The summer luxury train began service in 1891, forming part of the Dominion Atlantic Railway fleet when the company was formed in 1894 from the merger of two regional railway companies. At the time of the company’s formation, Nova Scotia companies in the Annapolis Valley capitalized on North America’s fascination with Acadian culture that evoked Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s wildly popular poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie. The poem tells the fictional story of Evangeline, who searches for her love, Gabriel, at the time of the expulsion of the Acadians from their idyllic agricultural lands.
Well-heeled tourists
Gary Ness is a professor emeritus at Acadia University and wrote for Flying Bluenose. (Janet Ness)
With well-meaning American tourists flocking to Nova Scotia to see the landscape and villages described in the poem, Nova Scotia businesses wasted no time in meeting their needs.
This included taking them to the site of the Grand Pré settlement, which had been abandoned by then. It would later be developed into an early theme park by the DAR.
Tourists boarded steamboats in Boston and disembarked in Yarmouth. Then they would make their way to Evangeline Country, to Halifax, by steam engine.
Passengers making the journey could choose the regular train or the express train — the Flying Bluenose.
The regular train was slower and made many stops. But the Flying Bluenose had far fewer stops, was luxuriously equipped and could travel the 400km from Yarmouth to Halifax in around eight hours.
Detail from a 1900 Dominion Atlantic Railway brochure promoting the Evangeline route. (Dominion Atlantic Railway/John Polhemus Printing Company, NY, NY)
Despite the train’s luxurious appointments, a 1900 company brochure stated that the cost of a one-way trip from Boston to Halifax by steamboat and train was $8.50, or about $300 today.
Pretty exclusive
According to Gary Ness, professor emeritus at Acadia University and author of The Dominion Atlantic Railway: 1894-1994, descriptions of luxury in railroad brochures at the time weren’t just marketing hype. “If you walked in, what you would find are carpets made by the most exclusive company in England, which has been in business for hundreds of years then and continues to be in business now,” he said. “The lining inside was amazing… and people could sit at the back of the train on an observation deck and watch the scenery. They were quite exclusive.” Ness said the close integration of ferries and trains was designed to promote tourism and build the region as a tourist destination. A page from the 1895 book Beautiful Nova Scotia, the Tourist’s Eden, with an illustration of the train and a photograph of the interior of the saloon. (Yarmouth Steamship Company 1895) The Flying Bluenose had the first Pullman cars in Canada, Ness said, with the Haligonian and Mayflower in the 1890s and two others, the Annapolis Royal and the Grand Pré, added in 1921. The Canadian Pacific Railway took over the Dominion Atlantic Railway in 1911 but did not rename it, allowing it to retain its identity. “It was great, to be honest with you,” Ness said. “I think the fact that CP took it over and then started running it as part of their system explained a lot about it. CP, of course, owned the tourism business out West and saw it as a big financier.”
Railway stories
As with any iconic railroad, there are stories attached to the once great train. Some people who arrived from the United States at the time were protective of the locals and treated them as “cottages,” Ness said. Sometimes the locals took the same weight. Ness said he was told an unverifiable story by retired railroaders he interviewed in the 1980s about an American tourist who was rude to employees at the Yarmouth train station. The tourist asked to know where the express train was and the worker directed him to the train that left about 20 minutes after the Flying Bluenose. “The express train was called the Express Mail, that was sort of its official name, and of course it stopped at every station between Yarmouth and Halifax,” smiled Ness. “He put them in the milk, stopping at every kennel and coop along the way.” A color photo shows the Flying Bluenose at Digby Station circa 1903. (MCoy Printing Company, Moncton, NB) The development of highways and the Great Depression marked the “cone of death” for the Flying Bluenose and passenger train travel in general, Ness said. People stopped traveling for pleasure during the Great Depression, Ness said, and highways allowed people to use their own cars to get around Nova Scotia.
End of an era
The era of fancy passenger trains came to an end and the Flying Bluenose was retired in 1936.
Passenger service on the route continued until 1989, when the federal government made major budget cuts to the rail network, Ness said.
In the 1910 travel guide Vacation Days in Nova Scotia, written by Thomas F. Anderson and published by the Dominion Atlantic Railway, the train is described as a household name throughout the US and Canada.
“Each of these trains is as luxurious a flier as modern science can make it, and in the Pullman Palace cars the traveler will find everything that makes railroad travel a delight,” wrote the writer.
While the book’s description of the train’s fame may have been exaggerated, Ness said the train would certainly have been well known and recognized as a major “jewel in the crown” of the railroad and Nova Scotia at the time.
