Train Country: An Illustrated History of Canadian National Railways

A.A. den Otter is a professor of history at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland and co-author of Lethbridge: A Centennial History.

According to the authors of this generously illustrated volume, the
railway, an amalgam of several bankrupt companies, played a crucial role
in knitting together the disparate regions of our transcontinental
nation. In several breezily written, haphazardly organized chapters,
MacKay and Perry trace the development of the railway from the early
1850s to the 1990s. They sketch the stories of the Grant Trunk, the
Great Western, the Intercolonial, the Canadian Northern, and a host of
smaller lines, and they briefly outline the emergence of Canadian
National Railways. Their real emphasis, however, is on the machines and
the men who operated them. The value of their book resides in the
photographs, taken from CN Photo Archives, and the loving, detailed
portrait of railway culture.