Loverna is a small hamlet in the Rural Municipality of Antelope Park No. 322, about 50 kilometres northwest of Kindersley, where Highway 772 meets Range Road 290.
The railway shaped the place. The Grand Trunk Pacific was completed in 1913, running from Biggar, Saskatchewan, toward Hemaruka, Alberta, and it played a big part in the local economy. The line was meant to be a through route, but the planned connection to another line under construction at the time, to Sponin, Alberta, was never finished. The track was lightly built and poorly maintained, so it could carry only boxcars and lightweight hopper cars for loading grain, and only special lightweight GMD-1 locomotives were allowed on it.
During the sweeping closure of uneconomic branch lines in the late 1970s and 1980s, the tracks west from Smiley through Loverna were shut down. Canadian Pacific Railway took over the remaining track from its connection at Dodsland to Smiley, but that section closed in 1996, and Loverna's population has declined since.
Loverna was once an incorporated village. On March 10, 2003, it was restructured as a hamlet under the authority of the RM of Antelope Park No. 322.
Written from Wikipedia’s article “Loverna” (CC BY-SA 4.0), and shared under the same licence.