Elgin County Railway Museum

St. Thomas sits on the Lake Erie plain of southwestern Ontario, roughly 29 km (18 miles) south of London, and has called itself the Railway City since the nineteenth century. The reason stands on the north side of the city centre: the Canada Southern Railway pushed its main line through in 1872 as a flat, fast bridge route across the Ontario peninsula, and built its headquarters and passenger station here between 1871 and 1873 to the Italianate designs of the Canadian architect Edgar Berryman. The Canada Southern later passed to the Michigan Central Railroad and in turn to the New York Central. The Elgin County Railway Museum occupies what all that traffic required: the Michigan Central locomotive repair shops, completed in 1913 a few hundred metres east of the station.

The shop building is as much the exhibit as anything inside it. It runs to about 52,000 square feet (4,830 m²), still laid out as the repair shop it was built to be, and a transfer table — the flat car on rails that shuffled locomotives sideways between repair bays — survives on the property. When the plant opened, the St. Thomas Daily Times reported that it ranked the city among the leading railway divisional centres on the continent for equipment; at its peak the shops employed more than 400 people. Traffic through St. Thomas fell away over the following decades, and scheduled passenger trains stopped calling at the Canada Southern station in the 1980s.

Canadian National and Canadian Pacific were the last railway owners of the shops. The museum moved into the building in 1988 and was incorporated the following year, then spent two decades as an occupant before buying the property outright — a purchase funded in large part by five summers of Thomas the Tank Engine events that drew tens of thousands of visitors, and completed at the end of 2009. Fifteen acres of the surrounding railway lands came with it.

Nothing inside is photographable while the building is shut, which leaves the exterior and the surrounding railway lands as the only subjects for now: the 1913 shop frontage, the fifteen acres of former Canada Southern property, and BX Tower at the crossing.

When the shop floor reopens, its draw is scale and light rather than any single vantage point — a working locomotive repair building with 5700 standing on it. The museum has for years rented that room out for wedding, engagement and family portraits precisely because of the 5700 backdrop and the industrial setting; enquiries go to operations@ecrm.ca.

Two railway subjects nearby are open right now. The Canada Southern station, 108 m (354 ft) long and 11 m (36 ft) wide, is about 300 m east-to-west along the same railway lands. The St. Thomas Elevated Park, 2.2 km (1.4 miles) west, puts you on the deck of a 1930 Michigan Central steel bridge 425 m (1,395 ft) long and 28.3 m (93 ft) above the Kettle Creek valley, open dawn to dusk.

The centrepiece is Canadian National 5700, a class K-5-a Hudson built by Montreal Locomotive Works in November 1930. Canadian National owned only five 4-6-4s — 5700 through 5704 — against the sixty-five Canadian Pacific eventually rostered, and they spent their careers on passenger trains working out of Spadina roundhouse in downtown Toronto. 5700 came off the roster in 1960 and reached St. Thomas in 1988. It is the locomotive visitors climbed into, and the one the museum puts behind wedding parties.

Beside it stands a genuine oddity: Canadian Pacific 8921, the Empress of Agincourt, the only RSD-17 Montreal Locomotive Works ever built. Delivered in 1957, it went out on loan to Canadian Pacific as 7007, passed to Canadian National for testing as 3899, spent time on the Pacific Great Eastern as 624, and was finally bought by Canadian Pacific in 1959 and renumbered 8921. It earned its nickname by spending so much of its working life sidelined in CP's Agincourt yard near Toronto. Truck problems that could not be repaired forced its retirement in 1995; it was donated to the museum in 1997 and cosmetically restored in 2007.

The electric side of the collection belongs to the London and Port Stanley Railway, the interurban that carried Londoners down to Lake Erie. Car 14, built by the Jewett Car Company around 1917, is preserved here, along with L&PS L1, a General Electric boxcab electric locomotive dating from about 1915. Diesel is represented by CN 9171 — built as an EMD cab unit for Grand Trunk Western as 9013, rebuilt in 1973 and retired in 1989 — and by Wabash 51, a 43-ton General Electric switcher the museum calls Tillie.

Rolling stock fills out the rest: CN Jordan spreader 51041, CN baggage car 7074, Pullman troop sleeper 8367, the Pullman sleeper 10075 Cascade Lane, Grand Trunk Western caboose 77137 and Norfolk & Western caboose 555020.

Nothing, for the moment. The Elgin County Railway Museum suspended operations on 7 January 2026 because of building-related issues in areas outside the public galleries; the museum was explicit that the problems had not affected visitor safety at earlier events and operations. The building is closed to the public, to members and to volunteers alike, with staff admitted only for essential purposes. The museum's own visitor page now states that it expects to remain closed until summer 2028, and its events calendar lists nothing.

What the closure has interrupted is a museum built around three rooms. St. Thomas: The Railway City opens the visit with displays on how the city earned the name, which lines ran through it, and how railway work was a way of life rather than simply a job; the museum rotates fresh artefacts into those cases each season. The Rolling Stock Gallery is the shop floor itself. History in Motion is an HO-scale layout twenty years in the building by volunteers, modelling southern Ontario between Windsor and Niagara Falls in the era when steam, diesel and electric railways were all still competing — the Michigan Central shops themselves are on it, along with the car shop, the Canada Southern station, the roundhouse and turntable, the Wabash Railroad yard, the London and Port Stanley Railway and the Port Stanley Incline Railway. A Wall of Fame carries thousands of plaques naming railway workers.

Visitors before the closure typically reported spending forty-five minutes to a little over an hour, and consistently singled out the volunteers. Children could climb into the caboose and the steam engine and work buttons that ran signal lights and bells. One caution for whenever the doors reopen: the museum's last published note on the Rolling Stock Gallery said only two pieces of rolling stock were open to enter, L&PS car 14 and the Grand Trunk Western caboose. BX Tower, the c.1910 interlocking tower at the crossing of the Canada Southern and the L&PS, is owned by the City of St. Thomas and opened by the museum only for a small number of special events or by appointment.