06 Jul When eight trains and two steamships served tiny Kingsport, NS

On Monday, Pier 21 curator Dan Conlin, whom Contrarian readers know from his annual tally of Halloween revellers on Duncan St. in Halifax, carried out a curious experiment. Using a 24-page railway timetable from July 4, 1914, which the Nova Scotia Archives has made available online, he tabulated the trains and steamships arriving and departing the village of Kingsport, in the Annapolis Valley.

As Dan explains:

I used a replica station board, the kind stations used to post on their platforms, to recreate a day in the life of a long-gone station 102 years ago.  (Rail service ended there in 1962.)

It is interesting that Kingsport in the Annapolis Valley (population about 500) had this level of public transport – eight trains a day plus a couple of steamship calls! Two connections from this small station would put you in Boston or Montreal the next morning.

There is probably no community in Nova Scotia, outside of Halifax or Sydney, with this level of public transport today.

And Halifax and Sydney only manage it by virtue of airports.

I recently spent some time in Parrsboro, where a profusion of large, stately homes bespeak a bygone era of prosperity, the source of which is no longer evident. Like Kingsport, Parrsboro was an important shipbuilding centre in the late 19th Century. It was also a major port for shipments of coal and timber, and a stopover point for passengers travelling by rail and steamer between Halifax and Upper Canada, via one of the routes outlined by Dan Conlin.

I have published a followup post about rail service in Kingsport here.