North Street Station (Halifax, Nova Scotia)

The station was functional and without ornamentation as well as inconveniently located two miles from downtown Halifax, connected by a horse-drawn street railway.

[3] The station followed the Second Empire architectural style with a mansard roof, a large central clock tower and elaborately decorated dormers.

The main station structure was 113' x 50' with walls of decorated pressed brick rising from a granite base.

The station was the first departure point for such famous named trains as the Ocean Limited in 1904, the Maritime Express and the Flying Bluenose.

Following the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912, numerous private cars of the wealthy filled the special spur beside the station as wealthy families arrived in hopes of identifying and claiming bodies of their loved ones and so many reporters congregated that the station installed extra telegraph lines for their use.

Plans announced in 1912 for a much larger combined passenger station and ocean liner terminal in Halifax’s South End.

Construction of the tracks, piers and terminal grounds in the south end had just begun when World War I erupted in 1914.

While track work slowly continued towards the site of the south end terminal, the North Street Station remained the gateway to Halifax and saw the heaviest use in its history.

Although numerous accounts of the Halifax Explosion erroneously state that the North Street Station was destroyed, it was only damaged, albeit seriously, and quickly resumed service.

More significantly, two miles of the approach tracks to the North Street Station were deeply buried in debris and blocked by wrecked railway equipment.

[10] Despite its battered exterior, the North Street Station served for another year of intense passenger traffic as the fighting drew to a close and troops returned home following the Armistice on November 11.

However, the heavy wartime traffic highlighted the limited size of the station's terminal tracks, already noted before the war.

[11] Although the North Street station saw a few months of sporadic use for freight and special passenger trains, it was demolished sometime in the 1920s.

Today the site of the station is a parking lot opposite the main gate to HMC Dockyard just north of the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge where it crosses Barrington Street.