A labour of love by volunteers and members of the Grand Falls-Windsor Heritage Society has restored a piece of the town’s history that was close to being lost forever.
The 1953 Plymouth switcher – a small locomotive engine – was used by the AND Company in central Newfoundland at the height of pulp and paper operations in the region.
Chair of Collections with the Grand Falls-Windsor Heritage Society, Brian Reid says the switcher was put into storage after it retired from service, and was eventually donated to the Trinity Loop amusement park by Abitibi Price in the 1980s where it was put on display.
When the park closed, the engine sat abandoned, becoming the target of vandals. Reid says the Heritage Society first tried to gain access to the engine in 2018, but that effort failed.
Before restoration (Jim Locke Facebook)
In 2022, they were notified that they could get the switcher, but it was up to them to remove the 14 tonne engine from the site. Reid says that’s when the real work began – but first they had to get it to Grand Falls-Windsor.
Lifting the old engine onto a flatbed (GF-W Heritage Society)
“We got a company here in town, Exploits Welding and Fabrication, and they had the equipment. So they sent a person out to look at it and they said ‘yeah, there’s no trouble to get her out of there, but the problem is we don’t have a crane big enough to handle it.’ So they got a crane out of St. John’s to meet them out there, and load it onto a flatbed truck, and brought it in to Grand Falls with the crane following behind and unloaded onto our property.”
Reid says they knew the engine was in bad shape, but it was much worse than they anticipated. Basically says Reid, everything that could be broken, was broken, or had rotted away.
“Some parts we had manufactured here, and then we kind of, played with it a bit and got some gauges that looked period.”
After restoration (GF-W Heritage Society)
They replaced the wooden floor, and painted her up in her original colours. He says they also fabricated lights for the engine, as close to the original as possible, “because the originals just can’t be got, right? It’s just impossible.”
The engine is now proudly on display to the public at their museum in Grand Falls-Windsor.
The engine of the 1953 Plymouth switcher, restored (Submitted by the GF-W Heritage Society)
