Imperial Oil Review February 1960 - The Saltiest Railroad in Canada

Imperial Oil Review February 1960, The Saltiest Railroad in Canada

A four-page article with text and pictures was printed in the February 1960 issue of the Imperial Oil Review magazine. A scan of the four pages is below. For search purposes, the text of the article (but not the picture captions) is here:

In Harry Haystead's boyhood he yearned as did so many Nova Scotians of his generation, to be the master of a schooner. Unfortunately, heights bothered him. Since he couldn't swing through rigging like a monkey through jungle he realized he'd never be a mariner. Instead, he got a job with the Dominion Atlantic Railway. He thought that working for the DAR would be a little like going to sea. He still thinks so.

Now a retired conductor who lives at the Annapolis Valley town of Kentville, Haystead claims with a twinkle in his eye that the DAR is as much like a ship as anything that doesn't exactly sail. This only a slight exaggeration.

The DAR is unquestionably Canada's—and perhaps the world's—saltiest railroad. Its bridges cross briny tidal rivers, not ordinary fresh water rivers, and when the fog rolls in, its locomotive whistles have to compete with the din of foghorns. A lot of its passengers wear the blue uniform of the navy or the casual but recognizable garb of the fisherman. Its refrigerator cars have a redolence of lobsters, scallops, clams, haddock, herring, tuna, cod, halibut and flounder. And, for much of its run from Yarmouth to Truro and Halifax, the DAR winds along the Bay of Fundy and Minas Basin, passing through small picturesque ports like a string through beads.

Even in the fruit-growing Annapolis Valley, the railway is seldom more than a few miles from the roar of the surf, and when it finally turns inland, it takes the shortest out from the Fundy shore to Halifax, the proud naval base and harbor on the Atlantic.

Although the 101-year-old DAR, with its 287.5 miles of track, has been a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway since 1912, Nova Scotians continue to look on it as their own—an integral part of their history, like tall ships, Bluenose skippers. Joe Howe and Thomas Chandler Haliburton. Indeed, they haven’t forgotten that Howe, the fiery orator and champion of freedom, and Haliburton, the great humorist who was Howe's friend and wrote for his newspaper were the first to advocate that the DAR be built.

So sentimental are they about their railroad that last April when J. C. McCuaig, the DAR's big affable manager, announced a $2 million program to replace the steam locomotives with diesels and bring DAR standards up to those of the CPR main line, Nova Scotians didn't know whether to rejoice or mourn. They liked the idea of faster service. But they were sadly aware that such improvements made the DAR—which once had snorting scarlet and gold locomotives, each emblazoned with the name of its personal engineer—less and less like its old rakish flamboyant self.

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald interpreted the feelings of the average Nova Scotian in an editorial that said:

"This move toward efficiency and modernization, which was reflected as far back as 1956 when the Halifax to Yarmouth Dayliners (diesel passenger carriers) went into operation, does not erase fond memories . . . the flossy old club car on the dignified passenger train; the sight of steward, brakeman, conductor, fireman and engineer shoveling the overnight speedster out of a snow bank while the sleeping car passengers shivered uncomplainingly in their berths; the chorus of greetings exchanged at every station along the way by passengers, crew and the inevitable knot of station bystanders”

The Chronicle-Herald added, with a sort of half-chuckle, half-sigh, that the DAR had been a traditional “symbol of unhurried and unruffled Nova Scotia.” Nobody could dispute this.

In the DAR's unregenerated, unimproved era, both passengers and crew seemed perversely pleased by its utter contempt for timetables, which prompted wild, imaginary tales like the one about the frantic mother who protested to the conductor that be baby would be born on board if they didn't reach Halifax soon.

“You shouldn’t have come on this train if you were expecting” the conductor chided her.

“I wasn't,” she snapped, “when I got aboard.”

