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Following the tracks of the original cross-Canada road trip

Broadcast Date: Sept. 22, 1997

With a 1912 Reo wagon and Edwardian suits to match, John Nicol and Lorne Findlay have set out to pay tribute to the first-ever car journey across Canada. They're repeating the trip made 85 years earlier by British writer Thomas Wilby and St. Catharines, Ont. mechanic Jack Haney. CBC's Midday catches up with them in Winnipeg and finds they're encountering fewer problems — like bumpy railroad ties and sticky mud — than their predecessors.

Following the tracks of the original cross-Canada road trip

• The original 1912 trip was a stunt sponsored by the Reo Motorcar Company, which provided the car and employee Jack Haney as mechanic/driver. Thomas Wilby was a journalist who mostly wrote magazine travel features. He had already completed a similar trip across the United States and produced a book about it called On the Trail to Sunset. After the Canadian journey, he wrote a book called A Motor Tour Through Canada.

• Roads in Canada in 1912, particularly in rural areas, were not very good. Haney and Wilby encountered mud, sand hills, deep holes and steep grades. In places, the terrain was impassable and the car had to be shipped by rail to its next destination — including one long stretch from Thunder Bay to Selkirk, Man.
• The network of roads Wilby and Haney took was known as the "Red Route."

• Lorne Findlay, a B.C. mechanic and vintage car collector and restorer, acquired a 1912 Reo in 1980 and had long planned to duplicate the trip by Haney and Wilby.
• Findlay's wife Irene and son Peter accompanied him on the trip.
• John Nicol, a newspaper columnist, was also along for the ride. He had written a book about Jack Haney, the mechanic and driver on the original 1912 journey. In 1999, he published The All-Red Route, the story of the 1997 trip.

• Both trips — in 1912 and 1997 — left Halifax on August 27 and arrived in Victoria on October 17.
• Findlay was faithful to the itinerary of the original trip, stopping in the same cities on the same days. In Winnipeg they had a three-day wait because Wilby and Haney had been held up by muddy roads.
• The Reo covered about 6,700 kilometres in 1912 and 7,841 kilometres on the 1997 journey.

Following the tracks of the original cross-Canada road trip

Medium: Television

Program: Midday

Broadcast Date: Sept. 22, 1997

Guest(s): Lorne Findlay, John Nicol

Host: Brent Bambury, Tina Srebotnjak

Duration: 7:02

Last updated:
Aug. 30, 2004