years during the North American housing construction boom. Prior to Hantsport's expansion, gypsum had also been hauled farther west to the Annapolis Basin at Deep Brook, however shipping operations were consolidated at Hantsport in the post-war years. In 1978, financial responsibility for the Halifax-Yarmouth passenger services was transferred to the federally owned Crown corporation Via Rail from the DAR/CPR. The Windsor-Truro mixed train passenger service on the Midland, which had survived as the last mixed train on the CPR and one of the last mixed trains in North America, was abandoned in 1979 after being deemed non-essential, reducing the Truro branch line to light freight status. Passenger service on the DAR began to rise, particularly after a 1983 schedule change which provided a daily return trip to Halifax from all points on the line, as well as improved connections to other Via trains at Halifax. Via also introduced refurbished Budd RDCs, and began a modest promotional campaign which included reviving the name Evangeline, drawing on Acadian history, a longtime focus of DAR travel. By 1984, Via reported that traffic in its Halifax-Yarmouth service had quadrupled to an average of more than 100 passengers per trip, eclipsing most of the decline experienced in previous decades. The Evangeline would continue operating until January 15, 1990, following a massive cut in funding to Via's branch line services ordered in the 1989 federal budget by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's government. Abandonment proceedings for the Kentville to Yarmouth portion of the line were commenced by CP with in three months of the VIA cuts. Railway decline in southwestern Nova Scotia In 1981, Canadian National Railway, successor to the Halifax and Southwestern Railway, abandoned its trackage which connected to the DAR at Yarmouth and Middleton. On May 22, 1986, the DAR abandoned its tracks between Truro and Mantua, just east of Windsor where it continued to serve a gypsum quarry. In 1988, CPR announced that all of its money-losing services east of Montreal would be grouped under a new internal marketing division called Canadian Atlantic Railway (of which the DAR was one component, along with CPR properties in New Brunswick, Maine, and the Eastern Townships of Quebec). The fate of any possible resurgence in freight and passenger traffic on the tracks west of Kentville was sealed with the construction of final links in the all-weather Highway 101 between Kentville and Yarmouth in the mid to late