Trolley Tuesday 1/4/22 - The Halifax Street Railway

Oh crumbs, is it January already? I was much rather enjoying my hibernation... Ah well, if my editor is poking me with a stick, I must meet his demands...

Welcome to another month, another year, and another country on Twice Weekly Trolley History, as we break free of the Land of Freedom to look at streetcars from around the world! Our first country this year is... Canada, which we will be looking at from East to West, starting with our sunny little trailer park island of Nova Scotia. Despite Halifax and the Maritimes' reputation of a proud, sea-faring region, they also possessed a seven-decade spanning street railway that helped build the city up and get Haligonians on the move. The history of the Halifax Street Railway is primed with plenty of explosions, company intrigue, and enough silly stories to sustain you for, oh, let's say twenty paragraphs. So pop open that ninth can of ravioli, imbibe in The Liquor, and rev up your Birneys as we take a look back at the history of the Halifax Street Railway! 

  

Haligonian Horsecars

Halifax Street Railway's horsecar fleet posing for pictures, 1894.
(Skyrise Cities, Nova Scotia Archives)

    Like most cities its size and with similar industrial backgrounds, Nova Scotia's street railway origins can be pinned to a single date: June 11, 1866. That was when the Halifax City Railway Company (HCR) was first inaugurated, running a small fleet of five horsecars within the city center. The railway was the brainchild of the Halifax Gas Light & Water Company (later Halifax Gas Light, or HGL) and local civic booster William D. O'Brien, who chartered the railway in 1863. Despite its relative success and utility, as well as being the first streetcar system in Canada and preceding both the Hamilton and Toronto systems, the HCR ceased operations after 1873 for a number of reasons. One of these reasons included moving the "Main Line" on Inglis Street north to Duffus Street, to better reach the Nova Scotia Railway's station in the Richmond district. This led the HCR terminating operations for eight years until a new company was chartered, the Halifax Street Railway Company (HSR) in 1886, to absorb the assets and rolling stock of the HCR and resumed operation. 

Let There Be Light

An ad for Dominion Iron & Steel of Sydney, Nova Scotia,
shows the electric generators and steam engines powering 
their factory, 1902.
(C. W. Vernon)

    Around the same time that the HSR was chartered, Halifax industrialist John Starr created the Halifax Electric Light Company to provide the city with that wonderful revolution of electricity. Power was provided from a giant 70kW electric generation plant at Black's Wharf, which later fell into the hands of HGL after two years when they bought out Starr's firm. In 1889, another group of local boosters led by "Morning Chronicle Publisher" Charles Annand founded the Nova Scotia Power Company to bring together the HSR and the Halifax Electric Light under one electrified banner. When this scheme failed due to a lack of capital, local lawyer and coal investor Benjamin Franklin Pearson took it upon himself to create the People's Heat & Light Company in 1893 and the Halifax Electric Tramway Company on March 20, 1895. Under these two banners, they were able to purchase both the Nova Scotia Power Company and merge it with the People's Heat & Light, with the street railway becoming the Nova Scotia Tramways & Power Company after 1917.

Barrington, Nova Scotia, some time before the 1917 Explosion.
(Nova Scotia Archives)

    While that corporate history may seem very dense and boring (try writing it next time!), the streetcars on the other hand were having an excellent time. One of the most important sections of line went along Barrington Street, a major northwest-southeast corridor snug against the waterfront, and by the late 1890s, it became a major destination for commerce, trade, and especially retail. Upon electrification on February 12, 1896, its importance as a retail center almost doubled as Haligonians were able to reach their destinations in a more timely and reliable manner. Other lines to gain importance around this time included the Gottingen Street Line, which established new retail spaces, and the Spring Garden Road line which originally connected new streetcar suburbs and grocers to downtown Halifax. 

Explosive Expansion

A picture-perfect postcard of Barrington Street, looking north from Sackville Street, 1900.
(Public Domain)

    After the turn of the century, it seemed the streetcar line had settled into its purpose within Halifax's daily routine. New electric streetcars finally popped up with heavier, larger designs that could accommodate increased passenger capacity, and the horse cars were soon no more. Due to Halifax's prominence as a major shipping and industrial center by World War I, the streetcars served dutifully as it ferried Canadian soldiers and dock workers alike to the waterfront. There were even plans to extend the HSR across the Bedford Basin into Dartmouth, along what is now the Angus L. McDonald Bridge. Unfortunately as some of you close readers will know, Halifax did not exactly get out of World War I unscathed...

