Gravity, Steam, and Steel: An Illustrated Railway History of Rogers Pass; Second, revised edition

Graeme Pole

Dec 2022 · Mountain Vision Publishing

About this ebook

In 1882, the Canadian Pacific Railway Company committed to building Canada’s first trans-continental railway across unknown ground in the Selkirk Mountains of southern British Columbia. It was a gamble that almost scuttled the project and the promise of the young country. During the next three years, a small army of surveyors, engineers, and labourers cleared the grade and built track across Rogers Pass—the only break in the Selkirk Mountains—a place that defined wilderness. Trestles, tunnels, snowsheds, bridges, and miles of looping track—the Canadian Pacific Railway has since employed them all to reduce the dangers and to make railway operations in Rogers Pass safer and more reliable. Gravity, Steam, and Steel recounts the triumphs and tragedies of building and operating a railway in a place where 40 feet of snow falls each year, and where trains routinely run on grades that many other railways would consider impossibly steep. 

About the author

Graeme Pole has been writing professionally since 1989. 

His thirteen published titles have cumulative sales of more than 300,000 copies.

Canadian Rockies SuperGuide (1991, 1997)

The Canadian Rockies: A History in Photographs (1991)

Walks and Easy Hikes in the Canadian Rockies (1992, 1996, 2012)

Classic Hikes in the Canadian Rockies (1994, 2003, 2011)

The Spiral Tunnels and The Big Hill (1996, 2009)

Healy Park (1998)

David Thompson (2003)

Summit Tales (2005)

Great Railways of the Canadian West (2006)

Gravity, Steam, and Steel (2009)

Canadian Rockies Explorer (2010)

Rails Across the Rockies (2015)

Siren Call (2016)

Since 2009, Mountain Vision Publishing has published Graeme’s catalogue in print and eBook formats. His wilderness essays and historical essays have been widely circulated, with his annual contributions to the Canadian Alpine Journal being among the better known. 

Nine of Graeme’s titles have been finalists in the Banff Mountain Book Festival. Classic Hikes in the Canadian Rockies won the Mountain Exposition category in 1994. Gravity, Steam and Steel received an Honourable Mention Citation in the 2009 BC Historical Federation Writing Awards. Graeme has been a runner-up for the Andy Russell Nature Writers’ Award (1995), a finalist in the Crown of the Continent Nature Writing Award (1998), and in 1997 received a Northwest Outdoor Writers’ Association “Excellence in Craft Award,” and the inaugural Teddi Brown Award for Nature Writing, for which he was also runner-up. 

In 2017, his essay, Designs of the Wild, which appeared in Canadian Rockies Annual, 

took Gold for non-fiction essays published in Alberta the previous year. Also in 2017, 

Graeme contributed research for the script to the CBC series, Canada: The Story of Us.

Graeme lives with his family near Hazelton in northwestern BC.

www.mountainvision.ca