Weekend Report: New Rolling Stock Appears on the Miniature Railway!

Click on each image for a closer look!
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We had another fine weekend at the Toronto Railway Heritage Centre with a steady stream of visitors all weekend long. Our volunteers did a terrific job despite the City declaring an "extreme heat alert" as temperatures reached the low 30's Celsius and into the 40's with humidity added into the calculations.
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Of special interest this weekend were the first appearances of two new pieces of rolling stock on our miniature railway as featured in these set of images.
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The first is a riding car especially designed to allow the engineer operating our mini-Whitcomb to ride behind it without having to be the first rider on the following passenger car. This car can also be used as a training car allowing the trainer to ride behind the student on one of our steam engines, for example.
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The second new piece of rolling stock is not actually completely new as Michael Guy built the first version several years ago as as a miniature railway dining car and ran it successfully on the Golden Horseshoe Live Steamers track in Hamilton, Ontario. It has now been rebuilt into a longer car using the same trucks that we now use for our miniature railway passenger car. In the attached images we find it in service feeding our staff!
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The Assiniboine Valley Railway, a miniature railway club in Winnipeg, Manitoba in western Canada have featured an annual dinner train at their track as shown in the photo in the lower right from their website.. Each time the train completed a loop of their track, a new course was served!
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Posting by Russ Milland; Pictures by Lance Gleich
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