In 2021, the Hantsport Gypsum Company was formed to purchase & reopen the old Fundy Gypsum mines southeast of Hantsport, and when deciding between a long conveyer belt & reopening the old Windsor & Hantsport Railway between the Mantua mines & the dock in Hantsport, made inquiries about putting the railway back into service.
The LT&L, leaping at the chance to reactivate another no-hope railroad branch, purchased the W&H, then rebuilt and electrified the the section between Mantua & Hantsport (Windsor to Windsor Junction had passed back into the hands of the Canadian National and had been (even more) unmaintained for 12 years; Hantsport to New Minas was still owned by the W&H, but it is in extreme disrepair due to large chunks of it being illegally converted to a rail trail. A few of the formerly online shippers are politely interested in getting rail service back, but the railroad would need to reclaim & rebuild either the Windsor to Windsor Junction or Truro to Mantua lines, so the LT&L said it would be undoable without a large construction grant from Nova Scotia.
(This is why the line was electrified; a short isolated railway is easier to keep running with electric power, and the extra CA$15 million to put up electrification was less than half the cost of rehabilitating this line)
The operational stub of the W&H was still officially a common carrier, but it was renamed to the Hantsport Mineral Railway because of what it moved for its only customer at that time.
Reactivating the line from New Minas to Windsor Junction
In 2024, the HMRY (with backing from the LT&L) purchased the out of service line from Windsor to Windsor Junction for railbanking, and then in 2026, started to rehabilitate it (as well as Hantsport to New Minas) as a condition of the United Railways Trust merger. (This section of line is not intended to be electrified, at least not yet, but will be operated by a pair of newly-remanufactured DL3c locomotives.)
Aside from the Frito-Lay facility in New Minas, a wallboard factory has been set up in Windsor that agreed to use the railway to ship wallboard to distributors in Halifax, which gives the railway a whopping 2500 carloads of traffic in addition to the mineral traffic from the Windsor mines to the Hantsport reload.
Renaming the railway
As part of the extension of the railway, the HMRY has announced that it is to merge with the CPR’s Dominion Atlantic Railway as soon as the New Minas to Windsor Junction line is put back into service – the CPR kept the corporate shell of the railway intact after it divested the physical assets of the DAR, and as part of the corporate shuffle post-merger transferred the DAR into the hands of the Groupe Ferroviaire Murmuration), which intends to reactivate the original name asap.