All aboard….Next stop Revelstoke……

Only a three hour drive from Fairmont Hot Springs, up the Colombia Valley and over a few mountains we reached Revelstoke This location offers access to two national parks…..Mount Revelstoke National Park and Glacier ( the Canadian one ) National Park.

Revelstoke is on the other side of the ( historic) Rogers pass ( nothing to do with Rogers cable btw) The whole saga of the Canadian railroads and the monumental task of finding the route through the mountains for both the railway and the roadway is quite the tale….and a far more interesting portion of the history, discovery and development of Western Canada than I might ever have imagined…….and the not so distant past at that…..

Having settled ourselves in to Revelstoke RV campground…….

We took ourselves up to the gate at Mount Revelstoke National park….only to find to our dismay…even tho’ it was almost the middle of June…the snow pack on the road to the summit still had the top half of the road closed.

….and then the next day the rain started………so…intrepid explorers that we are…we spent part of the day at the Rail museum……seemed like the place to go in a railway town.

The Museum is a lovely building with bits of the old station incorporated into a new structure.

It’s a fascinating little spot…and we followed the history of just how crucial Revelstoke was to the railroad and thus the development of the western side of the country. The railroad made it possible to cross the mountains and to move freight and supplies that changed the west. Difficult to imagine the scale of the operation….or even the scale of the vision to build roadways across and through this terrain. Wintertime presents another range of issues with snow and dangerous avalanches necessitating the development of protective snowsheds for the rail line and road. There is a HUGE set up of a model train layout of the Revelstoke yard and some of the surrounding landscape….

The outdoor part of the museum is a cutting off the main switching yard….with the constant movement of huge trains all around (lots of loud metallic groaning and screeching..!!)

You can climb into the caboose…… its sparse utility tells a whole story about how spartan life was for the guys building these rail lines….

…and the inside part of the museum also has some full sized trains…..one of them purports to be the luxury tourist train that used to do the trek through the mountains……..again…utility seems more like the name of this game…!!..and I’m pretty sure British rail still uses that carpet LOL….

All in….a fascinating rainy-day activity…….

Extra pix.