How the Faculty of Enginee at Queen’s came to be At 9:22 am on November 7, 1885, in the jagged mountains of British Columbia, the last spike was pounded into the railbed on the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR). It was an act of ceremony that nicely epitomizes the historical context in which engineering education began here at Queen’s. It was the Victorian era, the age of coal and steam, a period of galloping technological advancement and social and economic change. The CPR finally connected the Pacific Ocean and British Columbia with central Canada, completing the most difficult section of the first Canadian transcontinental railway. It fulfilled a central condition of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation, and allowed people
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THE COMPLETE ENGINEER
Sir Sanford Fleming
and cargo to move from the Atlantic to the Pacific in about 10 days. Beyond the symbolism, it cemented Canada both as a North American nation within the British Empire and as a viable industrial economy. Sandford Fleming, then a director of the CPR, looked on as the last spike was driven into the cold ground that day in 1885. A Scots-born surveyor and railway engineer, Fleming’s association with the transcontinental railway began almost a quarter-century earlier. He pitched a plan for a coast-to-coast railway to the Parliament of the Province of Canada in 1862. He worked as chief railway engineer on the Intercolonial Railway throughout that decade, connecting much of Atlantic Canada with Quebec. He led an arduous expedition across the
