In rail time
An important part of this area’s history is being paid tribute
BROOKFIELD, N.S. — “It’s a beautiful old station,” Rod Norrie says of the old sandstone building that once served as the centerpiece of Truro’s Esplanade Street.
In 1972 Truro’s historic train station was taken down, replaced with retail shops and for Norrie, rail travel would never be the same.
That majestic station, however, has undergone a rebirth of sorts in Norrie’s Brookfield basement. He’s created an intricate 12-ft. scale model of the structure, complete with train tracks, old Acadia Lines buses and a backdrop of brick buildings showing downtown Truro as it was in the 1940s and ’50s.
It is a history Norrie is happy to pass on to his 14-year-old grandson, Nathan Kavanagh, who already shares his grandfather’s love of model railroading.
“I’ll tell you a story,” Norrie said. “We took Nathan on the train one time going to Montreal, and we were looking out the window in Truro and I said, ‘are you going to sleep on the train tonight Nathan?’ And before we got to North River, which is two miles that way, he had dozed off and was in bed on the train. He loved it.”
A ROYAL CONNECTION
Norrie has plenty of stories about the old station to pass along to his grandson, like the time a young British princess named Elizabeth came to Truro in 1951.
A throng of people greeted the soon-to-be queen and her husband Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, including a nine-year-old Norrie and all his buddies from Alice Street School.
“I think half the country was at the centre of town on the Esplanade. Every child from classes at school and Eleanor – my future wife – from Tatamagouche was there,” recalled Norrie. “Everyone was jammed in all day; you just stood there waiting for the train to arrive.”
Another renowned historic figure travelling by rail also made a top in Truro. In 1943, as war raged in Europe, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill passed through Truro on a special train on his way to Quebec City, where he met U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King. The wartime leaders gathered to plan the liberation of Europe that year.
On the train from Halifax, Churchill stopped briefly in Truro, taking the platform in front of a crowd that included Norrie’s older sister Margie. Norrie himself was still a baby at the time.
COMING HOME
As a young man Norrie frequently travelled to Quebec. There was lots of choice as 11 passenger trains ran through town every day, taking people to Halifax, Cape Breton, the Annapolis Valley and Montreal.
The sandstone station of Nor- rie’s youth was built over the foundation of the old wooden Intercolonial Railway Station, which burned down in 1911.
It was after this disaster and subsequent rebuilding that rail travel in Truro peaked. Thousands of soldiers shipping out from Nova Scotia passed through Truro on their way to Halifax, where they boarded troopships heading to Europe and the front lines.
Rail travel continued to grow in the 1920s and 1930s, despite the Great Depression.
Truro again became a convergence point for thousands of Canadian soldiers shipping out to Europe.
By the time Norrie was born in 1942, the nearby village of Debert was housing up to 50,000 soldiers, their troop trains trundling through Truro’s station on their way to Halifax.
Any soldiers who stopped in Truro would have seen the old Scotia Hotel, just across from the train station on Esplanade Street on Norrie’s scale model. Look carefully at the hotel’s redbrick façade, and one can see an unclad woman at a third-floor window – while men in sailor uniforms stand gawking below.
“That might be a lady of the evening,” quipped Norrie.
“It’s exciting and educational,” said Nathan of his grandfather. “It’s very expensive but me and him are really good it at. He fixes them, I run them. I buy them, I trade them, you name it – I can do anything.”
It stands as a fitting tribute to Truro’s railway heritage, which began when the railway from Halifax was first opened in December 1858.