DAR veterans like Harry Haystead can top the fictional stories with true ones. Once a small girl who boarded the train at Annapolis asked Conductor Joe Edwards to tell her when they arrived at a flag station called Auburn. Her request slipped Edward’s mind until they were a mile beyond Auburn; then he pulled the cord and backed the train up.

“This is where you get off." he told the child "We're at Auburn.”

“Oh, I don't get off here,” she said, “I'm going right through to Halifax, but my mother said that when we got to Auburn it would be time to take one of my pills.”

Travel on the DAR in bygone days may have been slow but it wasn't dull. When an infant cried incessantly, and the mother explained apologetically to her fellow passengers that she'd left its milk at home, a young man climbed off at the first stop, jumped a fence and pursued a cow in a pasture. While everybody cheered and the crew held the train, he caught the animal and filled an empty bottle with milk for the baby.

At Windsor Junction he might have filled the bottle without leaving the train at all. Clarke's History of the Earliest Railways in Nova Scotia, written by a DAR conductor in the 1920s, reports that trains stopping at Windsor Junction used to be "boarded by goats which provided milk for a number of Junction homes. Walking through the cars, the goats would visit the passengers in quest of something to eat."

Almost anything could and did delay DAR trains—snowdrifts, streams over-flowing their banks, a collision with a moose, parades or a fire hose from a pond on one side of the track to a burning farmhouse on the other. It was typical of the atmosphere that prevailed on the old, erratic, unimproved DAR—and still prevails, for that matter, on the new, modernized and on-schedule DAR—that nobody ever seemed to mind. Nobody minded, either when the club car steward occasionally reserved. for dinner, the veal stew left over from lunch and called it "fricasseed chicken".

For, far more than most railways, the DAR has a personality that wins friends. It has inspired books, poems and songs. In the last decade the popularity of its employees has carried at least two of them into public office.

Gladys Porter was manager of the DAR station restaurant at Kentville when the was elected mayor of that town—a post to which she has been repeatedly re-elected. She was Nova Scotia's first woman mayor.

And, when Raymond Bourgue was conductor, steward, porter, dishwasher—a complete one-man staff—of the "flossy old club car” mentioned nostagically in the Chronical-Herald editorial, the voters of Yarmouth County elected him to represent them in the Nova Scotia legislature. He discovered that taking care of passengers is no chore for a politician. Not just his own constituents, but people from all constituencies, bent his ear with their political views and pressed him to support their causes. Meanwhile, he had a wife and seven hungry children to provide for, and the tips he counted on to balance his family budget dropped alarmingly because travellers were unwilling to risk offending the dignity of an MLA.

When the stubby competent diesel Dayliners succeeded the elegant but shabby steam-drawn passenger trains and no club car required his talents, the versatile and handsome Bourque, an Acadian who speaks French and English with equal facility, was hired by one of his more celebrated passengers—Nova Scotia's richest native son, Cyrus Eaton, the Cleveland multimillionaire. His duties include looking after the Pugwash estate at which Eaton brings together groups of internationally-known intellectuals to discus world problems.

Even without the frills and eccentricities of the steam trains, even with Canada's most unusual club car director gone, the DAR has color, flavor and character. The Chronicle-Herald editorial writer's fear that progress would eliminate “the chorus of greetings exchanged a every station,” proved unwarranted. At each stop, conductors like Avard Morse, a spry amiable man who has been with the DAR since 1915, can call by name nine out of 10 men, women and children on the platform.

Today the grandchildren of couples he originally met while they were honey-mooning via DAR, travel with Morse. People who live in tiny communities don't hesitate to ask him to do errands for them in larger places. His eagerness to be obliging is one facet of his genius for making friends. In his portable desk he proudly keeps a neatly-tied bundle of fan mail—letters sent him by people from all over North America, who travelled on the DAR, and appreciated his kindness.

Morse and his fellow conductors delight visitors by simply doing what comes naturally to Nova Scotians: talking about their beloved province. The route of the DAR stimulates the talk, for hardly a mile hasn't a fascinating tale connected with it.

