History
This summertime fast luxury train was the premier passenger service on the Dominion Atlantic Railway. It began in 1891 when the "missing gap" between Digby and Annapolis Royal was completed linking Halifax and Yarmouth by rail for the first time. This created an opportunity for a fast luxury service aimed at American tourists connecting Halifax with passenger steamers at Yarmouth. The name Flying Bluenose combined two earlier trains of the Windsor and Annapolis Railway, the Flying Acadian and the Bluenose.
The name was taken from an affectionate nickname for Nova Scotians and predated the name of the famous racing schooner Bluenose by many years. The Dominion Atlantic purchased the first Pullman parlour cars in all of Canada, the "Haligonian" and "Mayflower" for the run. After the Canadian Pacific Railway purchased the Dominion Atlantic in 1912, buffet observation cars were added, carrying the Dominion Atlantic's "land of Evangeline" herald on drumheads. The train successfully tapped a growing tourism market from New England and was an immediate success. It was joined by the New Yorker in the 1920s, a similar fast summer-only train which connected to New York steamships at Yarmouth. However a steep decline in travel during the Great Depression eroded the market for the Flying Bluenose and it was cancelled about 1936. Equipment and services were transferred to the Dominion Atlantic's daily fast passenger trains which continued many of the traditions of the Flying Bluenose such as open observation cars, fresh Digby scallops and flower arrangements from the Grand Pre memorial gardens. VIA Rail's Evangeline Dayliner maintained the route of the Flying Bluenose until 1989, minus the luxurious elements of the older train.
Read more about this topic: Flying Bluenose
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“They are a sort of post-house,where the Fates
Change horses, making history change its tune,
Then spur away o’er empires and o’er states,
Leaving at last not much besides chronology,
Excepting the post-obits of theology.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)