Dominion Atlantic

Company History: The DAR was created with the 1894 merger of the Windsor & Annapolis Railway and the Western Counties Railway. The DAR ran between Yarmouth and Halifax, Nova Scotia. The company logo included a portrait of the character Evangeline from the Longfellow poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie. Canadian Pacific, looking for a friendly route to the port of Halifax, leased the DAR in 1911 but operations continued under the Dominion Atlantic Railway name. Like their parent CPR, DAR opened hotels and steamship lines. Most operations were dieselized in 1959 with the arrival of ten SW1200RS’s. These units were lettered for Canadian Pacific and thus began the slow change in status to that of “paper railroad.” The DAR continued to exist as a paper railroad until Canadian Pacific sold it in 1994 to Iron Road Railways who resumed operations on the remaining portion of the line under the Windsor & Hantsport Railway name.

Successor/Parent History: The WHRC was launched in 1994 by the Iron Road Railways shortline group to take over operation of the remaining segments of Canadian Pacific’s Dominion Atlantic Railway subsidiary. The 56 mile line linked Windsor Junction with New Minas, Nova Scotia but most of the traffic was on a branch from Windsor to Wentworth Creek and Mantua where a pair of large gypsum quarries were located. The gypsum moved in unit trains to docks on the Avon River at Hantsport. The river drains into the Bay of Fundy which is infamous for its huge tidal range. As a result, a special high speed ship loader which can load 10,000 tons of gypsum per hour is located at Hantsport so ships can limit their time at the dock to just a few hours. In 2010, the last customer on the WHRC which was the gypsum operation, closed and the last Windsor & Hantsport Railway train ran in 2011.

Brief History: Canada is a North American country stretching from the U.S. in the south to the Arctic Circle in the north. Major cities include massive Toronto, west coast film centre Vancouver, French-speaking Montréal and Québec City, and capital city Ottawa. Canada's vast swaths of wilderness include lake-filled Banff National Park in the Rocky Mountains. It's also home to Niagara Falls, a famous group of massive waterfalls.