Most of the new biographies the Dictionary of Canadian Biography is publishing these days are of people who died in the 1930s and 1940s. Today's entry on William Burnie, who died in 1902, is an outlier, or maybe a catch-up.
It is a good one and an original contribution to historical knowledge, I should say. William Burnie's claim to be included in the DCB arises from the fact that he was the engineer who drove the Grand Trunk Railway train that ran through an open swing bridge and crashed into the Richelieu River in June 1864, killing 97 people.
The story gives a detailed account of how and why the accident occurred. It focusses mostly on how the extraordinarily careless management of the GTR caused the crash, and how the railway escaped all consequences beyond some inadequate financial compensation payments, while trying to scapegoat Mr Burnie.
I looked into 1860s railroading a little when I was going deep into the events surrounding the Quebec Conference of 1864 while writing Three Weeks in Quebec City. It was striking how much railroads, though only fifteen years old in Canada then, had already transformed the lives of politicians, businessmen, and other travellers -- and also how crash-prone and delay-plagued railroads were in 1864.
The whole subject of early railroading and its social and economic impact on British North American society seemed seriously under-researched, so this DCB article stands out. It is signed "John Derek Booth, railway historian, Lennoxville, Quebec."
Good thing somebody is doing the work.
