CNR 1949 Halifax

This post features snapshots taken by my father during a vacation taken mainly on the rails of his employer in October 1949.

To recap his trip up to this point ... from Montreal he had taken the CPR short line through Maine to Saint John; the CPR ferry to Digby, Nova Scotia; and he had arrived in Halifax on a Dominion Atlantic Railway (CPR) train through the latter's running rights over the CNR.

Above, is my father's Halifax hotel - the CPR Lord Nelson. The lens on his box camera tends to fish-eye and blur the corners of some of his photos. This photo nods to a major change in the urban transit system of Halifax.

The last run of Halifax's streetcar system had taken place five months before these photos - back in May 1949. The catenary above is being used by electric trolley buses. 

A quick orientation to Halifax follows ...

From: Canada, A Regional Analysis; Putnam and Putnam; 1970; JM Dent.

This view of Halifax comes from the 1960s. Downtown Halifax is at the centre, bottom. Dartmouth is across the harbour. To the right is the Atlantic Ocean, to the left is Bedford Basin - an excellent sheltered area in which trans-Atlantic wartime convoys were assembled. 

'The Narrows' was the location of the Halifax Explosion of December 6, 1917. Three piers at the right extremity of Halifax mark the location of the CNR yard - completed after the Great War; the passenger station; and today's modern container port.

The Angus L Macdonald Bridge connects Halifax and Dartmouth at the Narrows - it was built between 1952 and 1955. It is a suspension bridge, designed to clear the superstructures of merchant and military ships using the inner harbour. 

While cross-harbour ferry transportation was particularly busy with people commuting back and forth during the years of World War Two ... there was no cross-harbour ferry for railcars between the two cities.

Here is a historical curiosity ... there had been a double-tracked railway bridge across the harbour ...

The Halifax and Eastern Railway Company twice built a railway bridge across at the Narrows. In 1884, construction started to build the bridge to connect the Woodside sugar refinery near Dartmouth to the Intercolonial Railway's Richmond Yards. This was a low wooden trestle bridge with a steel swing-span mounted on stone abutments. The first train travelled across the double-track structure in 1885 and the bridge was destroyed in a storm in 1891 ...

Caution suggested the idea of building track to Dartmouth by land from the head of Bedford Basin. However, they ignored caution and immediately rebuilt the bridge. It floated away for good in 1891, leaving 23 cars stranded at Dartmouth. 

Since then, Windsor Junction has linked the land-based railway lines of Dartmouth and Halifax. 

As you can imagine, there was a very high level of shipping activity through The Narrows, particularly for the purposes of assembling wartime convoys. It seems likely that having the obstruction of a railway swing bridge across this busy area would not have been tolerated for long, had the bridge survived.

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Quite naturally, most of us are immediately drawn to the 'old cars' shown in historical photos. Besides being sources of nostalgia for many ... the short lifespans of both the in-fashion sheet metal designs, and of the vehicles themselves, are quite helpful in dating photos precisely.

The Isaac-Newton-style water system 'pressure intensifier' on the roof ... and an extinct brand of Canadian department stores provide less precise dating for this October 1949 photo.

My father's first harbour photo is taken from the Halifax Citadel hill and looks up the harbour toward Bedford Basin.

A freighter may be under tow. In the foreground, the row-housing here might post-date the Explosion. Wood-framed dwellings on the land rising up from the harbour were generally swept away or heavily damaged by the 1917 Explosion in the Narrows. This photo has sepia-ed itself.

An enduring sight today is the Halifax Town Clock. It was put in service in 1803 - ostensibly to keep the local military forces punctual. Today Parks Canada is responsible for Citadel Hill historic sites, including the clock.

Above, are two systems used to communicate time - guess which of the two is more prized for its precision ...

The British military tradition of the Noon Gun would be accurate enough for normal business and social interactions. 

According to a write-up by Dr Randall C Brooks of the Canada Science and Technology Museum, the time ball shown above was completed in 1904 and was probably removed circa 1959. 

At five minutes to noon, the ball was raised halfway. At one minute to noon it was raised to its highest point of travel. The ball was dropped by electricity at noon exactly - the electrical current coming from the nearby observatory, where the sun's transit was used to determine the exact time.

