The North Street Station was the railway terminal for Halifax, Nova Scotia from 1877 to 1920. It was built by the Intercolonial Railway in the North End of Halifax and was the second largest railway station in Canada when it opened in 1878. Damaged, but repaired after the Halifax Explosion, it served until the current Halifax terminal location opened as part of the Ocean Terminals project in the city's South End in 1919.
The first railway station in Halifax was built by the Nova Scotia Railway in 1854 at Richmond, Nova Scotia. A large wooden structure, it consisted of an enclosed train shed covering one track and platforms with series of wings for the ticket offices, waiting rooms and a lunch room and saloon. The station was functional and without ornamentation as well as inconveniently located two miles from downtown Halifax, connected by a horse-drawn street railway. After Confederation in 1867, the Nova Scotia Railway was taken over by the Government of Canada and became part of the Intercolonial Railway. In 1873, the Intercolonial made plans for a large new landmark station worthy of their eastern terminus.
The new station was located much closer to downtown at the corner of North Street and Barrington Street thanks to negotiations between the Canadian Government and the British Royal Navy whose Halifax Dockyard had blocked the railway's extension into downtown. The new station was the second largest in Canada when built, exceeded only by Toronto's Union Station. [1] The layout of the new Halifax station was designed by the Intercolonial's Chief Engineer Alexander McNab. The architectural details and working plans were drawn up architects Andrew Dewar and David Stirling, who also designed the Provincial Building and St. David's Presbyterian Church on Grafton Street. [2] The station was built by the construction firm of Henry Peters. [3]
The station followed the Second Empire architectural style with a mansard roof, a large central clock tower and elaborately decorated dormers. The main station structure was 113' x 50' with walls of decorated pressed brick rising from a granite base. The first floor contained a general waiting room, a ladies’ waiting room (fitted with plush seats, a marble fireplace and a separate ticket office), a reading room as well as ticket offices for the Intercolonial Railway and the Windsor and Annapolis Railway as well as offices for the station master and passenger superintendent. The second floor contained more railway offices and a balcony where railway officials could observe operations in the large glass-covered passenger shed, the second glass railway canopy built in Canada. The shed was 400' by 87' and contained five enclosed tracks and platforms. A sixth track on the west side outside the shed was used for private railway cars where the rich could disembark in privacy and hook their private cars up to steam heating from the station. The glass roof was supported by a canopy of 24 iron trusses. Extensive iron awnings sheltered express wagons on the east side and passenger cabs on the North Street side. [4] A covered and heated staircase led from the station up to Barrington Street's sidewalks and streetcars. The ocean liner and immigration terminal at Pier 2 was only a few blocks away making for a convenient transfer to trains at the North Street Station for ocean liner travellers. Ships with large numbers of immigrants were served by special immigrant passenger trains of Colonist cars ran directly into the wharf side sheds on Pier 2, co-ordinated by the North Street Station.
The station opened on August 8, 1877 with a special ceremonial train carrying Canadian Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie, followed by a public opening the next day. [5] The North Street Station was a union station as it served the Intercolonial but also the Windsor and Annapolis Railway (known as the Dominion Atlantic Railway after 1893) and the Halifax and Southwestern Railway after 1901. The station was the first departure point for such famous named trains as the Ocean Limited in 1904, the Maritime Express and the Flying Bluenose. In 1902, the King Edward Hotel, the most modern, and one of the largest, hotels in Halifax was built immediately across Barrington Street to the station's west.
The North Street Station served as the focus for important civic events such as the departure of Halifax's contingent in the North-West Rebellion of 1885 and the departure of Canadian troops for the Boer War in 1898. The entire front of the station was decorated for the return of Boer War troops in 1901. Following the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912, numerous private cars of the wealthy filled the special spur beside the station as wealthy families arrived in hopes of identifying and claiming bodies of their loved ones and so many reporters congregated that the station installed extra telegraph lines for their use.
However, by 1912, the North Street Station was reaching its limitations. Built for fewer and shorter trains in the era of 50-foot wooden passenger cars, the newer longer trains with 80-foot steel cars exceeded the size of the station's platform. The increased number of trains taxed the station's limited number of platforms. Hemmed in by Barrington Street to the west, and the Navy dockyard to the east, the station had no room to expand. Plans announced in 1912 for a much larger combined passenger station and ocean liner terminal in Halifax’s South End. Construction of the railway cutting to access the new South End site began in 1913.
