Grand Trunk Railway
The Grand Trunk Railway ((reporting mark GT); French: Grand Tronc) was a railway system that operated in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and in the American states of Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The railway was operated from headquarters in Montreal, Quebec, with corporate headquarters in London, United Kingdom (4 Warwick House Street). It cost an estimated $160 million to build. The Grand Trunk, its subsidiaries, and the Canadian Government Railways were precursors of today's Canadian National Railway.
Map of the Grand Trunk system, including a connection via the NTR | |
| Overview | |
|---|---|
| Headquarters | Montreal, Quebec |
| Reporting mark | GT |
| Locale | The Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia and the U.S states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana, Maine and Illinois |
| Dates of operation | 1852–1923 |
| Successor | Canadian National Railway |
| Technical | |
| Track gauge | 4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge |
| Previous gauge | Built to 5 ft 6 in (1,676 mm) but converted by 1873 |
The original charter was for a line running from Montreal to Toronto mostly along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. It quickly expanded its charter eastward to Portland, Maine, and westward to Sarnia, Ontario. Over time it added many subsidiary lines and branches, including four important subsidiaries:
- Grand Trunk Eastern which operated in Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
- Central Vermont Railway which operated in Quebec, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
- Grand Trunk Pacific Railway which operated in Northwestern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.
- Grand Trunk Western Railroad which operated in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois.
A fifth subsidiary was the never-completed Southern New England Railway, chartered in 1910, which would have run from a connection with the Central Vermont at Palmer, Massachusetts, to the deep-water, all-weather port of Providence, Rhode Island.