Canadian Transport Sourcebook

FOREWORD

Is someone needed to put across
A worth-while piece of work,
A job which offers a worthy task
A job that weaklings shirks
Don't look askance as weaklings might
Though hard may be the test;
Perhaps the someone now required
Is you: Then do your best.

The days grow lovelier; the air
Is chillier than it used to be
We hear about us everywhere
The haunting chords of memory.

MARGARET SONGSTER. 

Coming across the above little verse recently, I felt that it meant me, as I have been urged by so many of our townspeople to write down my memories of pioneering along the Canadian Pacific Railway, and life in the early days in Sudbury. I have been a "weakling" and have "shirked the task", undoubtedly a worthy one. Not that I was unwilling, but I did not feel equal to it. However, as there seems to be no one else to undertake it, "I will do my best," and beg the kind consideration of readers for any shortcomings in composition, and forgiveness that I have "shirked" so long, when I might have made a better job of it had I done it earlier.

I do not propose to carry it past the very early days, 1883 to 1886, but give place then to some later historian. I hope someone will be preparing to carry on after me, and if for any reason I am unable to continue, I hope someone else will be able to gather up the fragments I leave and think them worth while.