While railways may have been effective tools of economic and political policy throughout much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they represented some of the best and worst traits of modern industrialism. For the Canadian public, railways were an obvious example of the economic and social changes brought about by rapid advances in technology. Steam engines, hidden away in factories and shops, had already transformed the means whereby goods were produced; yet in the 1860s it was the steam locomotive that epitomized the rapidly changing pace and apparently irresistible momentum of industrial Canada (Fig. 1). By the 1890s electric streetcars such as Toronto Railway car No. 361 (Fig. 2) brought the marvel of electrical technology to the streets of Canadian cities before it made its way into the homes of the average citizen.