Walking through the doors of the Palmerston Railway Heritage Museum is like walking into a 1940s and 1950s railway station.
There are railway maps, model trails, mannequins dressed in conductor uniforms and even a reconstructed women’s-only section showing the station’s history from its 1871 construction.
On Sept. 10 the museum held a soft opening to showcase the new renovations and rejuvenation of the space.
“We’re still working on it and it’s still in progress,” Minto Mayor George Bridge said. “We’re looking forward to going through the winter and starting off in the spring and really bringing the railway … history back.”
A Town of Minto steering committee was put together this summer to organize and assemble museum artifacts.
“The people whose family members were railroaders opted to share and donate material to the station rather than sell it because we did not have an acquisitions budget … and what you’re seeing is basically what the families of the railroad people in the area chose to let us have,” said Bob McEachern, who runs the museum.
McEachern was honoured at the opening with the presentation of a plaque indicating that the genealogy research room at the museum will be named after him.
“We need work on the research room,” Bridge said. “That’s the room that we haven’t quite got finished yet but we want to have a research room so people can come here, it will get people coming to Palmerston to research railways,” Bridge said.
“We’re going to have an amazing research room that will look back in history.”
McEachern will also help anyone interested in tracing his or her genealogy.
He explained the Palmerston station is one of the only railway stations still standing in Wellington County, which had at least 43 stations at one time.
“I think the mistake is that they think people will come here as an end in itself and I don’t think it is,” McEachern said.
“I think if they come here, my job, the group’s job is to encourage people to find out about their own area and how do you do it.”
He also said he hopes that in three years, when Wellington County celebrates the 150th anniversary of railways coming to the county, each station is represented in some way, such as a commemorative plaque.
“We can be the leader in helping the county work with this,” McEachern said. “I really think it will be nice if [county council] picked up on it and we talked to the Wellington County Historical Society about it.”
He predicts that within three or four years, riding the train will no longer be “novel” and will just be a way of life and people will want to know about its past.
“We have a railway heritage here and that’s wonderful but I think we need to expand it and people need to go back,” he said.
“It’s a crime that towns with the CN (Canadian National railway), CPR (Canadian Pacific Railway) lines going through them have just ignored their railway heritage.”
The museum also has outbuildings that it’s going to rahabilitate as well.
Before the museum was railway-centric it also displayed generic Palmerston content, which is now being stored on the second floor of the building and is not accessible to the public.
Though the museum will not be open regularly until next summer, personal or group tours can be arranged by contacting palmrailroad@wightman.ca, 519-343-4014 or 519-343-3435.