Certainly no-one could have survive that explosion...
(Public Domain)

A photographer atop a steam locomotive surveys the damage after
the mighty explosion, 1917.
(The Canadian Press)

    The SS Mont Blanc Explosion of December 6, 1917 remains the largest non-nuclear artificial explosions in human history, killing 1,782 people (including hero railroad dispatcher Patrick "Vince" Coleman, who redirected trains out of the city before the blast) and destroying an entire half-mile radius of Halifax and Dartmouth. Included in the destruction was the infrastructure of the HSR, whose waterfront line down Barrington Street was simply obliterated. Though service was restored to the rest of the city, falling fare numbers and a worn out fleet of turn-of-the-century streetcars meant that the company had no choice but to consolidate with the Power Companies to form the aforementioned Nova Scotia Tramways & Power Company Limited that same year. With their finances in dire straits and an expensive rebuild on the horizon, it didn't take long for a new factor to strike the city's streetcars.

Stone & Webster Strike Again

A preserved Stone & Webster "Turtleback" car working on the
McKinney Avenue Transit Authority's historic streetcar
line in Dallas, Texas
(Unknown Author)

    We on this blog have discussed the Boston engineering firm of Stone & Webster here before, as they operated streetcars in Seattle, El Paso, and Dallas. Though a usually responsible and well-meaning electric railway holding firm, Stone & Webster also liked to exert a bit of personal control in their railways, especially when it came to rolling stock. Their interest in the HSR was through their power utilities, and they purchased a controlling interest in 1919, bringing with it some marginal improvement as well as a new order of Birney Safety Cars. Stone & Webster also put into motion the building of new lines beginning in the 1920s, with three whole interconnecting loops (and 11 numbered lines) by 1927 between the Northwest Arm and the Dartmouth Ferry on the Halifax Waterfront. At its peak, the HSR was carrying 33 million people a year, and when Stone & Webster divested control in 1924 to the Royal Securities Corporation, the company changed identities again to become the Nova Scotia Light & Power Company (NSLP) in 1928.

A total system map of the Halifax Street Railway, 1927.
(Skyrise Cities)

Birney Car No. 128 trundles along Barrington Street
on the "1 Belt Line" Route, 1933.
(Nova Scotia Archives)

World War II saw renewed importance in the streetcar as gas rationing had also hit the naval center of Halifax. Not only were shipyard workers and Canadian soldiers taking the trolleys to the docks, but the HSR's infrastructure (namely NSLP's generation plants) aided in "degaussing" (or, in layman's terms, demagnetizing) more than 1,600 naval and merchant ships to protect them against magnetic mines. The company was even entrusted with degaussing fifty American destroyers bound for the Royal Navy, with America turning over the ships to the NSLP for a brief time and forming the world's only short-lived electrical utility navy (or so they say). Meanwhile, the HSR was pushed to its limit and was plagued with both aged Birney cars and overcrowding issues, as 59 cars now had to handle well over nine million passengers a year.

Birney-ing Down the House. (I'm sorry)
Birney No. 126 is seen burning immediately 
preceding its destruction in the 1945 V-E Day Riots.
(CBC)

    When V-E Day came on the late night of May 7, 1945, tensions spilled onto Halifax's streets as two days of rioting erupted that resulted in the destruction of a dozen streetcars. Birney No. 126 was destroyed the night of the 7th on Barrington and Spring Garden after it was wrecked and burned by an angry mob. Another car, No. 151, was shanghaied off of its usual route and commandeered onto Duke Street, where it was then vandalized and abandoned by the next afternoon. NSLP spent a lot of money to return most of those streetcars to service and, consequently, purchased twenty-three other trolleys from other systems to better meet the tripled ridership. Unfortunately, the same problems that plagued the HSR after WWI (worn-out infrastructure and new equipment in short supply) meant that their time on Earth was not for long.

