Elgin County Railway Museum
225 Wellington Street N5R 2S6 Saint Thomas, ON, Canada

It is new years eve and we are about to transition out of 2020 and into 2021. We would like to take a moment and say thank you to our wonderful community for supporting ECRM during this rollercoaster of a year. We truly appreciate the donations, volunteers and community support during one of the most unpredictable and hard years in our history. Thank you, thank you, thank you and happy new year!

Thank you to everyone who participated in our auction, and thank you to all the people who helped make it happen! It allowed us to raise funds to support our re-housing project and 20% of the funds will go directly into the collection, which will allow us to continue to maintain and preserve our amazing artifacts!

The staff have been working hard to put together our newly cleaned and painted baggage car. We have new panels, new exhibits, and a new interactive postcard activity! We can't wait to be open so we can share it, but here is a little sneak peak...

Now that our auction has wrapped up we are focusing on our collection. Yesterday we went through and began labelling newly accessioned metal artifacts like hat badges, stamps and keys. Any guesses for how we attached the accession numbers?

Today is the last day to get your bids in for our online auction. Bidding ends at 5:30pm! https://shackeltonauctions.hibid.com//elgin-county-railw/

Today we are doing an "Ask us anything" post! We want to hear from you. What questions do you have that you have for us? What is the thing you have always been curious about in a museum but didn't know who to ask? Let us know in the comments!

Today is the day, our auction is live! Check it out at this link: https://shackeltonauctions.hibid.com//elgin-county-railw/. We are also excited to announce a walk-through viewing of auction objects on Saturday November 28th! We will be open from 8:30am - 11:30am for our members and volunteers and from 12:00pm - 4:00pm to the public. If you have any questions follow this link for full details and information: https://ecrm5700.org/auction/

We are very excited by the progress in the Baggage Car! The staff has been hard at work with cleaning and painting the shelves. We are just about ready to put together some exhibits for everyone to enjoy and explore! What do you think of the colour we chose?

Our Auction Preview is tomorrow! We invite ECRM members and volunteers from 8:30am - 11:30am and the public from 12:00pm-4:00pm. Please go to https://ecrm5700.org/auction/ for full details on COVID-19 restrictions and regulations for the event.

Have a happy and safe Halloween everyone!

We are happy to announce that our online auction will be open from Monday November 16th until Monday November 30th. The link for the auction will be available on our website and social media starting on Monday, and we will be releasing details about a walk-through viewing in the coming days. Stay tuned!

We will be hosting an auction preview on Saturday November 28th for anyone wanting to see the items in person. Open from 8:30am-11:30 for ECRM members and volunteers and 12:00pm to 4:00pm for the public. COVID 19 restrictions will be in effect. Details at https://ecrm5700.org/auction/

Have a safe and happy holiday!

There is still time to pick up the railway lover in your life a gift from our online store before Christmas! Follow the link to check out all the cool products we offer! https://ecrm5700.org/shop/

The holiday season is fast approaching, and ECRM has a great COVID friendly shopping option for the train lover in your life! Our online store is up and running, meaning you can shop our gift shop for all kinds of rail related merch!

Today we are answering our question of the week, and it is a really good one! We have had multiple people asking about when we will be re-opening. As of right now, we are hoping to be open again in the New Year, but it depends on what kind of COVID-19 restrictions are in place at the time, and how far along we are in our collections re-housing project. We want to be able to share all our new and exciting updates with you in person, and we will be working hard to make sure we can re-open soon! Keep checking in, we will post updates on our social media and our website. PS: Do you like our new sign??

Check out this article in the Toronto Star about our ongoing auction!

This is our History in Motion room. It is volunteer built and volunteer run, and while it hasn't been open much this year because of COVID-19 restrictions, it has to be maintained! Our volunteers work hard to continuously dust the tracks, maintain the model trains and make changes and additions to the layout to keep it new and exciting for visitors. We hope to be able to open the History in Motion room in the new year!

Let's look at our collections policy! What is a reason to de-accession an artifact, and what is the process we follow to ensure we are making the best decisions for the museum and the collection?

