Railway museum on track for 29th season with new exhibits

The Niagara Railway Museum is spending its 2026 season restoring locomotives and assembling a donated 30-by-13-foot model railway it hopes to have chugging away by July.

The volunteer-run museum at 21 Warren Street in Fort Erie opened its 29th season two weeks ago with several active restoration projects and a newly assembled model of the National Pacific Railway donated by Darren Davis.

Davis’s father, Eric, spent 35 years building the 1:87 scale model, which became one of the best-known model layouts among Canadian railway enthusiasts on Facebook before the family donated it to the museum last year.

The National Pacific Railway model has more than 140 buildings, a six-foot scratch-built bridge, a mainline trestle 225 feet long and 110 feet high, two operating streetcar lines, a Petro-Canada refinery, and working traffic lights and neon signs.

The model has been disassembled, transported from Burlington and rebuilt piece by piece inside the museum shop.

Ken Jones founded the museum in 1994 with a small collection of documents and photographs. It has since grown into one of the larger railway collections in Ontario, holding four steam locomotives and ranking fifth or sixth in the province by collection size. The only other museum in Ontario with more than four steam locomotives is in Ottawa.

This season, one locomotive is receiving a full cleaning and repaint, the first time that work has been done on that engine in years. A second locomotive cab and two rail cars are also set to receive more attention.

“Being able to show something different when people come back is an important thing to me,” said Jones.

The museum also added several new members this year, and Jones said their involvement gives the organization more capacity to move restoration work forward.

Jones said the museum, and several private heritage groups across Fort Erie, share the same difficulty: volunteer shortages.

“And it’s harder to get younger people involved,” said Jones.

Jones said recently met with Clark Bernat, the Town of Fort Erie’s new manager of culture and museums, who oversees the Fort Erie Railway Museum a short distance away on Central Avenue.

He added that two families this season made return trips specifically because they discovered the Fort Erie Railway Museum was within walking distance of the Niagara Railway Museum.

“There’s four attractions right here, within two miles of each other, that’s a big draw right in town,” said Jones.

Jones said Bernat has agreed to open and staff the Fort Erie Railway Museum, which is generally closed to visitors during the off-season, for the Niagara Railway Museum’s RailDays event in September.

“It’s great for cooperation and great to get people into the town,” said Jones.

RailDays is planned to take place September 29. The museum is open Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. until October.

Stay Informed

Events, offers, contests, and breaking news, all delivered straight to your inbox.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser to complete this form.

Subscribe