I read your description about how you manually placed a timeline file on the new master but I can't quite figure out exactly what should go in there, I have no existing timeline files and I have no idea what one looks like. Can you give me some more details on how to create that file to get streaming replication working again?
I think the fastest way to get a timeline file is to initialize a new PostgreSQL cluster and promote it afterwards. Make sure you have archiving turned on and look at the archive destination after promotion. You will get a new .history file. Just copy this file to your master, renaming it to the timeline number the replica requires.
This is rather a hack than a proper solution though...