Manitoba joined confederation in 1870. Then British Columbia, on the west coast, was enticed to join the new confederation in 1871, but it too was promised a rail link to the rest of Canada to be built within 10 years.
The railway's early construction was filled with controversy, so much so that it was responsible for toppling the Conservative government of John A. Macdonald in 1873. By the time Macdonald was returned to power in 1878, the massive project was seriously behind schedule and in danger of never being completed.
To try and save the project Macdonald had a group of Scottish Canadian businessmen formed in October 21, 1880 to build a transcontinental railway.

The Canadian Pacific Railway Company was incorporated February 16, 1881, with George Stephen as its first president. 
The 1881 construction season did not go well and the railway's chief engineer and general superintendent was fired after building only 131 miles of track. Syndicate member and director James Jerome Hill suggested William Cornelius Van Horne was the man who could get the job done and as things turned out he was.
Van Horne was lured from the United States to become CPR's general manager and to oversee construction of the transcontinental railway over the Prairies and through the mountains.
Van Horne boasted he would build 500 miles of main line railway in his first year. 
He came close to that but considering the floods that delayed the start of the 1882 construction season, 418 miles of main line and 110 miles of branch line track-laying was quite the feat. This made the vision of a transcontinental railway much more of a reality. 

On Nov. 7, 1885, the eastern and western portions of the Canadian Pacific Railway met at Craigellachie, B.C., where Donald A. Smith drove the last spike. The cost of construction almost broke the syndicate, but within three years of the first of the transcontinental trains leaving Montreal and Toronto for Port Moody started to put the railway's financial house in order and it allowed the CPR to start paying dividends again.

By 1889, the railway extended from coast to coast. The railway had expanded to include a wide range of related and unrelated businesses. A trend that continued for many years.
CPR had been involved in land settlement as early as 1881. 
They also erected telegraph lines right alongside the main transcontinental line, transmitting its first commercial telegram in 1882.
In that same year the CPR went into the express shipment business by the acquisition of the Dominion Express Company.
CPR started building some of its own steam locomotives as early as 1883.
It would later build its own passenger cars, making it second only on the continent to the Pullman Company of Chicago, Illinois. 
By 1883 the CPR had steamships on the Great Lakes and expanded into chartered ships on the Pacific Ocean in 1886.
In 1891 it launched its own Pacific fleet. By 1893 it was in the paddle wheelers in British Columbia's interior and moved out to the coast in 1901. A move to the Atlantic Ocean only seemed natural. This happened in 1903.

The famous CP Hotels had started in 1886 because Van Horne thought it would make good business sense to have a tourist trade set up in The Canadian Rockies and elsewhere.
These tourists of course would travel on his railway.

The CPR discovered natural gas on the Prairies in 1886. Quite by accident, while digging a well to get water for its steam locomotives, the CPR crews stumbled across natural gas. 
This location became Alderson, Alberta. 

One of the final major ventures undertaken by the CPR was forming Canadian Pacific Airlines by amalgamating 10 northern bush plane companies.

The CPR has had a hand in many other ventures. Some of these are abattoirs, bus transportation, containers and pallets, forestry, foundries, insurance, irrigation, mines and minerals, newsreels, oil, pulp and paper, radio broadcasts, supply farms, trucking, waste management, even bottled spring water.
Yes they were and still are a varied company.
 

There were 2 choices:

Either the conductor read the flimsies at the station (at larger stations) and passed the information to the engineer and the brakeman or the flimsies were picked up on the fly at the smaller stations.
In this case the stationmaster stood on the platform, held the Y gizmo high and, as the train went by, the fireman put his arm through the Y gizmo, grabbing the flimsy attached looely by the cord and threw the y gizmo further up the track, as the train kept its speed.

The fireman then read the train order to the engineer and the information was then relayed to the conductor and the brakeman (On passenger trains, the trainman wes the brakeman)

The pecking order was as follows"

Operating Crew:
Engineer (driver)
Fireman (brakeman)

Non-op:
Conductor (looked after the tickets and the operation but didn't drive it) Gold buttons and gold "conductor" designation on his hat.
Trainman (looked after the steam, electrics etc on passenger trains). He was also the brakeman 
and his job was to go a mile back in case of emergency and put up some flares.

What is shown here are 3 types of train orders here, one is a clearance to proceed, the others are flimsies.
For more information of Train Orders please go to this page.
http://www.greenbayroute.com/trainorders.htm#end