Charles Melville Hays (1856-1912)

He was born in Rock Island, Illinois, and grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri. He began his career in St. Louis with the Atlantic & Pacific Railroad, of which his father became president. In 1878, he was appointed Secretary to the General Manager of the Missouri Pacific Railroad and six years later he accepted a similar position with the larger Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific Railroad, becoming General Manager of the Wabash Western in 1887 and of the entire Wabash system in 1889. By 1895, his name and reputation had spread to investors in London, and they enticed him to move to Montreal as the new General Manager of the struggling Grand Trunk Railway of Canada. Between 1896 and 1902, he turned what had been a deficit of $18-million into a profit of $36-million. He was briefly lured back to the United States to become the new President of the Southern Pacific Railway, but after eighteen months returned to Montreal as General Manager of the G.T.R., becoming President of the railway’s western Canadian subsidiary, the Grand Trunk Pacific, in 1904, and then President of the Grand Trunk Railway itself from 1909. However, he did not live to see the GTP completed, he went down on the ill-fated Titanic, survived by his wife and their daughter, who would live to be its longest living survivor. He lived between Montreal and Maine (see images) and had four children.