DCHP-1 Online

end of steel

• 1a the farthest point to which railway service extends; the terminus of a railway.

  See also: head of rail  head of steel (def. 2)  railhead (def. 1b)  steel (def. 1)  

  • 1909  Edmonton is the end of steel. Three lines converge here: the Canadian Northern, the Canadian Pacific, and the Grand Trunk Pacific.
  • 1938  The "Muskeg" was just pulling out, headed not south for The Pas but north for Mile 214, which was then the "end of steel" on the Hudson Bay Railway.
  • 1962  The railroad terminus--the "end of steel"--is at Waterways, Alberta. . . .

• 1b the most recently laid tracks of a railway under construction; the farthest point to which tracks have been laid.

  See also: head of steel (def. 1)  

  • 1933  Winter, therefore, had scarcely gripped the country, when an engine drawing a train of ballast trucks and two steam shovels steamed to the end of steel. . . .
  • 1964  The end of steel now is 140 miles from its terminal point at the Hay River, N.W.T. . . .

• 2 a community at the end of a railway line.

  See also: end-of-steel town  

  • 1913  The weather had favored them and eventually they had found themselves in Athabaska, end-of-steel!
  • 1935  It is a drama which finds its foci on those days when . . . trains leave for that most eloquent place-name to be found in any railway guide--"the end-of-steel."
  • 1961  It was on April 5th, 1902, that my husband and I arrived at Strathcona, Alberta, the end of steel. . . .