Grand Trunk Railway

This article includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (June 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Grand Trunk Railway

Map of the Grand Trunk system, including a connection via the NTR
Overview
Headquarters	Montreal, Quebec
Reporting mark	GT
Locale	The Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia and the U.S states of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Indiana, Maine and Illinois
Dates of operation	1852–1923
Successor	Canadian National Railway
Technical
Track gauge	4 ft 8+1⁄2 in (1,435 mm) standard gauge
Previous gauge	Built to 5 ft 6 in (1,676 mm) but converted by 1873

The Grand Trunk Railway ((reporting mark GT); French: Grand Tronc) was a railway system that operated in the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario and in the American states of Connecticut, Maine, Michigan, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont.^[1] The railway was operated from headquarters in Montreal, Quebec, with corporate headquarters in London, United Kingdom (4 Warwick House Street). It cost an estimated $160 million to build.^{[citation needed]} The Grand Trunk system and the Canadian Government Railways were precursors of today's Canadian National Railway.

The original charter was for a line running from Montreal to Toronto mostly along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River. It quickly expanded its charter eastward to Portland, Maine, and westward to Sarnia, Ontario. Over time it added many subsidiary lines and branches, including four important subsidiaries:

• Grand Trunk Eastern which operated in Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
• Central Vermont Railway which operated in Quebec, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut.
• Grand Trunk Pacific Railway which operated in Northwestern Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.
• Grand Trunk Western Railroad which operated in Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois.

A fifth 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.