During the early 1900s, the Time Ball would provide the more accurate signal for anyone with serious precision needs - ocean navigation using accurate ship chronometers, for example. The visual cuing of the raised ball, and the 'speed of light' nature of the ball dropping sight had advantages over the less precise - but more fun - Noon Gun.

If you are curious about the spotting differences between the two cupola balls above ... you'll notice that the official time ball is constructed to rise and fall within a metal framework. In contrast, the ball on the Halifax Town Clock is not. As well, the two cupolas are different in their construction.

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The Nova Scotia Legislature is having some stonework done.
... Somewhere, there must be parking meter fans and 'rivet counters'.

The Scotian was in use from 1946 until 1955.

This is the view from the ferry to the Halifax side of the harbour.
You can see the way Citadel Hill dominates the harbour here.

The Dartmouth shore is seen above, also from the Scotian. If you check the 1957 CNR Dartmouth Subdivision footnotes (far below), you'll see that there are precautions for movements over the rail crossing at the ferry ... on the same track as that hopper at the right.

In the post-war mania for rubber-tired vehicles, these Fort William-manufactured trolley buses had significant advantages over the streetcars they were replacing ... The trackwork no longer had to be maintained; the rubber-tired road adhesion of torque from electric motors provided unprecedented acceleration; unlike streetcars, trolley buses could swerve to the curb to pick up riders; the buses were very quiet and smooth riding.

Of course, the children of this transit revolution were themselves dispatched by the march of technology. With powerful postwar diesel engines in buses, the trolley bus catenary would no longer need maintenance. While noisier, diesel buses could operate on any road - not being limited to routes with overhead wiring.

The trolley bus above is just leaving its own 'Belt Line' bus stop.

from: Canada Handbook 1946; Dominion Bureau of Statistics.

While looking around for other illustrations to include, I found this image from the government's Canada Handbook of 1946. The hand-drawn marks refer to the Bedford Magazine explosions of July 18, 19 1945. This occurred after Germany had been defeated but before the end of the war in the Pacific. 

As you can imagine, military ships participating in ocean convoys needed all kinds of exploding materials - from anti-aircraft machine gun ammunition, to anti-ship torpedoes, to anti-submarine depth charges. These dangerous articles had been located away from the main areas of civilian population ... The Halifax Explosion of 1917 had provided the 'never again' incentive to ensure the safe handling of explosives around the harbour. While many windows were broken in the city, there was no civilian loss of life from the Bedford Basin explosions.

You can easily pick out Citadel Hill. In the foreground, you can see the CNR Hotel Nova Scotian as well as the new Halifax station, CNR yard, and the piers for the ship/rail transfer of military personnel and people reaching or departing Canada by ship.

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The local CNR employee timetable pages for the Halifax and Dartmouth areas are provided below.

The following timetable images are from
CNR Atlantic Region, Maritime District,
Timetable 94, October 27, 1957.

1951 Canada Handbook Photos

from: Canada: A History in Photographs; Hall & Dodds; 1981; Hurtig Publishers.

Canada's wartime 'Minister of Everything' in 1943 -

at the wheel of the 500,000th Canadian vehicle for the war effort.

Yet another of 'The Official Handbook of Present Conditions and Recent Progress' provides the illustrations for this post. Here is the Foreward from someone whose name you might recognize ...

The 'Canada' Handbook Series was initiated in 1930 to supplement the field of the Canada Year Book by offering to teachers and pupils in the public schools and to Canadian citizens generally a brief and attractive record of current economic conditions at a price within the reach of all. The Year Book is primarily a detailed reference work and is not designed to meet the need for a popular medium of this kind. 

The past two decades have seen expansion of the national economy in every direction and, since a considerable proportion of space in the Handbook is allocated to illustrations, the editorial task of giving a well-balanced presentation in a publication of this size and at low cost becomes more difficult each year. Currently many thousands of copies are being distributed abroad through our Diplomatic and Trade Commissioner Services and it is desirable for this reason alone that the Canadian economy should be explained fairly completely. 

