MacKay and Perry, pp. 14 & 17: «The Grand Trunk had 206 locomotives in 1860 and its shops at Point St. Charles, Montreal, where rolling stock was repaired and built, became a city of steam covering thirty acres, with foundries, rolling mills and 2,500 boilermakers, machinists, electricians, pipefitters, carpenters, moulders and other artisans. The first engine built there was the Trevithick to pull the royal train of the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, in 1860. Though only thirty-three tons, it was the giant of its day. For the occasion, the Grand Trunk built Canada's first fancy parlour car, with air conditioning provided by blocks of ice.

The highlight of the prince's visit was the opening of Montreal's Victoria Bridge (also built by Robert Stephenson), which the prince said was “unsurpassed by the grandeur of Egypt or Rome.” Its tubular spans, supported by piers of limestone, arched across the St. Lawrence River to assure Montreal's primacy as the country's commercial capital for another hundred years.»

Stevens, pp. 50 & 52-53: «At Montreal further progress could be observed, for while the traveler to Quebec City still crossed the St. Lawrence in a small ferry, the great piers of Victoria Bridge continued to grow out of the bed of the river in serried order. From beginning to end, this project was a professional job that revealed that Peto, Brassey, Jackson and Betts, whatever their deficiencies as promoters, were worthy of their reputation as master builders. Many engineers held it to be lunacy to attempt to build a bridge more that two miles in length, at a height under which ocean steamships might pass, across a mighty stream given to heavy floods and violent ice jams. However, two eminent Canadian engineers, Casimir Gzowski and Thomas Coltrin Keefer, said that it could be done, and Robert Stephenson, whose father had built the first locomotive, designed another of his famous tubular structures. Peto, Brassey, Jackson and Betts fabricated it in their ironworks at Birkenhead with such accuracy that out of 1,540,000 rivet holes not one needed reaming or redrilling. Best of all, they got James Hodges, a brillant engineer, to erect the bridge. At the completion of his task, he wrote a dramatic narrative, illustrated by his own drawings. Neither in Canada nor anywhere else has a great feat of engineering been carried out more efficiently or been more amply documented.

Hodges was accompanied by several hundred craftsmen — finishing masons, master carpenters, blacksmiths and other specialists. They suffered greatly from the extremes of climate — frostbite and snow blindness in the winter, sunstroke in the fierce heat of midsummer. There was also an outbreak of the dreaded ship fever (the colloquial name for cholera). Yet these skilled workers stuck to their tasks manfully and quickly learned the ways of the country. …

A local attitude that caused him considerable trouble was the unwillingness of Canadian workmen to accept long-term contracts. …

Such difficulties, however, both with imported craftsmen and local labor were no more than learning pains. The British craftsmen quickly adopted colonial practices, and the Canadians soon took pride in pulling in harness with their fellows. Throughout the five years it took to build the bridge, Hodges again and again reported instances in which the colonists and the home countrymen pooled their knowledge to common advantage. A typical instance was a primitive traveler, the ancestor of the rail-layers of the future. It moved along 1,300 feet of temporary tracks laid on gantrys; its sixty-foot boom hoisted the ten-ton blocks of stone from the river barges, stacked them and later conveyed them to the sites of the piers or retaining walls. Such a machine had been shipped out from England, but had proved useless and had been thrown aside. A subcontractor named Chaffey, described by Hodges as “an Englishman who had been in Canada sufficiently long to free his genius from the shackles riveted on him in early life,” undertook its reconstruction. Thereafter it worked perfectly.

The piers had been designed with sharp cutwaters, as protection against the ice, and with substantial cribwork around them because of possible damage during the summer months from the great rafts of logs that it was impossible to steer between them. The first caisson was towed into position on the Queen's Birthday, May 24, 1854. The first pier took several months to build, but improved teamwork progressively reduced the period until the last pier was completed in forty-five days. In August 1857, the assembly of the superstructure began. It consisted of twenty-five tubular spans sixteen feet in width and eighteen feet in height; the sides were plate girder and the roofs were of timber with tin sheeting. The tubes were erected in pairs and were connected with expansion joints mounted on rollers. The total length of the tubular portion was 6,521 feet; of the entire bridge, 10,410 feet.

On December 15, 1859, the first train crossed; the contractors not only had kept within their time estimate but they had also delivered the bridge for $500,000 less than its estimated cost. On August 25, 1860, H. R. H. the Prince of Wales, the first member of the Royal Family to undertake an officiual tour of Canada, had driven the last rivet.»