Engineers at Heritage Park have been working for several years to restore a CP Rail steam crane from the 1920s and will demonstrate its power this weekend at Railway Days.
Crews will fire up the boilers on five steam powered machines for the event including the park’s two locomotives, a steam tractor, steam roller and the crane.
The crane was built in Milwaukee and worked in the Calgary, Lethbridge, Crowsnest Pass and Field before it was retired. It was brought to Heritage Park in the 1970s where it sat untouched for several years.
“It’s a big, ugly piece of steal and nobody wanted to work on it , I guess, so it’s not as sexy as a locomotive or a coach,” said Brian Manning, Chief Engineer. “I’ve seen worse come to life.”
Manning and an army of volunteers started restoring the crane in 2008, thanks to a $30,000 grant, and it is the only one currently operating in Canada.
“We had to ship the old boiler down to Minnesota, use it as a pattern and have a new one made. Shipped back to Calgary, we finally got the boiler back in 2016. Of course, we had to fit the grates, we had to fit all the externals on it and that boiler fits in the crane like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle,” he said. “We did a lot of work to it. The engines were pulled apart, everything in that thing was pulled apart and inspected and then put back together again, the clutches, the brakes, everything for the boom.”
The total cost of the restoration project was between $45,000 and $50,000 but Manning says it was worth it.
“Where else are you going to see it? You take a look at it now, it’s just a big, black chunk of steal with a wood house on it but if you come back on the weekend when we’re running it, it’s alive,” he said. “Something about steam, it gets you. Every day is different. To bring an artifact like this back, especially so rare that it is. You sit in there and you try and figure it out, there’s no operational book for it, nothing to tell you what does what. The guys that put it away, thank you, they wrote on the handles in chalk what they were so a lot of it is still a learning curve but you can only imagine the two guys working that thing out in the middle of the mountains, years ago, and now we’re reliving that kind of thing, so yeah, it’s worth it.”
Ben Brown is the assistant chief engineer and says he enjoys bringing history back to life.
“We do a lot here, on the fly, kind of behind the scenes and if we're doing our job right nobody notices, Railway Days is an opportunity for us to show off and to say this is what we do, this is what we work so hard to do and what we pull off for an incredible guest experience,” he said.
The team also worked on the 1912 steam roller and was able to get it up and running this spring.
The roller was used for road construction in Fernie and it is also the only one in Canada that is operational.
Railway Days is on at Heritage Park this weekend. For more information, click HERE.
(With files from Kevin Fleming)
