The next step in the expanding West Coast Railway Heritage Park will be a revolution - literally.
The West Coast Railway Association, which operates the Heritage Park, has secured funding to start work on adding a turntable to its already ambitious expansion plans - the CN Turntable Plaza.
The WCRA was awarded a Gaming Capital grant of $100,000 last month along with $50,000 from an anonymous private donation. The grants, added to the $50,000 budgeted by the WCRA, are enough to allow work to begin on installing a turntable which was donated to the Heritage Park by CN several years ago.
The turntable will allow the Heritage Park to turn its engines around and run showcase engines like the restored Royal Hudson in and out of the new Roundhouse Conference Centre, which is scheduled for the start of construction this summer for completion by the end of 2006.
The turntable will also be part of the WCRA's exhibition facilities, allowing for outdoor concert seating for up to 2,000 people in the turntable well.
"We need the turntable for very practical reasons too," WCRA executive director Don Evans wrote in the upcoming WCRA newsletter announcing the funding. "Now that there are no longer switcher crews based in Squamish, it has become very difficult-if not impossible-for us to get our equipment turned around when we need it. In the past, BC Rail would pick up whatever we occasionally needed turned, turn it on the wye, and return it to us."
The Heritage Park design called for the turntable installation a few years ago, but the plans languished with the changes at BC Rail and unforeseen projects the WCRA took on, such as acquiring the Royal Hudson and arranging for its restoration.
"As you can well understand, these hit into the budget in a huge way," said Evans. "But now these are done, and we are back on track - in fact, we will end up ahead of track with the good news announcements of the last two months."
The turntable pit will be constructed and the turntable installed at the same time as the new Roundhouse Conference Centre, which will add up to 20,000 square feet of conference and convention space to the community, as a combined $4.2-million project.
Initial soil sampling work has already started and planning and design and engineering work will get under way immediately, according to Evans. The target is to turn sod for construction start by summer 2005, and then construct progressively through the remainder of 2005 and 2006.
"We expect to open CN Turntable Plaza in mid 2006, and the Roundhouse and Conference Centre late 2006 [or] early 2007."
