Bonavist Line, The

DESCRIPTION: An old man tells of the workers' hardships imposed by the "red roaring devil" management while building the line. Outrageous amounts are charged for trivial services. Awful food: pork can drive you mad and flour is like lime. The old man will quit
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1951 (MUNFLA/Leach)
KEYWORDS: sex food hardtimes railroading nonballad worker
FOUND IN: Canada(Newf)
REFERENCES (3 citations):
Peacock, pp. 768-771, "The Bonavist Line" (2 texts, 2 tunes)
Leach-FolkBalladsSongsOfLowerLabradorCoast 92, "Riverhead Line" (1 text, 1 tune)
ADDITIONAL: Roger deV. Renwick, _Recentering Anglo/American Folksong: Sea Crabs and Wicked Youths_, University Press of Mississippi, 2001, pp. 82-83, "The Bonavist Line" (1 text)
Roud #5206
RECORDINGS:
Bernard Houlihan, "Shoal Harbour Line" (on MUNFLA/Leach)
James John, "The North Shoreman's Line" (on MUNFLA/Leach)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "The Track to Knob Lake" (theme)
ALTERNATE TITLES:
The North Shoreman's Line
The Shoal Harbour Line
NOTES [1751 words]: Peacock says the Bonavista Line serving the tip of the Bonavista peninsula and Riverhead Line serving Conception Bay are spurs of Newfoundland's now defunct narrow-gauge trans-insular railway.
Whichever branch line is in question, the complaints are the same. Sometimes the old man is omitted and the complaints are the singer's own.
For the history and a map of the Newfoundland railroad branch lines see "The Branch Lines" at http://www.heritage.nf.ca/articles/economy/railway-branch-lines.php, accessed Febraury 25, 2017. According to that article the Bonavista Line operated from 1911 until 1983. - BS
For a little more on the Newfoundland Railroad, which was simply not economically viable because the population was so scattered that it didn't pay to run the trains, see "The Wreck of the Steamship Ethie"; others songs with notes about the railroad include "Downey's Our Member," "The Loss of the Bruce," and "Drill, Ye Heroes, Drill!"
The history of the rail project explains the "red roaring devil" management; the first attempt at building a Newfoundland railroad, in 1881, was predicated on a government subsidy (Penney, p. 27), but the "Blackman Syndicate" that had won the contract was badly under-capitalized and run by people with limited rail experience; they didn't really know the job. (They proposed a narrow gauge line -- easier to build, harder to keep open; it was to prove a long-term problem; Kearley, p. 56. According to Major, p. 284, "That particular decision, which would put it out of step with practically every other line in North America, would be one to regret for the life of the railway." One company which bid on the contract told the government that a narrow-gauge rail would never be reliable -- and was dropped from the bidding for the crime of being correct; Harding, p. 40) What's more, the Newfoundland government didn't supply the bond guarantees Blackman wanted, limiting its support to land grants (Hiller/Neary, p. 131), in part because they got little support from Britain (Major, p. 284).
Little surprise that Blackman's group ran into financial difficulties very early, and so were trying to build track as quickly as possible and as cheaply as possible to get their hands on parts of the subsidy for running (as opposed to building) the route. The result was that much of the railway was badly designed and built (e.g. the rails were of incredibly light steel, short-lived and prone to damage; Lingard, p. 1), and even so, the whole thing failed financially: "Less than three years [after the work began] Blackman was bankrupt. Much of what the company had built was substandard, and it fell forty-three kilometers short of Harbour Grace. A shame-faced government was left to quietly encourage the bondholders in their task of completing the connection to Harbour Grace in order to see some return on their investment" (Major, p. 285).
The branch lines, including the Bonavista Line, were often built very quickly simply because everyone knew the money could dry up fast. "It [became] something of a tradition in Newfoundland to construct a railway prior to a general election. The branch lines were the result. A branch line was a make-work project. A railway would give the unemployed something useful to do and inject some money into the local economy, at least until the votes had been counted. As a legacy of this 'enlightened' policy, a traveler going down the main line would encounter long stretches of rusty-looking track that began at no particular point, ended at no particular point, and on which the amount of freight and passengers was not very great" (Harding, pp. 91-92).
