That's because in many places there was no road to drive on. The Toronto physician embarked on his journey in a Ford Model T to promote the idea of a national roadway. But when Doolittle and his partner ran into dead-ends, they replaced the car's wheels with special steel rims and motored along railway tracks.
"Since they travelled a total of 1,365 kilometres in this fashion, they could hardly have been said to have driven across the country," writes Vancouver-based historian Daniel Francis, author of the new book "A Road for Canada: The Illustrated History of the Trans-Canada Highway" (Stanton Atkins & Dosil Publishers).
Doolittle, who has been dubbed "the father of the Trans-Canada Highway" because of his lobbying efforts, is among the cast of characters populating the book about what Francis calls "the world's longest continuous trans-national highway."
Another pair of motorists, Jack Haney of St. Catharines, Ont., and British journalist Thomas Wilby, found it necessary in 1912 to travel at least part of the way across the country backwards - that being the best way for their Reo Special Touring Car to go up steep hills.
Prime Minister John Diefenbaker attended at the birth of the Trans-Canada on Sept. 3, 1962, expressing the hope that the 7,714-kilometre route would "serve to bring Canadians closer together."
But the opening ceremony, in B.C.'s Selkirk Mountains, was an inauspicious occasion. Both Newfoundland and New Brunswick boycotted the event after years of federal-provincial squabbling over how to build the mammoth project, and Quebec claimed the highway was an intrusion into its area of constitutional responsibility.
Francis argues that the highway has never managed to become the iconic symbol of national unity that the Canadian Pacific Railway once was.
Lavishly illustrated with all manner of road-related photographs - everything from vintage cars and licence plates to historical townscapes and spectacular scenery - the book succeeds in making highway-building an interesting topic. The reader learns that:
- Roads were constructed in national parks during the First World War by "enemy aliens" - German and Austro-Hungarian nationals - who were rounded up and kept in internment camps across Canada.
- Imperial Oil, created in 1880 by a group of Ontario refiners, opened the first gas station in Canada in 1907 - in Vancouver.
- Ontario's first concrete highway was completed in 1915, connecting Toronto and Hamilton.
- A&W was Canada's first roadside burger chain, opening in Winnipeg in 1956. It grew to more than 200 drive-in restaurants, some featuring waiters on roller skates who brought food to diners in their cars. "Eventually, as labour costs became an issue, A&W and its competitors replaced 'drive-in' with 'drive-thru.' "
"Pretty much the minute the Trans-Canada Highway was finished it seemed to unleash a desire to get out and see the country," Francis said in an interview.
"In the late '60s and early '70s the highway was just littered with people hitchhiking from one end of the country to the other."
Besides luring Canadians far from home, the Trans-Canada has also been the scene of inspiring personal feats - most notably the aborted journey by one-legged runner Terry Fox in 1980.
More recently, though, Canadians have developed an "ambivalent attitude toward cars" because of concern about exhaust contributing to global warming. As a result, Francis says, "it's hard to make a great affectionate symbol of the highway."
Francis says he sees the Trans-Canada as a metaphor for the country: the early federal-provincial bickering over the project sounds all-too familiar to Canadians today. And the highway is constantly changing, constantly being rebuilt - much like Canada, he says.
