At 90, Wetaskiwin man still chugging at train museum south of Edmonton

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Back in the day, back when eight passenger trains a day chugged through Wetaskiwin, Bill Wilson got his start as a telegraph operator.

The years from 1952 to now have sped by like a diesel locomotive. But at 90, the resident caretaker of the Alberta Central Railway Museum, about 86 km south of Edmonton, is as spry and engaged as the days when he tapped out birthday messages and bank transfers in Morse code.

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“I got my 80s in my rear-view mirror,” Wilson said with a grin.

The secret to his longevity?

“I left all my bad habits behind,” he said.

No rocking chair just yet for Wilson, who scrambles up the steep train steps to make sure the horn and whistle are ready to make the brief ride at the museum authentic.

“I’ll tell you what, if I just sat here watching it, I’d probably be pushing daisies. You got to keep busy, keep active, keep your mind going,” he said.

Wilson takes proprietary pride in the museum that sits on 10 acres his family donated from their farmland.

He and his late wife, Ellen, farmed grain there and raised three sons, before renting out the land and selling the dairy.

“Then we played trains,” he said.

A charitable organization in place for 32 years, the museum is devoted to preserving, conserving and interpreting Canadian Pacific Railway artifacts and history prior to 1965.

The moniker recalls an old railway that stretched from near Red Deer to just beyond Rocky Mountain House from 1913 until 1981.

The seasonal museum southeast of Wetaskiwin is run by a seven-member board, and certified by Alberta Transportation because it has a passenger rail service — albeit just a mile long.

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Ticket to ride

Back in 1891, a stage coach ride from Edmonton to Calgary took an exhausting five days, complete with overnight stops at forts.

Hand-hammered spikes on steel rails changed all that.

“When the railway went through, you could go from Edmonton to Calgary in 12 hours,” Wilson said.

“During the heyday of the passenger trains on the midnight runs, they had sleepers, and you could occupy the sleeper till eight o’clock in the morning in Edmonton or Calgary before you had to get off,” he said.

“They were going to stay there anyway, so you might as well finish your night of sleep.”

As the 20th century got underway, rail service picked up steam — and speed.

“The Dayliner ran between Edmonton and Calgary in three and a half hours. They did 90 miles an hour, with five station stops,” Wilson said.

No whistlestop in those days, Wetaskiwin was a busy station town, with a roundhouse.

The people-watching was a prime source of entertainment for locals.

“It would be kind of a thing for the people in town, they’d come down and meet the train, see who was getting on, see who was getting off,” Wilson said.

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“They didn’t have internet, not in those days, so it was word of mouth, right?”

At one point, there were 12 passenger trains a day through Wetaskiwin — four northbound, four southbound, two going east to Winnipeg and two going west.

But the full transition to automobiles and airlines doomed rail passenger service to antiquity, and it all petered out rather quickly.

“Nobody rode it, and you can’t run a train with 15 people on it,” Wilson said.

Family tree rooted in rails

The Wilsons have lived on the land there since 1892, when they arrived via the brand-new rail service.

“Our great-grandfather bought this land from the CPR. The CPR went through in 1891. We’ve been here a long time,” he said.

Bill Wilson’s father, George Wesley Wilson, started with the railroad in 1928 and retired in 1972.

The elder Wilson authored a memoir of train engineering — at 103.

“We’ve got some longevity in our family,” Bill Wilson said.

It was no surprise that Wilson initially headed for a railroad career.

“My dad was an engineer for 44 years, so we grew up in a railroad house, and the railway liked to hire family because you knew what was expected of a railroader,” Wilson recalled.

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To become a telegraph operator meant spending six months learning the telegraph key and Morse code.

“We had to copy 25 words a minute in those days, because everything was coming by a telegram. If you wanted to wish grandma ‘Happy Birthday,’ you sent her a telegram, because the phone was almost impossible. And if you could phone, it was expensive. It was cheaper to send her a telegram,” he said.

About the time teletype put an end to telegraphy, Wilson went back to farming full time.

A little help from his friends

A restored 1926 first-class observation-buffet sleeper, the Mount Avalanche, is named for a peak in Rogers Pass.

Complete with sofas, chairs and windows for spectacular backward views, she had been in Quebec, where she was used as a sleeping cabin with cots for crew before being stripped and refitted to historic specs.

Wilson showcases tracks of history in the elegantly restored gem, its flip-down berths and comfy seats.

“When you were travelling by train, you had the lower berth. You didn’t know who was in the upper berth, and whoever was in the upper berth, if he or she wanted out, she rang the bell and the porter brought the ladder so she could get down,” he said.

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“You had a curtain for your privacy,”

In its Art Deco glory, the streamlined Dayliner is the former self-propelled Rail Diesel Car (RDC) 91, renumbered 9108, that once hauled passengers around Ontario. It was the last of the RDCs — its sister train was donated to The Canadian Railway Museum outside Montreal.

In September 1984, she carried VIPs to a ceremony in Rogers Pass, B.C., to celebrate the railway’s double-tracking mega-project through the Selkirk mountain range, marking the first time a rail diesel car operated independently from Lake Louise to Revelstoke.

These days, the two cars are pulled through the countryside by a diesel locomotive donated by CPR.

The 1959 RS23 ex-CP 8015 is the only Montreal Locomotive Works (MLW) Alco design lightweight locomotive preserved in Canada, landing at the museum after carrying grain and freight on prairie branch lines.

For a special August event, three CPR locomotive engineers from Red Deer and a CPR mechanical engineer came to help make a success of the biggest public event since COVID-19 derailed things.

Enthusiastic nostalgia-seekers clambered aboard something of a time machine fuelled by curiosity about old days and old ways, savouring the gentle click-clack of 10 miles an hour (no metric system in rail world), the squeal of the wheels on steel, the sights of golden bearded wheat that will provide feed for farm creatures once it’s harvested, the borders of yellow tansy, planted by settlers who believed it was good for headaches.

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They marvelled at the second oldest standing grain elevator in Alberta, walked through the museum and the nearby schoolhouse from a bygone era, used an old-fashioned phone and tried their hand at telegraphy, and took in the layout of the 1930s Wetaskiwin railyard.

Those looking for a hayride-feel could board the Speeder, riding open-style behind the larger locomotive.

“They enjoy it. They can’t believe that you can drive nine miles out of Wetaskiwin and have a full-size train ride,” Wilson said.

Megan Tyner, a diesel mechanic from Edmonton, came to help with the museum’s triumphal post-pandemic return.

A Bill Wilson fan, Tyner said she’s not alone.

“He’s into everything, and still so spry and so interested in everything. He’s been checking everything over and making sure everything’s running good. We’re happy to help him out get it going,” she said.

“This has been a labour of love for many, many years.”

The Alberta Central Railway Museum will reopen on the May long weekend in 2025.

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