A Thousand Blunders

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway played an important role in the development of the north-central corridor of British Columbia. Running from Winnipeg via Edmonton and the Yellowhead Pass to Prince Rupert on the northwest coast, the GTP was built to challenge the primacy of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The 1,500-kilometre British Columbia line, built at great cost over some of the country's most rugged terrain, was completed in 1914. But traffic on this line fell far short of company expectations, and this contributed to the collapse of the GTP in 1919. In this book, Frank Leonard looks at the failure of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, focusing on the problems of the BC line. He calls into question traditional interpretations of the company's collapse by arguing that much of it can be attributed to 'a thousand blunders' made by senior and junior GTP managers. His research is based on the meticulous examination of surviving internal company documents, which provide important insights into the routine decisions that formed the basis of GTP policies. A Thousand Blunders is a provocative account of one of the greatest failures in Canadian entrepreneurial history. Richly detailed and thoroughly documented, it makes an important contribution to the fields of railway and business history, as well as to the study of the history of northern British Columbia.