Rand, McNally & Co's official railroad map (ca. 1892) modified in red to highlight the route of the New Westminster Southern Railway (NWSR), taken over by the Great Northern Railway (GN) after the line's completion in 1891, connecting South Westminster, British Columbia with Blaine, Washington.

At the international boundary in Blaine, passing under a wooden arch festooned with silver spikes, the NWSR linked up with the Fairhaven & Southern Railroad Company (F&S), started in 1888 with plans of building their line from Fairhaven -- now part of Bellingham and at the time a center of railway construction out of Bellingham Bay -- north to British Columbia and south to Portland, Oregon. By 1889 the F&S had built south to Sedro in Skagit County, and the following year the line was extended from Fairhaven north to the boundary, finally connecting with the NWSR early in 1891 -- creating the first rail connection from British Columbia into the United States. The F&S, like the NWSR, was taken over by the GN well before their main line, the northernmost of the American transcontinentals, was completed to Seattle in 1893.

The western section of the GN main line from the company's 1893 system map. In the larger version the railway can be seen terminating in Vancouver, although for more than ten years rails reached only South Westminster, where a barge car service from nearby Liverpool made the run to Burrard Inlet in Vancouver.

Although not built at the time of the 1897 map (seen above) of Surrey Municipality by Albert J. Hill, who had surveyed the NWSR's route in 1887 and was the company's chief engineer until 1889, also present were future GN lines:

Running west of Cloverdale to Port Guichon (below Ladner) at the mouth of the Fraser River would be the Victoria Terminal Railway & Ferry Company (VTR&F), created in 1900 in concert with the then-established Victoria & Sidney Railway (V&S) on Vancouver Island as part of a planned rail-ferry route to connect with the GN on the mainland. Construction began in late 1901 using British rail unloaded at Port Guichon and Liverpool, where GN had a dock alongside the NWSR. In 1902 the VTR&F and V&S were officially absorbed into the GN system, and by the spring of 1903 the 17-mile VTR&F from Port Guichon to Cloverdale was completed, linking Vancouver Island via a fast ferry.

Running east of Cloverdale (and noted on the map as "GN RY.") would be the Vancouver, Victoria & Eastern Railway and Navigation Company (VV&E), originally proposed in 1896 by British Columbian businessmen but whose Kootenay-Coast charter was acquired in 1901 by James Jerome Hill's Great Northern Railway in a bid to compete with the Canadian Pacific (CP) to create a line from the west coast to the Kootenays in southeastern British Columbia. Completed in late 1908 and operational by early 1909, the VV&E east of Cloverdale went to Abbotsford via Langley and Aldergrove then south to the American border at Huntingdon and Sumas City.

Previous to the construction of the Cloverdale-Sumas line, the Great Northern's VTR&F and VW&Y (Vancouver, Westminster & Yukon Railway, built in 1904 linking New Westminster with Vancouver) had fallen under the flag of the VV&E.

Great Northern Railway (1904)

Great Northern Time Table (May 1909)

In 1912 the VV&E was extended east of Abbotsford to Kilgard and then eventually, in 1916, to connect with the main line of the Canadian Northern Railway (CNoR) between Chilliwack Mountain and Sumas Mountain. The last spike on the CNoR transcontinental, eventually absorbed into Canadian National (CN), was early in 1915 near Kamloops Junction but had begun construction in the lower Fraser Valley by 1910.