Everything about Charles Melville Hays totally explained
Charles Melville Hays, sometimes rendered
Hayes, (
May 16,
1856 –
April 15,
1912) was a
railway official most famous for his role as president of the
Grand Trunk Railway System. He died on
April 15,
1912, in the sinking of the
RMS Titanic.
History
Born at
Rock Island, Illinois, Hays began working for the
Atlantic and Pacific Railroad in
St. Louis, Missouri, at the age of 17 in 1873. In 1878 Hays became secretary to the general manager of the
Missouri Pacific Railroad and took a similar position in 1884 with the Wabash, St Louis and Pacific Railroad. In 1887 Hays became general manager of the Wabash Western Railroad and of the entire
Wabash Railroad in 1889.
In an 1895 reorganization of the Grand Trunk, Hays was appointed general manager effective
January 1,
1896. Except for an interruption in 1901, Hays was general manager of the Grand Trunk from 1896 to 1909. In 1904 Hays was also appointed president of Grand Trunk subsidiary
Grand Trunk Pacific, then under construction from
Winnipeg, Manitoba, to
Prince Rupert, British Columbia. Hays became president of the entire Grand Trunk system in 1909, a position he held until his death.
Arriving in Canada during a time of
economic recession, Hays sought to restructure the management and operations of the Grand Trunk system and implemented a more aggressive, American railroading approach which is credited in part for a period of unprecedented growth during the first decade of the 20th century.
Hays sought to have the Grand Trunk compete with the
Canadian Pacific (CPR) on the prairies where an immigration boom was recording record traffic. In 1899,
William MacKenzie and
Donald Mann had amalgamated a number of systems into the
Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) and spurned federal government offers of assistance in coordinating the construction of a second
transcontinental railway, preferring instead to go it alone.
Hays forced the Grand Trunk to reconsider federal offers to assist in building a transcontinental system, something that the company had rejected in the 1870s, which had forced the federal government to go with the CPR. Having realized the error in not expanding west, Hays accepted the offer of
Sir Wilfrid Laurier's government to build a system from Prince Rupert to
Moncton, New Brunswick, to be called the Grand Trunk Pacific.
In October 1903 the
National Transcontinental Railway Act was passed by Parliament and Hays became heavily involved in supervising construction of the line west of Winnipeg (the Grand Trunk Pacific). While the Grand Trunk agreed to build the line west of Winnipeg, the federal government assumed responsibility for constructing the line from Winnipeg to Moncton, including the infamous and costly
Quebec Bridge crossing of the
St. Lawrence River, with the Grand Trunk initially agreeing to operate the entire line as a single system.
Turning of the first sod for the construction of the GTP took place at an official ceremony,
September 11,
1905, at
Fort William, Ontario, by the prime minister. From there a 190-mile section of track was built by the Grand Trunk Pacific Construction Company, connecting with the NTR, near
Sioux Lookout.
The GTP proved to be controversial for Hays as he was criticized for various decisions, such as choosing Prince Rupert as the Pacific terminus, underestimating MacKenzie and Mann's competing CNoR system, and committing the entire Grand Trunk company to the GTP project. Hays's zeal to pursue construction of a well-engineered mainline in lieu of developing a network of branchlines for feeding local traffic proved to be a considerable hurdle as well.
As president of the Grand Trunk, Hays committed to competing with the CPR in a number of other areas, namely shipping and hotels. In fact Hays died while returning from a visit to
England to Canada where he was scheduled to attend the
April 26,
1912, grand opening of the
Château Laurier hotel in
Ottawa, Ontario. Hays had chosen to return from England on the maiden voyage of the ocean liner
RMS Titanic, which struck an
iceberg south of the
Grand Banks of Newfoundland the night of April 14 and sank.
Hays was one of the 1,517 victims of the disaster, and his body was subsequently recovered from the waters of the
North Atlantic for burial in
Mount Royal Cemetery in Montreal. On
April 25,
1912, the entire Grand Trunk system came to a halt for a five minute tribute to the company's past president. Hays never lived to see the completion of the GTP project on
April 7,
1914, or the opening of the Château Laurier on
June 12,
1912.
Not long after Hays's death, the Grand Trunk reneged on its agreement to operate the federally owned
National Transcontinental system east of Winnipeg, and the Grand Trunk soon faced financial ruin over its decision to build and operate the GTP west of Winnipeg, particularly after the
First World War caused traffic on the prairies to decline precipitously.
Local Ottawa folklore suggests that Hays's
ghost is rumoured to haunt the hotel that he was scheduled to open.
Charles Hays Secondary School, located in
Prince Rupert, British Columbia, was named after Hays.
Melville, Saskatchewan, a divisional point on the Grand Trunk Pacific route, was named after Hays.
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