page_title: Halifax and South Western Railway
section_title: Decline
hierarchical_section_title: Halifax and South Western Railway / Decline
caption_attribution_description: English: No more used rail tracks in west Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, east of the First Chain Lake. Tracks were used by the Halifax and Southwestern Railway. View towards Halifax peninsula. Deutsch: Nicht benutzte Eisenbahnschienen im Westlichen Halifax, Nova Scotia, Kanada, östlich des First Chain Lake. Die Schienen wurden von der Halifax and Southwestern Railway genutzt. Blickrichtung Halifax Halbinsel.
context_page_description: The Halifax and South Western Railway was a historic Canadian railway operating in the province of Nova Scotia.
  The legal name of this railway was the Halifax & South Western Railway, as is defined in various Acts of the Nova Scotia Legislature, such as 1902 c.1, Act respecting the Halifax & South Western Railway Co.. However, Halifax & Southwestern Railway is also sometimes also used.
  The H&SW was created in spring 1901 when William Mackenzie and Donald Mann approached the provincial government with plans to finish the abortive plans for a railway from Halifax to Yarmouth along the province's South Shore. For many years, the line had significant curvature throughout its length, a result of the rugged local topography, which earned it the moniker, "Hellish Slow & Wobbly".
context_section_description: CN passenger service ended on the South Shore on Saturday October 25, 1969, and its stations fell into disuse. The historic H&SW passenger station in Bridgewater was destroyed by an unexplained fire on December 22, 1982.
  CN's former H&SW lines on Nova Scotia's South Shore and in the Annapolis Valley were proving uneconomic by the early 1980s, even for freight service. In 1982, permission was given to abandon the far end of the mainline from Liverpool to Yarmouth as well as the branch line of the former NSCR line between Bridgewater and Bridgetown via Middleton, as well as the New Germany to Caledonia. Reduced to a line running from Halifax to Liverpool, CN depended on the Bowater paper mill and the Michelin tire plant, but even these customers were unable to keep the line generating positive income.
  By the late 1980s, CN was given permission to abandon the remaining line from Bridgewater to Liverpool as the Bowater pulp mill in Liverpool shifted its transportation to ocean shipping and trucks. At Bridgewater, CN built a small yard on the east side of the Lahave River and sold its extensive former yard property to a shopping mall developer. In the early 1990s, even that trackage was eliminated, as Michelin began to use trucks to service its plant and CN's last remaining customer in Lunenburg County was the forest products company at East River.
  In 1993 the former H&SW trackage was abandoned west of Halifax's Lakeside Industrial Park, leaving only a 7-mile spur as the last reminder of this once important railway network in southern Nova Scotia.  Called the Chester Spur in its employee timetable, CN freight operations to the Bayers Lake Industrial Park and Lakeside Industrial Park were focused on serving a cement depot, a scrap dealer and several other customers through a team track. In 2006, as part of its "Three-Year Rail Network Plan", CN declared its intention to discontinue service on the Chester Spur, this being the last remaining portion of the original H&SW trackage. The last freight trains operated on the spur west of Southwestern Junction through to the Lakeside Industrial Park in late 2007. The rail corridor was purchased by the Halifax Regional Municipality and by October 2009, rails at level crossings were lifted and paved over and by September 2010, all the remaining track of the CN Chester Spur had been removed and replaced by a rail trail (paved recreational pathway).
caption: Unused tracks of the H&SW in West Halifax, 2010. The track bed is now a multiuse trail.
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