Trains of Recollection / Drawn from Fifty Years of Railway Service in Scotland and Canada, and told to Arthur Hawkes

This memoir recounts fifty years of railway service in Scotland and Canada, following a career that moves from country and city stations near the Clyde to involvement in transcontinental development. It assembles anecdotes about vanishing practices, operational routines, and encounters with rival companies and prominent railway figures. The narrative sketches prairie life and settlement challenges, including farming misunderstandings, frontier meetings with Indigenous people, and sudden fortunes. It explains how wartime strain and rapid expansion transformed private lines into a national system and generated lasting management and financial difficulties. Throughout, it reflects on administration, logistics, and the human side of building and operating a vast railway network.