took a man named Dobbs, back in the seventeenth century, to dream of a project that twentieth century Canadians have started to fulfill. Dobbs was in England and quite naturally for a man of his day, was not thinking of railroad intervention to carry out his dreams, which contemplated the opening up of the vast territory around Hudson Bay. And all the way from Dobbs to A.P. Low, who is the present director of the geological survey in Canada, with men in between, there has been someone to keep alive the demand for the utilization of the Hudson Bay route to Europe, which will shorten the present distance of 4, 390between Winnipeg and  Liverpool via Montreal, to 3, 566 via Hudson Bay.

For the last two decades the insistent premier of Canada, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, has been an advocate of a Hudson Bay Railroad and at the general election held in Canada early in the present year he committed himself definitely to the construction of this line for which final surveys have been made over the greater portion of the proposed route. The Laurier government's railroad will be stretched to Fort Churchill on Hudson Bay from a point on the Saskatchewan River not quite 500 miles to the southward and running northeast along the Nelson and Churchill Rivers. The Eskimos, who have been known to travel 300 miles to see  steam-propelled boat without ever understanding what makes it move will come in contact with new humanizing influences which few in our day ever expected to see carried to so remote an area…..At Fort Churchill, York Factory, Manor House and Moose Factory there are posts of the Hudson Bay Company, not large but as old in years as to be found anywhere on the continent. To reach the Bay the best method has always been to go first to England and take a Hudson Bay Company boat sailing in via the straits…Here is what the Laurier Government is going to do: Open the territory of Keewatin with a railway; establish a harbour at Fort Churchill; build elevators and coal docks; place lighthouses along the shore to facilitate the navigation of the Hudson straits; thus giving to Western Canada an independent sea port of its own.

Grain from the prairie provinces will be shipped over this road in winter, stored in the elevators until the opening of navigation in June, carried across Hudson Bay, six hundred miles through Hudson straits, give hundred miles across the Atlantic and so to Liverpool, making a savings of distance over the present route of 1000 miles and calculating financially, about $6.40 per acre on land growing twenty bushels to the acre… The Hudson Bay route has always been a bogey in the eyes of Eastern Canada, whose business interests are afraid of it. (Editor's note: in 1912 they built that giant flour mill on the port of Montreal, that still stands today, ( I think.).. The success of the western Canadian wheat fields, may of which are far inland, depends on cheap transportation, preferably by water. The further population penetrates into upper Saskatchewan and Alberta, the longer the rail hauls and consequently the slower the development…. By 1912 Western Canada will be producing 400,000,000 bushels of grain on 15,000,000 acres of land. (From 1900 to 1906 the acreage under crop grew from 3,000,000 to 7, 500,000 acres. Not one but many outlets for grain are now wanted. Cost is not the whole question, since it is hard to get the crop out fast enough.