When my brother and I arrived in Canada in 1845, I was 18 years old. The
railway ran a total of 16 miles. Even the most established centres lacked
adequate maps, and every outpost, city, town and village told time by the rising
of the Sun, making travel a scheduling nightmare. The vast wealth of natural
resources that lay between Upper Canada and the Pacific Coast was totally
unknown and inaccessible.
I changed all of these things. By the time of my death 70 years later I had
surveyed this country from Ottawa to the shores of the Pacific on a voyage
that cost 20 men their lives. I had built thousands of miles of track as
Canada's foremost railway engineer, and I had created the worldwide system of
Standard Time in part to ensure that the many trains now criss-crossing
the country – trains that my work made possible – could schedule track use
to avoid head-on collisions