Notable Streetcars and Rolling Stock

HSR No. 11 is representative of the Rhodes Curry 
open cars from 1896.
(Nova Scotia Archives)

    Over its entire existence, the Halifax Street Railway rostered 175 streetcars (yes, streetcars. Not trams. Not on this blog.) between 1866 and 1924. The horsecars were built between 1866 and 1884 by the John Stephenson Company of New York City, who built cars for the New York & Harlem Railroads as well as the Toronto Street Railways. The first 26 electric cars came from the Rhodes Curry Company of Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1896 with the first twelve built with open vestibules for summer weather. Later Rhodes Curry cars were built between 1898 and 1905, with all being scrapped by 1928 and replaced with Birneys. The first second-hand cars purchased by the HSR were ex-Worcester Street Railway cars from 1904, and later streetcars were sourced from the Ottawa Car Company of Ottawa, Canada, beginning in 1906, and the Nova Scotia Car Works in 1912. Of these cars, only one (1913 Nova Scotia Car Works car No. 60) was lost to the 1917 Halifax Explosion.

Birney Car No. 162 (ex-Toronto Civic Railways) is
captured in this 1940s color view on the "4-Oxford Street" line.
(Bill Volkmer)

    The Birney invasion began in earnest in 1920, when the 1919 order to the American Car Company of St. Louis, Missouri, USA, was fulfilled. After this, ten used Birneys from the United Railways & Electric Company of Baltimore, Maryland, USA were purchased in 1926 to pack the rosters a little more, with No. 126 of this order being destroyed in the V-E Day riots of 1945. Other Birneys, new and old, began to trickle in from here and there until by 1942, the last five Birneys from the Bakersfield & Kern County Electric Railway of Bakersfield, California, USA, arrived to bring the total number of Birneys to eighty-two. Unfortunately, what Nova Scotia failed to understand about the Birney was that one can pack as many trolleys on the streets as one likes, but that won't solve the Birney's low capacity and cheap, rattly ride quality. Despite efforts of local Haligonians to save the Nova Scotia streetcars of all types, the company decided they were better off for scrap instead and the entire roster was gone by 1949. 

Into the Valley of Death Rode the Last Streetcar

Nova Scotia's infamous "Crying Trolley" in 1949, with a tear-jerking epitaph written on its side.
(Nova Scotia Archives)

A piece of old tramway rail breaks through the asphalt like a
stubborn weed in Halifax, taken in 2018.
(Global News)

    March 26, 1949, 83 years since the first horsecars rolled in Nova Scotia. On that cold spring day, the last streetcar, Birney No. 157 (ex-Cape Breton Electric, originally ex-Citizens Traction Company, Oil City, Pennsylvania, USA) ran down Barrington Street for the last time. For the special event, NSLP decorated No. 157 with a papier-mache crying face, and signs along its side reading "GOOD-BYE, MY FRIENDS, GOOD-BYE". It was decided by the NSLP to replace its aging trolleys with trolley buses just a few months prior, and an order to Canadian Car & Foundry of Montreal, Quebec, meant that when No. 157 pulled into the Water Street Carbarn for the last time, that brought an end to the trolleys altogether. Tracks were paved over, new wires were hooked up, and trolley buses ruled the roost until New Years Day, 1970. After this, the city of Halifax took over public transit service from NSLP and began running all-diesel buses to this day. The NSLP was eventually taken over by the Government of Nova Scotia and is, today, a shell company with its assets leased to the Nova Scotia Power Corporation by 1973.

  

Thank you for reading today's Trolley post, and watch your step as you alight on the platform. My resources today included a Skyrise Cities article on the Halifax Street Railway, a Global News article of HSR track being dug up during roadworks, a CBC News article of the same topic, a Halifax Transit article on "The End of the Street Railway", and the archives of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association, better known as Exporail. The trolley gifs in our posts are made by myself and can be found under “Motorman Reymond’s Railroad Gif Carhouse”. On Thursday, we hop into mainline Canada and look at the old Montreal Tramways! For now, you can follow myself or my editor on Twitter, buy a shirt or sticker from our Redbubble stand, or purchase my editor's self-developed board game! It's like Ticket to Ride, but cooler! (and you get to support him through it!) Until next time, ride safe!