Wainwright Rail Park

Introducing Kori Molloy

Wainwright Rail Park is pleased to announce the hiring of Grade 11 student, Kori Molloy as our summer season Assistant Curator. Kori will be at the park each day through the end of August. Her responsibilities will be to accession museum artefacts and to help maintain the park grounds, gift shop and museum. She will also assist with guided tours. We hope that this will be as rewarding an experience for Kori as it has been for our past STEP summer employees. Welcome to the park!

Wainwright has a significant railway past. Please join us!

Last year a lot was accomplished at Wainwright Rail Park. The trackwork for track # 2 has been completed, and locomotive 1404 will now be moved into position just east of the speeder shed. This will provide an easier location to complete cosmetic restoration work on the locomotive body. More ballast and tamping is still required on this track, along with side to side leveling, however CN track supervisors say it is safe for the movement of 1404 to its new place at the head of our short trainset.

A John Deere 870 tractor was purchased last Spring from Battle River Implements. The loader has been most useful doing odd jobs around the park, and the mower has given us a second unit for keeping up with the grass cutting. Cash donations from Wainwright Credit Union and CLC Trucking helped lower our costs. Max Rogers donated parts required for the tractor/mower, and Phil Valleau engineered a new mount for the belly mower so that it would ride a bit higher when cutting grass at Bunge.

Funding under the STEP program permitted us to hire Kendra Doetzel for the summer months. She proved to be an excellent employee, and took to trains like a duck to water. Her computer skills also made short work of the backlog of accessioning, cataloguing some 3000 items over the summer, including about half of the magazines in the library.

Once again, we wish to thank, Museums Alberta, MD Wainwright Rural Recreation Board, the Coleman Foundation and Bunge for all of their support.

For the coming year, several projects are on the agenda. Every effort is being made to have the pump car operational this summer. This should be a fun project.

We also looked at the UGG building, and some preliminary drawings have been made to convert this into a useable display building modified to look like a railway structure. We will need volunteer carpenters, or will need to get quotes on the work for inclusion under a grant.

Several enquiries have been made for tours this summer, and I look forward to a busy season.

The Crossbuck may be downloaded in Adobe PDF format using the links below. These are large files, and may take a few moments on slow connections. Downloading is recommended. Simply ‘right-click’ the link, and choose “Save Target As” to save a copy of the file on your local disk drive. Adobe® Reader® required for viewing.