Construction of the tracks, piers and terminal grounds in the south end had just begun when World War I erupted in 1914. While track work slowly continued towards the site of the south end terminal, the North Street Station remained the gateway to Halifax and saw the heaviest use in its history. Thousands of troops arrived in the city prior to embarking overseas followed by thousands of family members and wartime workers piling into the busy wartime port through the North Street Station. As the war dragged on, increasing numbers of wounded arrived back in Canada aboard hospital ships, met at Pier 2 by special hospital trains outfitted and organized at the North Street Station. [6]
On December 6, 1917, the French ammunition ship SS Mont-Blanc blew up following a collision in Halifax Harbour, a tragedy known as the Halifax Explosion which killed nearly 2000 people. Although numerous accounts of the Halifax Explosion erroneously state that the North Street Station was destroyed, it was only damaged, albeit seriously, and quickly resumed service.
On the morning of the Halifax Explosion, the Ocean Limited had just departed and the local train from Truro had just arrived. The air blast from the explosion collapsed two thirds of the train shed roof. Virtually all the windows in the station were blown away. Doors and walls on the exposed third floor were knocked over and the roof was damaged. In the blizzard that followed the explosion, heating pipes and radiators froze and burst, and portions of the roof collapsed. More significantly, two miles of the approach tracks to the North Street Station were deeply buried in debris and blocked by wrecked railway equipment. This included the destruction on 16% of all the Intercolonial's passenger cars. [7]
A few railway employees were killed at the North Street Station, but most railway deaths occurred in the Richmond yards north of the station, including the entire engine crew of a train that had just left the North Street Station. [8]
Relief and passenger trains were temporarily diverted over the recently-laid tracks to the unfinished south end terminal on December 6 and December 7. However railway workers quickly repaired and cleaned up the North Street Station. The remaining train shed roof was hauled down and the platform tracks were cleared on December 8. Windows were boarded up until they could be replaced. Cranes and track crews cleared the wreckage from the track through Richmond allowing the North Street Station to open for a modified passenger schedule on the evening of December 8. The Dominion Atlantic’s Kentville train was the first train to leave from the reopened North Street Station at 6 pm on December 8. Full service resumed from the station on December 9. [9] By January 1918 a new roof had been constructed on the train shed and the express offices had reopened. . [10]
Despite its battered exterior, the North Street Station served for another year of intense passenger traffic as the fighting drew to a close and troops returned home following the Armistice on November 11. However, the heavy wartime traffic highlighted the limited size of the station's terminal tracks, already noted before the war. The Royal Canadian Navy was also eyeing the property in hopes of dockyard expansion. As a result, the South End terminal was brought into permanent operation in 1919. The last regularly scheduled passenger train left the North Street Station on January 4, 1919. [11] Although the North Street station saw a few months of sporadic use for freight and special passenger trains, it was demolished sometime in the 1920s. Today the site of the station is a parking lot opposite the main gate to HMC Dockyard just north of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge where it crosses Barrington Street.
The North Street Station provides an important setting in the Canadian novel Barometer Rising by Hugh MacLennan where two major characters are killed in a vivid, although wildly-exaggerated depiction of the station's canopy collapse during the Halifax Explosion. The station is also depicted the Canadian Heritage Minute about the heroic telegraph railway dispatcher Vincent Coleman, although Coleman worked at the smaller Richmond station in the nearby railway freight yards. [12]
The Halifax Explosion was a maritime disaster in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, which happened on the morning of 6 December 1917. The Norwegian vessel SS Imo collided with SS Mont-Blanc, a French cargo ship laden with high explosives, in the Narrows, a strait connecting the upper Halifax Harbour to Bedford Basin, causing a large explosion on the French freighter, devastating the Richmond district of Halifax. Approximately 2,000 people were killed by the blast, debris, fires or collapsed buildings, and an estimated 9,000 others were injured. The blast was the largest man-made explosion at the time, releasing the equivalent energy of roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT (12,000 GJ).
