(The following story by Paul Everest appeared on the Chronicle Herald website on July 31.)
HALIFAX, N.S. — Relieving heavy road traffic and maintaining a significant part of Nova Scotia’s railway history are two reasons why Halifax should preserve a little-used stretch of rail line, a provincial heritage organization says.
In June, Canadian National Railways announced its intention to abandon the Chester Spur rail line, an eight-kilometre rail corridor running from behind the Atlantic Superstore on Joseph Howe Drive in Halifax through the Bayers Lake Business Park to the Lakeside Industrial Park in Timberlea.
Jay Underwood, president of the Nova Scotia Railway Heritage Society, says the line still has value and “should be kept alive.”
“Our key recommendation . . . is that the city, rather than just allow it to be abandoned, keep control of the rail corridor so it doesn’t disappear,” he said Monday.
The tracks, he said, could be sold for scrap but preserving the corridor would allow for future rail traffic.
“Just make sure that, should there ever come a need for a railway into the industrial park that that line used to serve, that the room is there to put a track. Make it into a walking track if you want in the meantime.”
Some Halifax regional councillors are also behind the idea of keeping the line intact, especially to preserve infrastructure for possible future commuter trains running from outlying areas such as Timberlea into downtown Halifax.
“The fact (is) that we have a lot of population growth out in those areas with development, and although it is a very small line, we still have to think about how we can get people around without actually having them on the roads,” said Coun. Dawn Sloane (Halifax Downtown).
Municipal staff have advised against preserving the Chester Spur, Ms. Sloane said, because they say the cost of maintaining the corridor is too high.
But she said the cost of upgrading and maintaining roads is just as big a concern.
“Yes, it does cost money, but I’d rather invest in (rail),” Ms. Sloane said. “Invest in the right kinds of infrastructure and then you don’t have to keep repaving.”
And, Mr. Underwood said, keeping the rail option open in the city has green implications, too.
“In the age of Kyoto accords and environmental concerns, railway transportation is a far more environmentally friendly form of transportation than trucking,” he said.
Aside from transportation issues, Mr. Underwood said, part of the province’s heritage is at stake.
“We have it estimated that by the 1950s, there wasn’t a family in Nova Scotia that didn’t have somebody working for the railway in some connection,” he said. “We want to make sure that people are aware of what it is that they’re losing.”
Mr. Underwood said the society established a committee to identify key railway heritage sites across the province after the Dominion Atlantic Railway roundhouse in Kentville was demolished this month.
The Chester Spur is all that’s left of the Halifax and Southwestern Railway that opened in 1903 and ran between Halifax and Yarmouth. It became part of the Canadian National Railway network in 1920 and was reduced to its current eight-kilometre stretch in the 1990s.