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Originally Posted by Nouvellecosse
I actually never heard about the plan for a subway. They must have been expecting some pretty serious growth because while larger systems were needed in smaller cities before the rise of the automobile, that's... kinda pushing it.
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They were expecting the same kind of growth that happened in Toronto and Montreal, which would have made Halifax a city of 300,000 or so by 1930. I don't know what the route would have been. I've only seen contemporary reports in newspapers, not city plans. I assume it would have been a tunnel under Barrington that would have replaced a portion of the surface streetcar network. It probably would not have been like the 1950's/60's Toronto and Montreal systems that ran out to the suburbs, but it might have served as a nice starting point for a larger system. The larger systems also tended to have better economies of scale and more staying power. Maybe if Halifax were a bigger city it wouldn't have completely lost its streetcar lines or overhead power infrastructure.
Congestion was pretty bad in Victorian-era cities, and transit use was much higher. Halifax's transit today is nowhere near as good as it was even in the 1940's. The service interval for trams on Barrington was 90 seconds during WWII. There was also commuter rail that ran to Bedford around 1900 (the route was called "the Suburban").
The Malmo system looks a lot like a realistic "dream" system for Halifax, which would have a downtown underground portion that would transition to above-ground farther out. This is probably going to get more and more practical in the future too with battery-powered trains and mixed light/heavy traffic along rail lines. Hopefully it won't take decades for Canada to adopt these changes. There were old proposals to extend the South End rail line into downtown along Hollis Street, maybe underground, but this was not very workable with heavy diesel-powered trains.
There is also a North End rail line in Halifax but the last 2 km or so if it were turned into parking (you can see that long strip of parking running by the naval base). There used to be a passenger rail terminal at North Street that was destroyed in the explosion.
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