New Brunswick Railway Museum

The New Brunswick Railway Museum occupies the former Hillsborough station and rail yard at 2847 Main Street, on the east side of Route 114 in Albert County, about 21 km (13 mi) south of Moncton. It is run by volunteers of the Canadian Railroad Historical Association, New Brunswick Division, a registered charity, and it holds the largest collection of railway equipment in the province — more than a dozen pieces of rolling stock, roughly half of it from passenger service and the rest freight, maintenance-of-way and service equipment.

Rails reached Hillsborough long before the museum did. The Hillsborough Plaister and Rail Road Company ran horse-drawn tramways here from 1851, hauling albertite and gypsum, and the Salisbury and Albert Railway worked the line from 1877 to 1982 — 105 years. Canadian National kept the subdivision alive to serve a gypsum quarry into the late 1970s. In 1982 a group of volunteers and retired railroaders took over about 20 miles (32 km) of the branch, from CN''s Moncton–Saint John main line at Salisbury east to just past Hillsborough, and founded the Salem and Hillsborough Railroad. Trial trains ran in 1983; the museum and the public excursions opened in 1984.

The S&H ran coach and dinner trains between Hillsborough, Salem and Baltimore until 2004, and the site has been a static museum since 2005 — the rails were eventually superseded by Highway 114. It was recognised as a Local Historic Place on 7 December 2009 and added to the Canadian Register of Historic Places on 9 May 2011. The main museum building is not the original station: an arson fire on 16 September 1994 destroyed the engine house, several locomotives and cars, and the offices with the division''s historical records. The replacement building was built in the idiom of a rural New Brunswick station — single-storey, moderately pitched gable roof, wrap-around awning with exposed rafters, double-hung windows — and the original section shed still stands beside it with its period maintenance equipment.

The collection is the subject. Interiors are the unusual opportunity — a caboose cupola, coach seating, and locomotive cabs you can actually stand in — so a fast wide lens and a willingness to work in low light matter more here than a long telephoto. CN 1009 is under cover on indoor static display, which means controlled light and no weather, but also no run-past and no smoke.

Outdoors, the yard gives you three-quarter views of 1754 and 8245 in S&H red and white, the 1913 ex-CPR 100-ton steam crane, the Jordan spreader and the double-ended snowplough — maintenance-of-way equipment that most museums scrap and that photographs beautifully in raking light. The named passenger cars carry their heralds and drumhead names, worth framing tight.

The replacement station building and the original section shed are the architectural subjects: single-storey gable roof, wrap-around awning with exposed rafters, double-hung windows. Shoot them from across Main Street to get the whole elevation. Summer mornings are the safer bet for outdoor work, since the yard sits open to the sky and midday sun on light-coloured equipment is harsh.

The centrepiece is Canadian National 1009, a 4-6-0 Ten-wheeler of class F-1-b built by the Montreal Locomotive Works in 1912, works number 51132. It started life as contractor''s engine O''Brien McDougall & O''Gorman No. 15 on construction of the National Transcontinental, became Canadian Government Railways 4529, then CN 1009. Class F-1 engines worked Maritime branch lines — including this one — until the bigger G-16-A 1100s arrived. Renumbered 1165 in 1957 to clear the 1000 series for new diesels, it made a farewell run out of Montreal in March 1958 and went to the CRHA museum at Delson, Quebec, where it got its old number back. It came to Hillsborough slung over two flat cars in November 1983, was rebuilt in the S&H shops, pulled the railroad''s inaugural train in May 1986 and worked excursions until 1998. It is a genuinely powerful small engine: 18 by 24 inch cylinders, 51 inch drivers, 160 psi, 20,735 lbf tractive effort, Stephenson valve gear, 89.1 tonnes (98 tons) in working order with 4,000 gallons of water and 8 tons of coal. It is now on indoor static display.

The two diesels are Montreal Locomotive Works products with unusually well-documented lives. CN 1754 was built in 1959 as CN 3847, an 1,800 hp unit on four-wheel trucks; in 1975 it received six-wheel A-1-A trucks salvaged from CN 1702 and was derated to 1,400 hp for light branch-line axle loading. It worked Prince Edward Island, Cape Breton, southwestern Nova Scotia and Halifax''s Rockingham yard before CN donated it in 1995 to replace the RS-1, No. 208, lost in the fire; it made the last 12 miles from CN''s Moncton shops to Pine Glen Road by road. CN 8245 is rarer still — an S-12 switcher of 1958, works number 82268, CN class MS-10P. Only eleven S-12s were built, all for CN, and 8245 was the last of the order. It carries the turbocharged six-cylinder 539 engine used in the MLW RS-1, weighs 232,000 lb and tops out at 60 km/h (40 mph). Retired in 1985 and stored at Gordon Yards in Moncton, it came to the S&H in 1989 in a trade for NW2 7941, which went for scrap, and wears S&H red and white applied in early 1992.

The passenger fleet is the part most museums cannot match. First-class car ex-CNR 4275 started as Grand Trunk 2335; coaches 5297 CRESCENT and 5229 CASCADE and colonist car 2737 CHESTERFIELD (originally Pullman 6175) sit alongside dining car 6733 SUNSET, lounge cars 1000 VALLEY VIEW and 1002 MOUNTAIN VIEW — both former CNR observation cars, Fort Francis and Fort George — and sleeper 2079 SAINT JOHN RIVER, born as New York Central 10161 Agawan River. The maintenance-of-way line-up includes a 100-ton ex-CPR steam crane of 1913, a Jordan spreader, a double-ended snowplough, and a ballast car built to the patented Improved Hart Convertible Car design.

This is a static museum, not a tourist railway: no train has carried passengers here since 2004. What you get instead is access. Several cars — a caboose, coaches and locomotives — are open to walk through, climb into and inspect from the inside, which is rarer than it sounds and is the reason the visit rewards a slow pace. The museum reckons a detailed tour takes slightly more than an hour.

The site is a working yard rather than a polished gallery. Volunteers set the artefacts out for the summer and put them away again in the autumn, so shoulder-season visitors may find displays incomplete; the museum says so itself. Buildings house the smaller artefacts, and the volunteers have been refurbishing a CN baggage car to add exhibit space, with a model railway planned for younger visitors in one half and displays on the local albertite, gypsum and petroleum industries in the other.

Expect quiet. Hillsborough is a village of a few thousand in rural Albert County, and this is not a high-traffic attraction — which for a photographer or a rolling-stock enthusiast is the point. Bring your questions: the people staffing the site are volunteers of the CRHA New Brunswick Division, several of them retired railroaders, and they are the ones who moved 1009 here on flat cars and rebuilt it.