Fast Freight

The Fast Freight leaves Digby in the early morning of August 26, 1956.

"The Fast Freight" was the DAR's official name for Train No. 100 and Train No. 99, the long-running overnight mixed trains from Yarmouth to Halifax. Both trains later became nicknamed the Midnight in western parts of the valley as they ran in the deep night hours.(1) In eastern parts of the valley, No. 100 remained known as the Fast Freight. Train No. 100 was the very first train of the day for many Annapolis Valley towns, arriving at dawn from Yarmouth where it had left the previous evening. It ran opposite to Train No. 99.

Allen Gibson wrote in his nostalgic book Train Time: "The first train of the day ran through Wolfville in the early hours of the morning. It had left Yarmouth the previous evening before, hauling just about anything and everything that could be attached to the engine. The railway knew the rain as No. 100. Passengers who sometimes waited long chill hours on station platforms knew it by other names, among which "The Fast Freight" possibly is to be preferred. Even that was a misnomer because it was neither fast nor freight. To be sure it hauled freight cars But it also had a baggage car, a passenger coach (in which people slept soundly in all many of uncomfortable positions) and a sleeping car (its passengers assuaging their feelings of guilt for having spent the night in comfort by insisting, "I never slept a wink, all that shunting and jolting. For many an early rising Acadia student, No. 100 was the first lap of a journey home. During the Second World War it was, for many a young soldier from nearby Aldershot Camp, the beginning of a journey to his country's battlefields."(2)

References

(1)(1) Doug Schaffner, post to DAR-DPI Forum, Dec. 19. 2009: http://www.dardpi.ca/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=188

(2) M. Allen Gibson, Train Time, Windsor: Lancelot Press (1973) page 21, 25.