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After Genesee & Wyoming embargoed (and threatened to abandon, but was bought off by regular payments from the province) the Port Hawksbury to Sydney segment of the Cape Breton & Central Nova Scotia, many many attempts were made to get rail service going again (despite the woeful lack of traffic on the island) before provincial officials approached the LT&L and asked if – given that the Parsons Vale seemed to be picking up various no-hoper railways and trying to get them back on their feet – the railroad might be interested in talking to the G&W about purchase or a lease.

Now, a sensible railroad would have declined, but the LT&L had not become the most adventurous railroad in the Parsons Vale system for nothing. So the upper managements of both railroads, plus someone from the M&A department of the Parsons Vale Trust, spent a few months negotiating purchase of the line, and in fall 2021 transferred it to LT&L control.

The LT&L had no illusions that they could turn that line around promptly, if at all, but thought that trying to do it was easily worth the $25 million that the line cost (one thing about being a segment of a class-1-equivalent railroad is that there were stupid amounts of money rolling in, so $25 million – plus about $40 million to rebuild the line, was only about a 20th of the expected system profit for that year.) And who knows, maybe they could teach a horse to sing.

In 2022 crews worked from one end of the line to the other repairing approximately 100,000 washouts, 1,000,000 ties, and relaying some of the terminal trackage in the sydney area, and by 2023 trains on the new Cape Breton Railway were again carrying (far too little freight) to and from Sydney.