Canadian Adventure: Nova Scotia and Newfoundland in 2001...

Two years on from the last trip, and my last with my Dad, the pair of us headed off to Halifax on September 11th 2001 - yes, the September 11th... we arrived in Halifax to find we were the last plane to leave Manchester that wasn't turned around...

The airport was a plane car park, as US airspace had been closed and thank goodness Dad had booked a hire car in advance as ours was the last in the lot! Anyway, that was a terrible tragedy but this post is about a meandering journey through some of the maritime provinces. Our trip took in Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Labrador, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.

We did see a VIA train, possibly the short lived Halifax to Sydney 'Bras d'Or' at the Canso causeway, and I have a memory of seeing some GP50 or something similar on the CB&CNS - but no photos I'm afraid.

I was 21, and my interest in trains was less overt by this stage, and we had quite a tight time scale, so we didn't really explore the railway history of Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island, much to my regret. However we did see plenty of items on Newfoundland, whose railways were the unusual narrow gauge of 3ft 6in. This meant that stock that arrived from the 'mainland' on the North Sydney to Port Aux Basque ferry had their bogies changed in the yard before heading across the island. I believe a standard gauge shunter was kept at Port Aux Basque for this reason. The stock was certainly much larger than I had ever seen on a narrow gauge line.

At Port Aux Basque, just off the ferry, was a train museum with a green CN liveried GMD NF10. I love this photo of my Dad on the caboose balcony. Not much else to see, the museum was all shut up, we probably had arrived on a weekday, so on we headed as we had a lot of ground to cover.

Later in the trip, we camebrack through Corner Brook, and found the museum there, also closed, but a chance to walk around and grab some photos - there we saw a CN livered GMD NF10,  a steam loco, caboose and some other stock.

Baldwin Pacific built in 1920

It always seemed strange, to someone from the UK and our proliferation of preserved railways, that more could not have been done to create a working attraction on Newfoundland. There was a good collection of stock in various locations, and surely a short working 'tourist' train might have been almost sustainable - I guess there just wasn't the tourist traffic to justify the effort and we should be thankful that these items were saved. These photos are nearly twenty years old, I just hope they all survive. Next week is the last of these look backs, with a reflection on Trinity Loop. Have a good weekend...