Browse "Transportation"

In Canada, bush flying refers to aviation in sparsely populated northern areas. Flight in the Arctic and the “bush” of the Canadian Shield developed between the world wars. Early bush pilots faced the challenges of cold weather and vast distances between communities. Given the rarity of airstrips, their planes were often equipped with skis or floats so that they could take off and land on water or snow. This type of aviation was key to developing services and industries in the North. While the romantic image of the bush pilot is associated with the past, bush flying continues to serve remote communities in Canada.

CAPE BONAVISTA separates Trinity and Bonavista bays on the eastern coast of Newfoundland. In 1842 it was decided to build a LIGHTHOUSE there as an aid to navigating the dangerous seas off the cape. The lighthouse operated for well over a century before it finally closed in 1962.

A contingent of Royal Engineers was brought from Britain to survey the route from Yale, at the head of navigation on the Fraser River, along extremely treacherous terrain to the administrative centre of the Cariboo.

On 28 May 1980, 22 workers on a Canadian Pacific Railway steel crew were killed in a bus accident on the Trans-Canada Highway near Webb, Saskatchewan, west of Regina. It was one of the deadliest motor vehicle disasters in Canadian history.

A collision between a school bus and a freight train on 7 October 1966 killed 19 students from Cité-des-Jeunes secondary school near Vaudreuil, Quebec, and their bus driver. The crash is among the worst road disasters in Canadian history.

Canada’s second deadliest road disaster was a single-vehicle bus crash that killed 40 people near Eastman, Quebec on 4 August 1978.

One of Canada’s most high-profile highway tragedies occurred on 6 April 2018, when a bus carrying 28 members of the Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team collided with a transport truck at a highway intersection near Tisdale, Saskatchewan. The crash killed 16 team members: 10 players and 6 staff. It also led to new truck-driver training and licensing regulations and increased awareness about the availability and use of seat belts among bus passengers.

Canada’s deadliest road accident to date was a single-vehicle bus crash near Saint-Joseph-de-la-Rive, in the Quebec municipality of Les Éboulements, on Thanksgiving Day, 13 October 1997.

The Montreal metro opened on 14 October 1966. The second Canadian subway system after Toronto’s, which opened in 1954, the Montreal metro was the first subway in North America to run on rubber tires instead of metal wheels. Extensions to the Montreal metro were built on Montreal Island over the two decades after it opened, and then to the city of Laval, on the island of Île Jésus, during the 2000s. The system runs entirely underground, and each station has a distinct architecture and design. The Montreal metro consists of four lines running a total of 71 km and serving 68 stations. In 2018, its passengers made more than 383 million trips.

The Suian Maru Voyagers were a group of people, 80 men and three women, who sailed to Canada in the summer of 1906 aboard the Suian Maru, which set sail from Japan's Miyagi Prefecture.

SABLE ISLAND, a crescent-shaped sandbar 300 km east-southeast (160 nautical miles) of Halifax, is also infamous for its shipwrecks, and is known as "the Graveyard of the Atlantic," as its shifting sands have been the site of over 350 such incidents.

A timber slide is a water-filled chute or runway built to carry “cribs” of timber around rapids and waterfalls. (See also Raft). Similar devices for individual pieces of wood were called “flumes.” Timber slides contributed to the growth of the timber industry in the 19th century (see Timber Trade Industry).

There are six time zones in Canada covering four and a half hours. From west to east these time zones are: Pacific, Mountain, Central, Eastern, Atlantic and Newfoundland. From the first Sunday in November to the second Sunday in March these zones are referred to as standard time zones, and may be abbreviated as PST, MST, CST, etc. From the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November most of Canada follows daylight saving time. During this summer period the time zones may be abbreviated as PDT, MDT, CDT, etc. The boundaries of the standard time zones are not necessarily the same as those of the corresponding daylight saving time zones. For example, the Mountain time zone includes a portion of northeastern British Columbia in the summer, but not during the winter (see maps below). Boundaries shift because some municipalities choose not to participate in daylight saving time. Similarly, Saskatchewan follows CST year-round and, as of 2020, Yukon follows PDT, also known as Yukon Standard Time, year-round.

Inuit and subarctic Indigenous peoples have traversed the North since time immemorial. Indigenous knowledge and modes of transportation helped early European explorers and traders travel and survive on these expanses. Later settlement depended to an extraordinary degree on the development of transportation systems. Today, the transportation connections of northern communities vary from place to place. While the most remote settlements are often only accessible by air, some have road, rail and marine connections. These are often tied to industrial projects such as mines.

Unlike other mountainous countries such as Switzerland, and despite its size, Canada is not distinguished by well-known tunnels.