Trans-Canada Highway

The Trans-Canada Highway is a road from St John's, Nfld, to Victoria, B.C. It includes two ferry journeys, one from Newfoundland to the mainland and the other from the mainland to Vancouver Island. (P.E.I.'s section of the Trans-Canada can be reached by ferry from Nova Scotia.) Counting only distance along the road, the Trans-Canada Highway is 7 821 km long. This makes it the longest national highway in the world.

An intrepid Englishman, Thomas W. Wilby, was the first to drive across Canada, in 1912. The trip from Halifax, N.S., to Victoria, B.C., took 52 days. Where there were no roads, Wilby either hoisted his automobile onto a railway flatcar or simply drove bumpily over the railway ties.

An early supporter of a cross-canada highway was Dr Percy Doolittle. He drove across Canada in 1925.

In 1946, Brigadier R.A. MacFarlane and Kenneth MacGillivray became the first people to drive across Canada by road without resorting to railway tracks. Their journey, from Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island, N.S., to Victoria, B.C., took nine days and they had nine flat tires. The roads they travelled varied greatly in quality.

Four years later, in the summer of 1950, work began on the Trans-Canada Highway. The minimum standards to which it was built were the same across the country. It was at least a two-lane highway, with wide pavement and shoulders, slow curves, gentle slopes and ample clearance room beneath bridges.

Building the highway turned out to be more difficult - and more expensive - than expected. The road had to be protected from avalanches in the Rogers Pass, B.C., where it passes through the Rockies. The 1 km long tunnel through which it passes beneath the St Lawrence River and into Montreal cost $75 million.

The total construction cost, which was shared by the provincial and federal governments, was over $1 billion.

On September 3, 1962, at a ceremony in the Rogers Pass, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker declared the highway open.