When the Road Ended, the Car Became a Train

In the early years of motoring, the greatest obstacle to crossing Canada was not the automobile. It was the lack of roads. Long before the Trans-Canada Highway, railways provided the only continuous transportation corridors across vast stretches of the country. For the automobile pioneers, that posed an intriguing solution: when the road disappeared, use the railway tracks.

In 1904, Charles Jasper Glidden and his wife, Lucy, traveled west across Canada in a British-built Napier. Where roads were unavailable, Glidden fitted the automobile with flanged railway wheels, enabling it to run directly on the rails. The automobile effectively became a small railway vehicle, operating on the infrastructure that already connected the country.

Eight years later, Thomas Wilby and Jack Haney faced the same problem while attempting their 1912 crossing of Canada in a REO. Wilby understood, even before leaving Halifax, that Canada's railways went where its roads did not. Describing his proposed route west, he wrote that after reaching Lake Superior:

Lake Superior illustrated the problem most dramatically. Wilby described its northern shore as “a wilderness with only one or two straggling railway settlements,” surrounded by a “pathless region of forest, rock and swamp.” He then summarized Canada's transportation reality in a remarkably concise sentence:

Wilby and Haney could not drive their REO along the north shore of Lake Superior. There simply was no continuous road.

They ultimately crossed the gap by boat and train before resuming their automobile journey farther west. The experience reinforced Wilby's argument that Canada might be politically united, but it was not yet united by road.

Wilby and Haney Actually Drove on the Railway

The most extraordinary part of the story occurred later in British Columbia, near Yahk.

Here, in Yahk, Wilby and Haney did something surprisingly similar to Glidden’s—but without Glidden's sophisticated railway wheels. The road simply stopped:

This was not an authorized railway excursion. Wilby understood that an approaching locomotive would have exclusive possession of the line.

He described the danger with characteristic drama, writing that they faced the possibility of being hurled from the embankment by “some legal claimant of the track.” If a train appeared, they might be able to save themselves, he wrote, but “the car must be a total wreck.”

They waited until darkness and tried to determine when trains were expected. Wilby writes that they obtained directions to: “a level-crossing where we could put the car on the track under cover of the darkness”— A Motor Tour Through Canada, p. 246. Then Haney drove the REO onto the railway.

But there was an important difference between this adventure and Glidden's 1904 expedition. Haney was attempting to drive an ordinary automobile over the railway ties:

The car did not ride smoothly on top of the rails like Glidden's Napier or the later 1925 Ford expedition. One set of wheels was inside the rails and another outside, while the rubber tires hammered across the wooden ties. Wilby described the psychological strangeness of the situation: “It was as if we had always motored on a railroad” — A Motor Tour Through Canada, pp. 246–247.

The danger was very real while they watched ahead and behind for the headlight of an approaching locomotive. Railway switches repeatedly trapped the REO's wheels. Haney had to jack up the automobile, place stones beneath the wheels, and maneuver it across the obstruction. The railway itself began destroying the car:

Eventually, they reached a lonely station and managed to get the REO safely off the tracks. From there, they resumed their struggle along what Wilby called the “Government road” toward Creston.

Three Expeditions, the Same Problem

In 1904, Charles Glidden confronted Canada's missing roads by fitting his Napier with railway wheels.

In 1912, Wilby and Haney reached Yahk and found that “the road ended abruptly.” Without railway wheels, Haney simply drove the REO over the ties for fourteen miles.

Then, in 1925, the Ford-sponsored Canadian expedition returned to Glidden's more sophisticated solution. The Model T could be converted to run on flanged railway wheels. Mark Richardson records that the car traveled more than 1,300 kilometers on railway tracks, including roadless sections north of Lake Superior and through the mountains.

The progression captures one of the great ironies of early motoring. The automobile promised freedom from fixed rails and railway timetables. Yet in Canada, the railway remained so dominant that some of the country's pioneering motorists could continue their journeys only by putting their automobiles onto the railway itself.

When the road ended, the railway became the highway.