The song doesn't exaggerate the hard times the workers experienced. For instance, the workers in 1890 had no lodgings while working inland: "There were no bunkhouses provided and the men shacked themselves.... [T]he railroad labourer would be given a roll of tar paper or felt and a handful of nails. He and a buddy went into the nearest clump of woods, cut a few poles for a frame and built a tar-paper shack" (Penney, p. 39). They also had to cook their own food. They also suffered from the weather; Newfoundland is never warm, but the rail went through one of the highest, coldest, windiest points on the island in the Gaff Topsails area -- a route chosen because it was shorter than any alternative, but it meant that the rail was very vulnerable to snow, and there was no demand for rail service there! (Lingard, p. 2); it also meant that the railroad had extremely steep grades -- "Grades are higher than in the Rock Mountains," and curves were extremely tight (Lingard, p. 55). According to Harding, p. 11, "the Newfoundland line had the curviest roadbed of any railroad in North America. Of its seven hundred miles of track, almost six hundred were expended in curves.... Railway engineers in Canada an the United States balked at the idea of building curves of ten degrees -- six is considered the optimal maximum. But in Newfoundland, curves of fourteen degrees were common. Moreover, the builders could not afford frills like tunnels and signals. There was a bridge every four miles on average and for a time there was but one signal on the whole line. On the entire length of the Bullet's track there was not a single tunnel, though steep hills were common." So common, in fact, that the trains spent much of the trip with their brakes on; they were almost guaranteed to need new brake shoes after just one round trip from St. John's to Port-aux-Basques. Sometimes, they needed new shoes after only a one-way trip! (Penney/Kennedy, p. 3). And hills were so steep that even short trains needed two engines, and hence two engine crews, adding dramatically to the expense (Penney/Kennedy, p. 41).
To make matters worse, "The work was done entirely without the aid of cranes, derricks, or any large machinery. The construction gang worked with hand tools and a few horses and carts and that was all" (Harding, p. 41). The first fatalities occurred in 1882, before the line was even open; a train carrying workers hit a cow, and three workers were thrown to their deaths (Harding, p. 46).
Things didn't get better even after the rail was built; because it was so vulnerable to snow, wind, ice-laden bridges -- even waves along the seaside washing out the track. So navvies had to be ready to head off on a moment's notice to repair it -- and the railroad didn't even supply them with food or shelter as they did so (Hardin, pp. 72-73),
The Reid syndicate that succeeded Blackman was truly a rip-roaring organization -- a thousand-odd workers working ten hours a day (Major, p. 286).
By Newfoundland standards, the pay under the Reid group that succeeded the Blackmans was decent but not great -- "The gang men worked for one dollar a day and [had to pay] two dollars and fifty cents a week for room and board" (Kearley, p. 57). Wages in Newfoundland were rarely more than a few dollars per week, but on the other hand, the men had to be away from home, and given the quality of the "housing," the price for "room and board" was absurdly high. For an example of complaints about working in the interior of Newfoundland (although not on the Bonavista branch), see "Reid's Express."
It's possible that the different versions of the song refer to different stages in the construction of the Newfoundland Railway. The original plans for the Railway, which began in 1881, included some service to Conception Bay (at least to Harbour Grace). But Bonavista, at the end of the long cape between Trinity and Bonavista Bays, was an economically unviable spur (88 miles long, according to Kearley, p. 59 and CuffEtAl, p. 11) that didn't get any attention until the second round of railway planning and didn't get built until 1913. It was basically a boondoggle; Edward P. Morris knew that the railroad was not viable (after all, the deal with the Reid railroad company had all but destroyed the Conservatives in the early years of the century), but he promised lines to places like Bonavista in the election of 1909, which he and his new "People's Party" won -- so contracts were signed in 1909 for six branch railroads. The Bonavista line, from Goose Bay/Lethbridge to Bonavista, was one of these, begun November 1909 (Penney, p. 95; there is a map of the route on p. 75).
By 1980, there were only three branch lines, including the Bonavista Line, operating. In that year, TerraTransport (the name some marketing hack had come up with for the Newfoundland Railway after it became part of the Canadian National Railway) proposed closing down the remaining branches. (Not for the first time; the first proposal to shut down the line to Bonavista had come in 1971; Penney/Kennedy, p. 67). The last three branches were all closed by 1984 (Kearley, p. 63); the Bonavista Line, even though it had been the busiest of the branches (Penney/Kennedy, p. 66), had seen its last train run on November 23, 1983 (Harding, p. 130). In 1988, the main line was closed also, and Newfoundland no longer had a railway. Within two years, even the tracks and ties had been taken up -- and hauled away by road. Newfoundland hadn't even figured out what to do with the land before it was all torn up (Kearley, p. 64).
Many of the branch lines did not have telegraph communication with the main line in the early days, and the trains were rarely on time, so apparently, after all that work, no one ever knew when the trains would arrive! (Harding, p. 93).
According to Harding, p. 175 (quoting a contemporary account), the first train on the Bonavista branch left St. John's on Tuesday, November 7, 1911, with an engine and ten cars, and carried about eighty passengers. Both the Governor and the Prime Minister were aboard, and used the various stops to make speeches. The arrival of the train drew hearty welcomes despite that.
The "Mr. Devine" of Peacock's "B" text is probably either John V. Devine, famous for writing "The Badger Driver" and apparently "Drill Ye Heroes Drill," or M. A. Devine (1857-1915), several of whose songs landed in the Doyle songbooks. If I had to pick one, I'd guess John Devine, since his songs were more relevant to the interests of the writer of this one. In fact, I wonder if John Devine might not have written the original "Bonavist Line" and someone else turned it into "The Riverhead Line."
For other songs about the problems of working on the Newfoundland Railway, see "Reid's Express," "Drill Ye Heroes, Drill!," and indirectly "Downey's Our Member." - RBW
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