As the Canadian Government embarked on the building of its first trans-continental railroad, before the formation of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the work of many of the sections between the Atlantic and the Pacific were divided in separate contracts, each varying in length and difficulty, and awarded to private contractors. Contract No. 60 was for a 29 mile section between two points on the Fraser River, Emory's Bar and Boston Bar. (The "bars" were sand or gravel bars where prospectors had panned for gold along the Fraser in the late 1850's.) The contract included excavation, grading, tunnelling, bridging, tracklaying and ballasting. The contract was signed December 23, 1879, and the date for completion was set at December 31, 1883. The scheduled price was $2,727,300.
Emory's Bar, or Emory, as it became known, was the terminus of the railway linking with the sternwheelers that provided transportation on the Fraser River. Because of the river's strong currents, the sternwheelers could not always reach Yale, four miles upstream, where the Cariboo Trail began to points north. It had been built at mid-century to bring prospectors to the north country during the Cariboo Gold Rush and to promote the settlement of the interior of the new Province.
Yale is where Andrew Onderdonk established his headquarters in the spring of 1880. Yale became the centre of operations for Contracts 60, 61, 62, 63 as well as for Contract 92. This was one of the most difficult places in Canada in which to build a railroad. The right-of-way had to be blasted out of the granite rock formations of the Cascade Mountains. Small wonder that it took Andrew Onderdonk and his crews a year before any track was laid. But on June 7, 1881, the Contractor's Locomotive No. 1, the Yale, arrived in Yale from Emory, a distance of four miles, hauling "four cars and three lorries" and thirty workmen.
For a first-hand account of the days of the construction at Yale and the Fraser Canyon, see Some Memories of the Construction of the C.P.R. in the Fraser Canyon by Mr. W. H. Holmes.
The number of accidental deaths and injuries was high on Onderdonk's contracts.
Progress reports on the construction of this section of Onderdonk's contracts can be found in The Inland Sentinel:
The following are photographs relating to Contract 60. 
ith a blast of nitro-glycerine, at 9:00 am, Saturday, May 15, 1880, at the site of the first tunnel just north of Yale, construction began on the western-most section of the transcontinental railway which was to link Canada from sea to sea.
