le for its
members, singly or jointly, to hear complaints in all sections of the
Dominion. Later, telegraph, telephone, and express rates and services
were added to its jurisdiction. Hampered by few of the constitutional
limitations which have lessened the usefulness of the Interstate
Commerce Commission, and guided by efficient businesslike heads--Blair,
Killam, Mabee, Drayton--it soon established a unique reputation for
fairness, promptness, and common sense.

But it is not merely in mileage or in relationship {244} to the state
that change has come in the three-quarters of a century since the first
locomotive whistle was heard in Canada. Let us glance at some of the
more striking changes in equipment and methods of operation. In the
road bed, new standards of solidity have been set, grades cut down and
curves straightened at a cost of uncounted millions, busy stretches
double-tracked, steel bridges built in place of wooden trestles. The
greatest single advance was the substitution, in the eighties chiefly,
of steel for iron rails, making construction cheaper and repair easier,
and permitting the running of heavier and faster trains. Heavier
trains in turn brought heavier rails, eighty to one hundred pounds to
the yard being the usual weight on main tracks, instead of forty or
fifty in early days. Locomotives grew steadily in size from the
_Kitten_ of 1837 to the huge _Mallet_ of to-day. Freight engines were
differentiated from passenger engines. Coal was substituted for wood
as fuel, and in some cases oil for coal. Electricity replaced steam in
tunnels and other places where smoke was troublesome. The crude little
freight cars, carrying four or five tons, gave way to cars carrying
thirty tons or more, specialized for all conceivable purposes, {245}
from cattle and coal cars and oil tanks to refrigerator cars for fruit
or meats or milk. Passenger coaches, following, as in other matters,
American rather than English models, underwent a similar change, and
improved steadily in size, strength, and convenience. The formal
division into classes which marks European railway travel has not taken
root in Canada; but between Pullman and parlour cars, first and second
classes, the actual variety is great. Train dispatching, at first by
telegraph, and latterly by telephone, has become a fine art; safety
devices such as the air-brake, and more slowly block signals, have been
adopted. The old confusing diversity of