Niall MacKay. Over the Hills to Georgian Bay (1981)

     Niall MacKay. Over the Hills to Georgian Bay (1981) Niall MacKay provides a summary history of the Ottawa, Arnprior and Parry Sound Railway, which connected the namesake towns (a rarity in railway naming), and provided J R Booth, its promoter and owner, with a means of bringing his lumber to market. If the Cashman Creek bridge, whose foundation had been undermined by a flash flood, had been replaced, the railway would probably still exist, as it was the shortest route by far between the Upper Great Lakes (and hence the Midwest) and New England (and hence European markets for lumber and other natural resources), and might now be one of the main west-east routes in North America. At its peak, it was running trains an average of twenty minutes apart.
     It was amalgamated with the Canada Atlantic Railway, which was the largest privately owned railway at the time. It ran through sparsely settled country, and after sale to the Grand Trunk, and later incorporation into Canadian National Railways, it was one of three routes across central Canada, a fact that assisted the decision to in effect abandon it, especially since the other two routes served more densely settled regions. It crossed Algonquin National Park, which meant a fair amount of tourist traffic before roads (built as Depression make-work projects) opened up the park to cars and busses.
     MacKay has mined the photographic sources, and these supply a good deal of the interest of this book; one wishes the pictures were larger and more clearly reproduced, but 23 years ago the printers were still limited to half-tone and letterpress. The profile and line map are well done, the general location map less so, since the latter doesn’t show enough of the surrounding settlements, roads etc. Nevertheless, the book gives one an excellent picture of the railway and the country it ran through. **½ (2004)