The Railway Beat: A Century of Canadian Pacific Police Service

At its apex, Canadian Pacific Rail operated the most expansive and comprehensive transportation system  the world has ever seen. Vast amounts of freight and multitudes of passengers moved seamlessly back and forth on the North American continent and across the oceans to the far corners of the world in the capable hands of a single, well-oiled administration.
The CPR was built in the early 1880s to connect the thriving cities of the east with the fledgling communities of the west coast. This first tenuous lifeline of the wildly ambitious enterprise stretched across more than two thousand miles of rugged, nearly uninhabited wilderness – with no blanket authority or viable system of law enforcement.
Initially, Canada’s RCMP took up the challenge of protecting the men and women who accomplished the dream of forging a link from sea to sea and beyond. Inevitably, however, the responsibility for the security of people and goods would fall to the CPR itself and the private police force which grew up within the company. From its somewhat disreputable origins of ad-hoc groups of semi-autonomous armed watchmen and strike-breaking thugs organized at the local level to the fully-professional force created in 1913, the stage was set for more than a century of police services to come. The quiet efficiency with which its officers have conducted themselves in their ongoing battles with fraud, theft, smuggling, bombings, murder and mayhem, and the degree to which they managed to avoid controversy and public scrutiny, speak well for the men and women of the “railway beat.”