As promised, here is another photo of one of the improved areas of our collections room! We have been lucky enough to receive a grant, which we used to buy a printer/scanner for our large blueprints and documents. This will allow us to digitize most of our collection! Fun fact: It was too big to be brought up the stairs and through the door, so volunteers and staff had to bring it through the window!

Continuing with our theme of preservation this week, here is how we store protect our textiles in the collections room! We moved our hats, quilts, ties and fabric out of smaller acid free boxes, and into large, flat boxes protected with plastic and tissue! #organized #protected

Thank you to everyone who has participated in our auction. You still have plenty of time to look through and bid on some interesting pieces! We are also only 5 days away from our walk through viewing, don't miss out! https://shackeltonauctions.hibid.com//elgin-county-railw/

We had a question about one of our CPR Conductor Hats! We do not have an exact date for this artifact, but it would have been made after 1949, which is when Stokes Cap & Regalia Ltd (the manufacturer) was incorporated. In order to keep it in good condition, we have our hats protected in acid free tissue paper, and stored in an acid free textile box. An at home solution if you are looking to store a textile artifact would be to store it in a large plastic Tupperware container with a cloth bag of crushed chalk. The chalk helps keep moisture out so the hat will stay mold free, and the plastic box will protect it without damaging the fabric!

One question that might come to your mind is why exactly we are hosting our upcoming auction instead of keeping all of these cool and fun items in the collection. It is a great question, with a lot of different answers. Check out the image for more info.

Have you ever wondered how the trains couple together? This is our Wabash engine (Tillie) and one of our boxcars getting linked together. Our volunteer Rob has hand signals to show the engineer driving Tilly what is happening, and when they are hooked and ready to go!

This is the more exciting side of our re-housing project! We are moving in, and cleaning out, the boxcars that are housed on our rail yard! We have gone through three of four so far, and each one we open has some surprises for us. Most of what we are cleaning and organizing is not part of our collection, but was donated to us to use as part of our 'working museum' mandate. Some of these pieces we are planning on accessioning into the collection, and others we will be including in our upcoming community auction.

We had some great questions last week! Q: Will we be running our Thomas event again? A: As of right now we don't have any plans to host a Thomas event in the future, and with COVID everything is on hold. If this changes we will post about it to make sure everyone knows!... Q: How much does the L&PS L1 weigh? A: The L&PS L1 weighs 60 tons! Thank you to everyone who submitted a question! If you have a question for us to answer in our Question of the Week posts feel free to comment them here or send us a message!

Today we are working on re-packaging and moving the china and glassware in our collection! ECRM was lucky enough to receive grant funding for collections maintenance, and with that money we have purchased new collections materials. One fun fact that you might not know is that in order to keep objects protected, they need to be wrapped and stored in acid free materials, so they are not eroded or degraded over time. Here we are wrapping each piece in acid free tissue paper, and putting them into coroplast boxes. The boxes are them labelled with the new location number, and a list of all the accession numbers for the objects in the box.

Today we would like to send a massive thank you to our wonderful team of volunteers. They are a crucial part of the museum, and we appreciate all their dedication and hard work!

There has to be a system right?? There is! Accession numbers. These little numbers are put on artifacts that we accept into our collection, and are recorded in our database so we can access all of the information on that artifact. They are recorded by the year they were accessioned, the 'lot' number for that year and the number of items in that lot.

We want to hear from you! What kind of museum things are you curious about? What have you always wanted to ask a curator? Let us know in the comments below or send us a message, we will be answering weekly!

Where do we keep our collection pt 2 of 2. These are a new addition to the museum, and we are very excited! We now have four new shipping containers that will provide a safe and waterproof space for our less fragile artifacts, such as cast iron tools, lanterns and oil cans.

Today we would like to highlight one of our community partners, Jackpot City St. Thomas! They have been operating in St. Thomas for more then 30 years and through their services have raised over $15 million for regional charities. Our partnership with Jackpot City helps to fund many important projects at ECRM, and we are just one of 85 other charities and non-profits that are supported by their program. #Jackpotcityentertainment #jackportcitystthomas #goodtimesforyougoodtimesforyourcommunity

This is our Collections Room! It's messy right now because our re-housing project has begun! This is where we store our fragile artifacts, such as wood, paper and textiles. We can keep this room a consistent temperature, and it is dry which keeps our items safe, and mold free!