The motor vessel Abegweit was the name for two different icebreaking railway, vehicle, and passenger ferries which operated across the AbegweitPassage of Northumberland Strait, connecting Port Borden to Cape Tormentine between 1947-1997.
The first MV Abegweit was laid down as hull 144 in November 1944 and was launched in 1946 at the Marine Industries Limited shipyard in Sorel, Quebec.
MV Abegweit was used as a cargo vessel to haul Marine Atlantic equipment located at Borden and Cape Tormentine to the corporation's dock and storage facilities at North Sydney, Nova Scotia to be used on its Cabot Strait service.
Early talk of a fixed link (as it is called) can be traced to George Howlan who called for construction of a railway tunnel beneath AbegweitPassage at the same time as a railway was being built across the province in the 1870s.
All major components were lifted from the Amherst Head staging facility, transported, and placed in AbegweitPassage using the HLV Svanen, a Danish-built heavy lift catamaran, which during the construction of the fixed link, was reportedly the tallest man-made structure in the province.
Following the placement of the final major component and completion of the bridge structure in AbegweitPassage on November 19, 1996, HLV Svanen returned to Denmark for use in construction of the ÃÂÃÂresund Bridge.
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