Pillsbury Press: Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario

During our trip to Smiths Falls, ON we kept passing a train yard with antique train cars, the Railway Museum of Eastern Ontario. I looked at it as we were dashing to the Perth 5-mile kilt race or to Ottawa and think I want to touch the trains, to explore the history, to spend time thinking how much my dad would enjoy this, yet how much he would hate the nine hour drive across the border and struggle climbing in and out of the rail cars.

On our last full day, after walking around Smiths Falls one last time, we stopped in the museum just after opening. Admission is only $10CAD (which is less than $10US).

Right after handing over our credit card we were told a school group was about to arrive. I tried to hide my groan as I imagined dozens of grade schoolers running amok. I'm sure we could have said we'd come back later, but we stayed.

After taking a picture of the empty waiting room that features one of the benches that used to grace the Beaux Arts Ottawa train station, I popped into the side room to learn about how trains communicated with each other in the decades before cell phones. They used Morse Code. They passed notes on poles to trains as they passed through stations.

I was glad I took a picture because five minutes later the benches were strewn with Blues Clues and princess backpacks. I immediately recognized the lamps and bench from our tour of the temporary Senate building the day before.

By being at the museum the same time the students were there (their school year runs through to June 30), there were more volunteers on site.

John, our telegraph room docent, has the air of a retired telegrapher. He demonstrated the machine used to create telegrams. The sign on the way showed the difference between the American Morse Code vs. the International Morse Code. The international code used spaces instead of dashes, as I understand it.

A skilled telegrapher could type between 30 and 40 words a minute, an exceptional one could do 84 words a minute. Each word has multiple letters, and each letter multiple combinations of dots and dashes (or spaces). The last railroad telegraph was sent in 1968. The operator used the same phrase Samuel Morse used when he sent his first telegraph: "What hath God wrought?"

The words were put a piece of paper and put on a pole, or caught in a pole like the one on the left.

John was fascinating to listen to, and I wish I had my notebook as I don't remember most of what he said. Unfortunately he also seemed hard of hearing, so asking him questions felt like a Herculean task.

Brian was another docent we spent time with. As Don and I were looking inside a boxcar, he asked if we would be interested in using the hand car to help him give an elderly woman and her daughter a ride. In theory, he could do it alone, but he promised his wife he would no longer do so. Brian is a retired teacher (grades K-11). His teaching ability came through as he kept finding excuses to bump into us and tell us more about what was in front of our eyes.

The four of us pushed the car partway around the track and let the mother stand in the middle smiling and laughing. It was not hard work. Then again, we only did it for about 10 minutes and her joy was infectious.

The museum has a grain car. It was someone's job to climb on top of the grain and level it out into the corners. There are markers for how high the grain could go based on the type of grain before it became too heavy to pull.

Inside the same boxcar was a partial car. This is how cars were transported in the beginning when Henry Ford built most of the cars. The top (where passengers sat) shipped apart from the bottom. The engine was in a box that was a specific size because they turned into the floorboards of the one assembled car. This way more cars fit in the box car.

As we neared the boxcar, Don said "you've been in a boxcar before." My mind fled to the boxcar we walked through at the Holocaust Museum in DC a few months earlier. He had a happier memory, one that has escaped me again. If I think of it, I'll add it here to have a happier connotation.

Brian let Don sit on a bicycle-looking contraption that was built to literally ride the
rails. This one is a recreation that was assembled last winter in that room. Twist Don's arm to sit on a bicycle! Brian let me ring the bell that would have been in a train used to alert people of its arrival.

The museum has three cabooses that can be rented for a night to sleep in. Don thought about how much my dad would enjoy it. I thought about how hard it would be for him to climb in and out of, especially in the middle of the night when nature calls. the beds look terribly uncomfortable to me.

Now going for a ride in the dining car looked like fun. They have fancy tea sets and run the car a couple of times a month for special occasions, such as Mother's Day. Reminded me of the dining experience we had on the tramcar in Christchurch, NZ.

As I was telling Don I was ready to leave (after all, how many train cars can you really visit?) he asked if I saw the Dental Car. Umm..what? The dental car turned out to be the highlight of the museum. Just as the border crossing agents asked us what a kilt race was, the dental car is exactly what is sounds like: a traveling dentist office. The dental car traveled from small town to small town from 1951-1977 providing dental services for free to the school aged Canadian children in Northern Ontario. Adults could pay a small fee to also receive services.

Rather than inundate this page with images, visit this page to see the inside of the car. It had two bedrooms (one for the dentist, one for the nurse), a large examining room that looks eerily like the one I visit in the 21st century, a tiny waiting room, a small office, a kitchen, living room, and a bathroom.

Here are pictures of the other special trains: