The Book that started it all
Canadian Pacific in the Rockies (Volume One)
In 1977, I was working for PanCanadian, Canadian Pacific's oil and gas company and for several years I was responsible for the company's annual report. This brought me into close contact with Nick Morant, CP's Special Photographer. The Chairman, who sat on the annual report committee decreed that we should have some photographs of PanCanadian's properties outside of Alberta. This meant that we had to get shots of the refinery in Sarnia in which the company had an interest. I told my boss that it was essential that I be there to show Nick what to take! Somehow he believed me, probably because I bamboozled him with something along the lines of "angular fragmentation of pigment" and I was given a week to get the necessary photographs. Remember that this was also in the time before severe cutbacks in the oil and gas industry.
Because of the weight of Nick's equipment we had to travel by train and so in September 1977 we set forth for Toronto in the Canadian in what was to be the last year it was operated by CP Rail. Nick arranged for me to get a cab trip as far as Medicine Hat and Floyd Yeats was the engineer. After that it was back to the cushions and as I remember, Nick, because of his seniority, got a bedroom while I, because of my lack of the same, got an upper bunk!! Neverthess, it was a memorable trip and it was during this journey that the seeds of preparing a work on CP began to form in my brain. My British Railway Modelling friends decried the lack of reasonably-priced, accurate and well-researched works on CP and the other Canadian railways. Nick and I discussed such a project but he was not interested in doing it himself. So, I took on the task and, with Bill Cruickshanks and other friends, Canadian Pacific in the Rockies (Volume One) was published on April 1, 1978. Floyd Yeats gave considerable assistance and we remained good friends until his death in June 2000. Floyd loved to talk about railways and he always saw our books before they were published, supplying great amounts of information. He'll be hard to replace. Rather appropriately in the early days of putting the work together it was mentioned that now was a good time to produce the book as "in 20 years most of the steam men will have gone."
How prophetic.
We could only afford to print 1,000 copies of Canadian Pacific in the Rockies (Volume One) but our printer, David Thompson, was very good to us and we received "maximum overs" which resulted in 1,400 copies being available at a retail price of only $3.50 apiece. They were all gone in six weeks and we were back at Dave's to arrange a reprint. Never did we think that 22 years later we'd have published 76 works from 30 different authors. Never did we think that we would have sold a total of over 500,000 copies of our works and we certainly never thought that Canadian Pacific in the Rockies (Volume One) would have sold almost 18,000 copies by the end of the millennium. In fact it has gone through eight reprints and it continues to sell well.
Now we have to look to the future. Both Bill and I qualify for the Canadian Pension Plan and wonder how much longer we can keep going. Publishing, editing, writing, marketing and shipping the works certainly keeps me busy although I enjoy "meeting" so many railway enthusiasts and am not complaining. After all, how many people can say that they have had a hobby for 22 years that hasn't cost much!!. Currently, it is my ambition to see us publish 100 works and when we reach this goal, we'll reconsider our options.
Donald Bain