Source: Link

TYE, WILLIAM FRANCIS, civil engineer; b. 5 March 1861 in Haysville, Upper Canada, son of Francis Edward Tye and Anna Shelly; m. 13 Oct. 1898 Mabel Annie Scholastic Maloney (d. 1938) in London, Ont.; they may have adopted a son; d. 8 Jan. 1932 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.

W. F. Tye was educated at the College of Ottawa and the School of Practical Science in Toronto, where he passed his civil engineering examinations in 1881. After a season of employment with the Dominion Lands Survey in the North-West Territories, he joined the Canadian Pacific Railway, working successively between 1882 and 1885 as a rodman, leveller, transit man on location, and assistant engineer on construction. This period of employment with the CPR, the first of two such terms in Tye’s career, marked the beginning of a quarter century in which he would be intimately involved with North American railways at a critical stage in their development. Shortly after the CPR’s main line was completed in November 1885, Tye joined the company’s American rival, the St Paul, Minneapolis and Manitoba Railroad, headed by James Jerome Hill*. After working for roughly two years as a transit man on location and assistant engineer on construction in Minnesota and Montana, Tye became engineer of tracks and bridges on the Tampico branch of the Mexican Central Railway.

Tye spent about a year in Mexico. Moving north, he was hired as locating and division engineer for the Great Falls and Canada Railway, which was part of the empire owned by Sir Alexander Tilloch Galt* and his son Elliott Torrance Galt* and situated in Montana and present-day southern Alberta. Then he was back in Hill’s employ, this time as engineer in charge of location and division engineer for the Great Northern Railroad’s extension to the Pacific coast. Tye located the line west of the Cascade Mountains in Washington and oversaw the building of the two-and-a-half-mile Cascade Tunnel at the Stevens Pass. The nearby Tye River and the community of Tye, formerly Wellington, were named in commemoration of his work on the project.

Tye returned to Canada in 1893 to serve as engineer in charge of a project to standardize the gauge of the Galt-owned Alberta Railway and Coal Company’s line near Lethbridge (Alta), a project that the CPR had made a condition of its lease and eventual purchase of the line. In 1895–96 Tye was chief engineer first of the Kaslo and Slocan Railway, a Great Northern subsidiary, and then of the Columbia and Western Railway, which would be absorbed by the CPR in 1898. He thus served on both sides of the struggle between the Great Northern and the CPR for control of the railway traffic of the rich Kootenay mining district of British Columbia. After the Columbia and Western became part of the CPR system, Tye was promoted to manager while remaining chief engineer of the line. In these two capacities he presided over the completion of the route from Robson to Midway. He believed that this 105-mile section of track, which entailed extensive tunnelling and switchbacks, was the most difficult railway construction project in Canadian history, and his superior, CPR general manager Sir William Cornelius Van Horne*, concurred. The company rewarded Tye’s hard work: in 1900 he was made chief engineer of construction for the entire CPR system. From this position he rose quickly to become principal assistant engineer and then assistant chief engineer in 1902, and chief engineer two years later.

Tye retired to private practice in 1906, residing first in Toronto and later in Montreal. Favourable to rationalization but suspicious of government involvement, he significantly influenced Canadian railway policy. In 1912 he was recruited to assist a commission investigating the beleaguered National Transcontinental Railway, a federally built and owned line from Moncton to Winnipeg that linked with the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway (a subsidiary of the Grand Trunk Railway) to form a transcontinental route. He determined that the National Transcontinental’s cost overruns were partly the result of its engineers being bound by unnecessarily rigid and expensive technical specifications. In a 1917 report, Tye and fellow engineer Noulan Cauchon recommended the consolidation of rail traffic through Hamilton, Ont., along the Grand Trunk line. That year Tye served with Louis-Anthyme Herdt* and Sir John Kennedy* on a commission, chaired by Reuben Wells Leonard*, that advised against building a proposed electric railway between Port Credit and St Catharines, citing the duplication of lines and growing competition from automobiles.

Also in 1917, in a widely circulated paper entitled Canada’s railway problem and its solution, Tye argued that the country could not support three transcontinental lines (the CPR was doing well, but the Grand Trunk Pacific–National Transcontinental and Sir William Mackenzie* and Sir Donald Mann’s Canadian Northern Railway were both in financial difficulty). Tye urged the consolidation, under private ownership, of the Grand Trunk Pacific, the National Transcontinental, the Canadian Northern, and the similarly struggling Grand Trunk. The paper earned him the prestigious Gzowski Medal, created in honour of Sir Casimir Stanislaus Gzowski* and awarded by the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers. Tye’s bold vision would be partially realized: the four companies (and the Intercolonial Railway) were ultimately amalgamated into the Canadian National Railways [see David Blythe Hanna; Sir Henry Worth Thornton], but the company was placed under public, rather than private, ownership.

In 1920, speaking before a provincial commission on hydroelectric railways that was chaired by Robert Franklin Sutherland*, Tye severely criticized Sir Adam Beck*’s proposal to build a network of publicly owned interurban radial railways in southwestern Ontario. His damning testimony, which cited the high cost of construction and duplication of lines in denouncing the plan, impressed the commissioners, on whose recommendation the United Farmers of Ontario government led by Ernest Charles Drury* rejected Beck’s scheme. Tye’s contributions to public policy went beyond his interest in railways. He was appointed to the federal Commission of Conservation [see James White*] in January 1918 and drew on his experiences in western Canada to comment on environmental issues: at a conference the following year, for example, he argued that white settlers, not Indigenous people, were to blame for declining wildlife populations in the region. An article in the University of Toronto Monthly (February 1921) suggests that he also found time for recreation, observing that “his main fun in life comes from travel and reading, and lately he has been trying to develop a more than ordinary ability at golf.” Tye died in France early in January 1932, at 70 years of age. The 1871 census indicates that he was raised in the Church of England, but he eventually chose his mother’s faith, and was buried in the Roman Catholic cemetery Notre-Dame-des-Neiges in Montreal on 11 May.

W. F. Tye was an active participant in the collegial life of the engineering profession. He joined the Canadian Society of Civil Engineers in 1896 and served as a councillor (1905–7), vice-president (1908–10), and president (1912). In his presidential address Tye, ever a voice of pragmatism, encouraged the application of technical expertise to minimize railway construction costs. After all, he argued, the duty of the engineer was to find efficiencies in location and construction and thereby maximize profits for his railway’s shareholders. Tye’s technical accomplishments were impressive, even if later in life he came to personify the conservatism of vision that characterized the railway industry following the great boom of the early 20th century.

Forrest D. Pass