Ontario’s steam trains

There’s a chance on these summer weekends to get a look at a very different aspect of history. It’s the history represented by the steam trains that helped shape canada in its early days as a country.

Engine 136 pulls into the station at Tottenham near Barrie on its regular schedule to take riders on another trip through the Ontario countryside.

The steam locomotive’s been hard at work for more than 130 years, and is still going.

“This engine was built september 15the 1883. the cpr at that point still hadn’t finished the transcontinental railway and this was likely involed in some of that,” said Eric Smith, an engineer and the president of the South Simcoe Railway.

The volunteer organization keeps its steam engines and historic train running.

Smith got the job that was in high demand more than a century ago. Every child wanted to aspire to be a locomotive engineer.

Engine 136 was part of Canada’s railway boom late in the 1800s.

And Smith is keeping that history alive.

“I’m a historian because i live the history,” said Smith.

The locomotive and its early 20-passenger coach are a thrill for the two or three-hundred people who regularly go for rides on Sunday.

The South Simcoe Railway operates out of Tottenham and the steam trains run every Sunday in the summer until the weekend after Thanksgiving, and there are a few other special trips, some of them with the railway’s other historic engines.