The southern terminal of the railroad is Yarmouth which, in the days of wooden ships, owned a greater tonnage per capita than any other port on earth. Two thousand vessels, mostly built in or around Yarmouth, were sailed from Yarmouth by Yarmouth men and, accompanied by wives and children, they beat up and down the world.

The wooden ships are gone now. Yarmouth's chief ship these days is an over-grown ferry that plies to Bar Harbor, Me. But visitors who transfer to the DAR from the ferry hear about Yarmouth's bygone glory from these old-time conductors. They hear, too, about the CPR's Lakeside Inn, where anglers who compete in the Nova Scotia tuna tournament stay.

At Church Point, when time permits they point out the largest wooden church in Canada. At Digby, where there's a longish stop, passengers learn that Thomas Edison’s great-grandfather was one of the United Empire Loyalists who settled here in 1783, and that the hard-smoked herring fillets called Digby Chicks got the name because one Christmas the early settlers had no chickens to eat, only hard-smoked herring fillets.

Mile after mile the DAR cuts a swath through Maritime history. After Digby comes Bear River with its annual cherry festival; Deep Brook with its sprawling warehouses for crude gypsum from Nova Scotia's abundant quarries; Cornwallis, site of the vast naval training school that, in the war, was the largest in the British Commonwealth. There's Annapolis Royal, capital of French Acadia settled by de Monts in 1605, with his fort reconstructed to exact specifications; Kentville, in the Annapolis Valley, centre of the apple industry and home of the DAR's head office; Wolfville, seat of Acadia University; Grand Pré, with its memorial park, Acadian chapel and statue of Evangeline. The DAR established and maintained the park until the federal government took it over as a national historic site.

Then comes Windsor, where Judge Haliburton (Canada's first and one of its greatest humorists) created his immortal character, Sam Slick the Clockmaker. In 1835, the first instalments of Sam Slick appeared in the Novascotian, the newspaper published by Joe Howe, who was even then tying to promote the initial stretch of he DAR from Windsor to Halifax. In one of these instalments Sam Slick said: "The only thing that will either make or save Halifax is a railroad across the county to the Bay of Fundy." In spite of the efforts of Haliburton and the mighty Howe, was December 1858 before the first link was ready.

At Windsor, which claims the world’s highest tide, the DAR splits, one branch going to Truro (which is known for Stanfield's underwear) and the other to Halifax, with its two centuries of stirring history. (The DAR has a third and minor branch that juts off at Kentville to serve Weston, Centreville, Canning and Kingsport.)

This railway, as conductor Morse may observe if a passenger appears interested in economics, is much more than merely picturesque. Apart from people, it carries two million tons of gypsum a year, 53,000 tons of forest products, 35.000 tons of farm products, 253,000 tons of manufactured goods, and most of the oil and gasoline used on Nova Scotia's Fundy coast. It serves the Cornwallis naval base and the Greenwood air base. It has 500 employees and a payroll of close to $2 million. It's a major factor in Nova Scotia’s trade and commerce.

Its manager, J.C. McCuaig, is constantly aware of this as he scoots from one end of the line to the other in his inspection car—a yellow station wagon with flanged wheels that can travel either on rails or on the highway.

Like most people in Nova Scotia, he felt a pang of sadness when the old, shabby, elegant steam passenger train snorted into oblivion, to be followed by the steam freights that pierced the silence of the night with the raucous but wonderful whistles and the clash of their shunting. It won't ever be the same again on the 101-year-old DAR.

But, after all, you can't live in the past, you can't eat memories, you can't waft passengers and freight from place to place on a cloud of nostalgia. If the DAR is more predictable and less glamorous, it's still Canada's saltiest railroad.

Ian Sclanders is an associate editor of Maclean's Magazine.

Reference Tag

Please use this citation when referring to this article: "The Saltiest Railroad in Canada" Imperial Oil Review, February 1960.

Article