lobster factories, also the large fleet of schooners and boats engaged in the salt and fresh mackerel and cod fish industry.

Therefore resolved, that we urgently request a survey to be made on the line proposed as petitioned for in February 1905, before calling for any branch railroad to New London. A committee of five was then appointed, viz: John Cousins, Edward Warren, William Ramsay, D.M. Johnstone and Hon. William Campbell to meet the Clifton committee and go to Charlottetown.14 (The peti- tion was never honoured.)

About 65 years after the presentation of this petition, the federal Department of Public Works was having preliminary designs prepared for a bridge to cross Northumberland Strait which did not make provision for a train track. Twenty-five years after that date our elementary schools are full of students who have never heard the whistle of a distant diesel train in P.E.I., much less the mournful wail of a distant steam whistle on a stormy winters night which was so reassuring to the early rural residents of this province.

The Higgins

Afternoon Sail from BayView

14 Author, “Railway Meeting at Long River," The Guardian 1906: Pages,

19