Union Station is a major railway station and intermodal transportation hub in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. It is located on Front Street West, on the south side of the block bounded by Bay Street and York Street in downtown Toronto. The City of Toronto government owns the station building while the commuter rail operator GO Transit owns the train shed and trackage. Union Station has been a National Historic Site of Canada since 1975, and a Heritage Railway Station since 1989. It is operated by the Toronto Terminals Railway, a joint venture of the Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Railway that directs and controls train movement along the Union Station Rail Corridor, the largest and busiest rail corridor in Canada.
The Intercolonial Railway of Canada, also referred to as the Intercolonial Railway (ICR), was a historic Canadian railway that operated from 1872 to 1918, when it became part of Canadian National Railways. As the railway was also completely owned and controlled by the federal government, the Intercolonial was also one of Canada's first Crown corporations.
Patrick Vincent Coleman was a train dispatcher for the Canadian Government Railways who was killed in the Halifax Explosion, but not before he sent a message to an incoming passenger train to stop out of range of the explosion. Today he is remembered as one of the heroic figures from the disaster.
The North End of Halifax is a subdivision of Halifax, Nova Scotia occupying the northern part of Halifax Peninsula immediately north of Downtown Halifax. The area once included historic Africville, and parts of it were severely damaged in the Halifax Explosion during World War I. A neighbourhood with strong African Nova Scotian roots, more recently the area has undergone gentrification.
The Dominion Atlantic Railway was a historic railway which operated in the western part of Nova Scotia in Canada, primarily through an agricultural district known as the Annapolis Valley.
The South End is a neighbourhood of Halifax Regional Municipality, located on the southern half of the Halifax Peninsula in Halifax's urban centre. Quinpool Road is increasingly considered to be an arbitrary border between the South and North Ends, though Quinpool Road is also a part of the West End, and is home, for example, to the West End Baptist Church.
The Ocean, previously known as the Ocean Limited, is a passenger train operated by Via Rail in Canada between Montreal, Quebec and Halifax, Nova Scotia. It is the oldest continuously operated named passenger train in North America. The Ocean's schedule takes approximately 23 hours, running overnight in both directions. Together with The Canadian and Via's corridor trains, the Ocean provides a transcontinental service.
Pier 21 was an ocean liner terminal and immigration shed from 1928 to 1971 in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Over 1.5 million immigrants came to Canada through Pier 21 and it is the last surviving seaport immigration facility in Canada. The facility is often compared to the landmark American immigration gateway Ellis Island. The former immigration facility is now occupied by the Canadian Museum of Immigration, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design as well as various retail and studio tenants.
The Halifax and South Western Railway was a historic Canadian railway operating in the province of Nova Scotia.
Halifax Harbour is a large natural harbour on the Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia, Canada, located in the Halifax Regional Municipality.
The Port of Halifax comprises various port facilities in Halifax Harbour in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
Bonaventure Station was the name of a railway station located in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Its name was later adopted by a commercial development and a metro station.
Rockingham is a community located in Nova Scotia's Halifax Regional Municipality.
The Westin Nova Scotian is a Canadian hotel located in Halifax, Nova Scotia, owned and operated by New Castle Hotels and Resorts. It was built in 1928 by the Canadian National Railway as the Nova Scotian Hotel and after several changes of owners and names in the late 20th century became the Westin Nova Scotian in 1996.
Windsor Junction is a Canadian suburban community in Nova Scotia's Halifax Regional Municipality. It is located 15.6 km (9.7 mi) north west of the HRM urban core and 3 km (1.9 mi) north of the Bedford Basin near the communities of Waverley, Fall River and Lower Sackville.
Halifax station is an inter-city railway terminal in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada operated by Via Rail.
Truro station is an intercity railway station in Truro, Nova Scotia. It is operated by Via Rail.
The Nova Scotia Cotton Manufacturing Company was a cotton mill located in Halifax, Nova Scotia which was founded in 1882 and destroyed with great loss of life by the Halifax Explosion in 1917.
The Maritime Express was a Canadian passenger train. When it was launched on the first of March, 1898, it was the flagship of the Intercolonial Railway (ICR) between Halifax, Nova Scotia and Montreal, Quebec. The train was operated by the Canadian National Railway (CNR) from 1919 until 1964, when it was reduced to a regional service and its name retired.
Coordinates: 44°39′35.9″N63°35′19.9″W / 44.659972°N 63.588861°W