Chicago Grand Trunk Railway Map, 1887 Poster

The Grand Trunk Railway (reporting mark GT) was a railway system which operated in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario, as well as the American states of Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The railway was operated from headquarters in Montreal, Quebec; however, corporate headquarters were in London, England (4 Warwick House Street). The Grand Trunk and its subsidiaries, along with the Canadian Government Railways, was a primary precursor of today's Canadian National Railways. GTR's main line ran from Portland, Maine, to Montreal, and then from Montreal to Sarnia, Ontario, where it joined its western subsidiary. The GTR had three important subsidiaries during its lifetime: Central Vermont Railway which operated in Quebec, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Grand Trunk Pacific Railway which operated in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia. Grand Trunk Western Railway which operated in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois. A fourth subsidiary was the never-completed Southern New England Railway, chartered in 1910, which would have run from a connection with the Central Vermont at Palmer, Massachusetts, to the deep-water, all-weather port of Providence, Rhode Island. A new line to Providence would have allowed for more extensive port facilities than were possible for the Central Vermont at New London, Connecticut. Construction began in 1910 and continued in fits and starts for more than 20 years until finally abandoned in the early 1930s because of the Great Depression. The loss of the SNER's strongest proponent, Grand Trunk Railway president Charles Melville Hays, on the Titanic in 1912 may have been the major reason that this new route to the sea was never completed. Another important factor was the unrelenting opposition of the New Haven Railroad, which fiercely protected its virtual monopoly control of rail traffic in southern New England.