C.D. Howe, Minister of Trade and Commerce

Shorter version: 

The Year Book of 1933-34 (for example) is almost 4 inches thick with a hard cover ... with 2/3 of the book being tables of statistics. There are no photos. 

These Handbooks have plenty of industry-donated photos with just a few tables of numbers. They are paperbacks and less than an inch thick.

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This book was published so long ago, that the boy standing in the aisle probably retired just after the turn of the century. Many intercity passenger trains would soon be going out of style in the US and Canada. You can see the smoking/non-smoking sections partitioned by glass. This is described as an 'air-conditioned day coach'.

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Trolley buses were perhaps a compromise between the tried and true street railways and the new Brill, Mac, CC&F and GM diesel buses. As a kid I rode on trolley buses in Montreal and Vancouver a few times, and they were very quiet and emitted no exhaust. They had exceptional acceleration.

The diesel bus salespeople will tell the transit authorities that diesels can be dispatched anywhere to meet new needs and that they don't need expensive catenary. 

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This may be a CPR boxcar wheelset getting turned - guessing from the chalked number on the wheel. In addition to being a good administrative practice, getting the wheelsets back to the original cars prevented asymmetries between truck wheelsets, which could lead to hotboxes.

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'The CPR freight terminal opened at Montreal in July, 1950, provides facilities for better and quicker handling of freight. Approximately 3000 cars pass through the terminal every 24 hours.'

'Cars being pushed up the hump are inspected from an undertrack floodlit pit.'

'Cars moving down the 'hump' into the classification yard are electrically braked and switched to their destined positions.' 

... in fact this looks like the early testing and calibration of the yard equipment. Perhaps they are working with a combination of pneumatic and electric retarders. The freshly-dug trench suggests that the hump yard is not shown in its final form.

Hump yards - with human riders working as 'car retarders' - had been used for decades. Post-war technology brought about advances in power switching and power retarders - hard couplings were notoriously bad for fragile cargoes which had been factory-loaded in boxcars. Eventually modern sensing and computing power enabled the automation of most of the processes ... at least after the cut lever was actuated by a human at the top of the hump.

With many hump yards now taken out of service, one could argue that high-horsepower flat switching is the favoured way of sorting cars for their destinations. Beltpack remote control of switching locomotives still requires careful work planning ... and enough people to protect the ends of the movements.

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With the 'freedom' brought by post-war automobiles, Ottawa could get rid of its streetcar system and move its smoky and dirty downtown union railway station where it 'belonged' ... away into an industrial park somewhere. The future of transportation would be in autos and planes!

Below: Freedom!
This kind of freedom can be scaled up to fill as many traffic lanes as one might build.

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Notice the shine on this domestically-produced locomotive.

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There was a Canadian elementary school reader story which described a thin and agile man who worked to get grain samples from each corner of the boxcars. Being thin was beneficial, as there was little clearance between the top of the grain load and the ceiling of the car for him to work in - an illustration was drawn to show the dark and claustrophobic working environment. This CD Howe Handbook photo doesn't quite match my childhood images of this type of work.

The worker at the door is leaning on a 'grain door' - assembled from boards at the country elevator and set inside the door frame to enable regular 40 foot boxcars to carry grain. Once the grain door was secure and made 'grain tight' with burlap, heavy paper, or other suitable material, the country elevator loading pipe was placed into the car, and the grain load would put back-pressure on the grain door. Levelling the load with shovels was part of the routine. The density of the type of grain loaded would determine the level to which the car was filled - and the filling levels for common grains (e.g. wheat) were often stencilled inside the car. The boxcar doors could then be latched and sealed in the normal manner after the car was loaded.

At its terminal elevator destination, the regular boxcar door would be opened, and the whole boxcar would generally be seized and tilted by mechanical jaws. The grain doors would often be broken before or during this process. Shovels could be used to finish the job.

Consider the ambient light outside. This is the best lit boxcar these two have ever worked in! 

" ... remember that time the Grain Board photographer came with all his lights? ha ha ha "

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'Toronto's subway under construction. In the foreground the decking has been completed, while for the next two blocks top-lift excavation is under way. Beyond that traffic is proceeding normally.'

from: Wheels of Progress; TTC; 1953.

from: Wheels of Progress; TTC; 1953.