14 April 2022
Hello and welcome to the cyber version of the Winnipeg Railway Museum. If you can’t come to see us then here’s how we can come to see you.
We’ve had websites before but this is the first time we’ve had one designed by a professional web developer. We asked Kyle of Cyberprairie to come up with a site to showcase our collection over the web. That way we can keep telling you the stories we were telling you when we were open. This is what he came up with and we’re delighted with it.
We’re also very excited about reaching people all over the world. We’re hoping to open again sometime in the future and we’d love to have you visit us for real when we do. Perhaps we’ll start producing video sometime soon so we can show you what railways are about and why they’re so important.
I miss the museum and I miss showing people around the place. I miss hearing some of the stories they tell me. I spoke with a man who was there with his young son when they were looking at some of our track building machines. It turned out that he worked for a contracting company in Alberta who built and maintained railway track so he told me some really interesting things about track.
He told me about two ribbons of steel supporting thousands of tons of train moving at 100 kilometers an hour. He told me about those steel wheels and how the weight of a railway car rests on tiny contact points where the wheel sits on the rail. He told me about how much energy the rails, the ties, the ballast and the roadbed have to absorb as that train rolls past. I learned a lot about track in those few minutes and, what he told me about track turns up in what I say and write when I’m telling the stories a railway museum should tell.
We’ll keep telling those stores through this blog and over this website. Please tell us what you think and what you would like to hear from us. You can find our email address at the bottom of the page or you can contact us through our Facebook page as well. We have Twitter and Instagram too so we hoping to get those up and running as well.
Keep in touch and let us know what you think.