Some railway places are rides. These are the others — the museums, grand stations, roundhouses and engineering works you visit on foot. Every site below was checked against its official source — the operator's own site, Parks Canada, or the municipality or province that lists it — and each page says plainly what that source says, including where a site is closed for the season.
Heritage sites are counted separately from the ride directory, always: 44 sites — 22 museums & collections, 17 preserved stations, 4 landmarks & engineering works and 1 rail trail. Nothing here is a ride; for trains you can actually ride, start with the directory or the Ride Finder.
Museums & collections — 22
Railway museums and collections — locomotives and cars you can get close to, in roundhouses, stations and museum halls.
Central BC Railway & Forestry Museum
Northern BC's rail and forestry museum, at the meeting of the Nechako and Fraser Rivers: locomotives, railcars and forest-industry exhibits — and home to the Cottonwood Minirail miniature train.
Plan a visit →Cranbrook History Centre
Cranbrook's history centre is built around its railcar collection — preserved passenger cars from the great age of deluxe train travel — alongside local-history galleries and the Royal Alexandra Hall.
Plan a visit →Engine 374
Canadian Pacific 4-4-0 No. 374, built in 1886, hauled the first passenger train from Port Moody into Vancouver on May 23, 1887. It is displayed in the Roundhouse Community Centre in Yaletown — climb into the cab and ring the bell — as an extension of the Railway Museum of British Columbia in Squamish.
Plan a visit →Kettle River Museum
Midway's museum keeps the Kettle Valley Railway's original station house, a working CPR caboose you can climb aboard, a section house and an artifacts yard, beside the Kettle Valley Rail Trail.
Plan a visit →Kwinitsa Railway Station Museum
A little Grand Trunk Pacific station museum in Prince Rupert's waterfront park, run by the Museum of Northern BC: the station agent's office and kitchen, and the story of Prince Rupert's birth as the GTP's Pacific terminus and of the small stations along its northern line.
Plan a visit →Revelstoke Railway Museum
The museum of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the mountains: galleries on building and running the CPR through the Selkirks and Rogers Pass, a diesel simulator, a model railway of the Revelstoke Division, and an outdoor heritage railcar collection beside the main line.
Plan a visit →Melville Railway Museum
In Melville Regional Park: the Grand Trunk Pacific's Type 'E' station, moved here from Duff, Saskatchewan; CN steam locomotive 5114, a 1919 Montreal-built Pacific; a CN caboose rebuilt from a 1918 boxcar; a GTP flat car; and the station's telegraph and records collection. The city designated the museum a Municipal Heritage Property in 1986.
Plan a visit →Canada Science and Technology Museum
Canada's national science museum (Ingenium) keeps full-size steam locomotives in its collection, including CN 6400 — the streamlined 4-8-4 that pulled the 1939 Royal Train and was featured at the New York World's Fair, the only one of its series left intact — and Canadian Pacific locomotive 3100, one of only two of its type ever built.
Plan a visit →Fort Erie Railway Museum
Canadian National steam engine 6218 — a 1942 4-8-4 Northern — takes centre stage at the Town of Fort Erie's railway museum, with displays and a gift shop in two historic stations relocated to the site: the original Grand Trunk station from Ridgeway and Fort Erie's B-1 station. Fort Erie was once home to the third-largest rail yard in Canada.
Plan a visit →Niagara Railway Museum
A volunteer-run museum inside Fort Erie's former Canadian National diesel shop — the only one of its kind in the area — preserving the railway heritage of the Niagara region with locomotives, rolling stock and artifacts. (A separate museum from the Town's Fort Erie Railway Museum across town.)
Plan a visit →Northern Ontario Railroad Museum & Heritage Centre
Capreol was created by the railway, and its museum fills two buildings on Bloor Street: a 1916 museum house with lumber, mining and railroading exhibits, and the former municipal building — once home to the fire and police departments — now a heritage centre with a model railroad, a locomotive simulator and the town's original jail.
Plan a visit →Palmerston Railway Heritage Museum
The museum in Palmerston's old Grand Trunk station preserves the story of a town the railway built — exhibits, artifacts and interactive displays inside, and a railway cook car the volunteers are restoring.
Plan a visit →Toronto Railway Museum
The museum fills the John Street Roundhouse — opened October 15, 1929, one of Canadian Pacific's largest — in Roundhouse Park under the CN Tower: locomotives and cars in the roundhouse stalls, an active restoration stall where volunteers maintain the collection, and the museum's miniature train ride outside.
Plan a visit →Musée ferroviaire de Beauce
The Beauce region's railway museum in Vallée-Jonction, in the Chaudière valley — a community museum keeping the area's railway story.
Plan a visit →Middleton Railway Museum
Preserving railway heritage in Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley: a volunteer-run museum with steam locomotive 1274 on site, a caboose and waiting room dressed for the season, and exhibits on the valley's railway years.
Plan a visit →New Brunswick Railway Museum
Historic railway equipment in Albert County: Canadian National locomotive 1009, diesel locomotives, vintage passenger coaches, a caboose, a rare double-ended snowplough and a heritage motor car — plus a replica of the 1881 Hillsboro station, an exhibit building of artifacts and photos, and displays on Hillsborough's gypsum industry and narrow-gauge railways.
Plan a visit →Nova Scotia Museum of Industry
Pictou County's industrial museum holds a collection of six locomotives, among them Samson and Albion — two of the oldest surviving locomotives in the world. Samson, built by Timothy Hackworth in 1838 for the Albion Mines railway, has been on display here since 1990; around them the museum tells the coal and steel story of Nova Scotia's industrial heartland.
Plan a visit →Railway Heritage Museum
At the western end of the old Newfoundland Railway, this museum recalls the railway, fishery and ferry services that tied the island together. Its train cars include a snowplow, a diesel locomotive, two Second World War tank cars, a Newfoundland boxcar, a sleeper car, two baggage cars and a caboose — and its treasures include the Mushrow astrolabes, 1600s navigational instruments found on shipwrecks off Isle aux Morts.
Plan a visit →Sydney & Louisburg Railway Museum
The Sydney & Louisburg Railway carried Cape Breton's coal for over a century, and its museum fills Louisbourg's original station and freight shed — both 1895 buildings — with the line's story of coal, company towns and the people who ran it.
Plan a visit →Dawson City Museum
Housed in the Old Territorial Administration Building — itself a National Historic Site — the museum covers Hän First Nations history, pre-gold-rush and gold-rush Dawson, and keeps three Klondike Mines Railway locomotives in its train shelter, one of them among the oldest preserved locomotives in Canada.
Plan a visit →MacBride Museum
The Yukon's history museum in downtown Whitehorse. Its Roundhouse is home to Engine 51, and the same museum runs the Whitehorse Waterfront Trolley along the Yukon River — roundhouse tours are included with museum admission or a trolley ticket.
Plan a visit →Yukon Transportation Museum
Beside Whitehorse's airport, the museum tells 'the precarious and exhilarating history of northern transportation' — dog teams, riverboats, bush planes, the Alaska Highway and the railway age that tied the Yukon to the sea at Skagway.
Plan a visit →Preserved stations — 17
Stations that outlived their trains — or still serve them — kept as museums, breweries, town offices and landmarks.
Big Valley Railway Station & Roundhouse
The Canadian Northern Railway created Big Valley as a divisional point in 1911. Its 1912 standard second-class station — a provincial historic site kept by the Canadian Northern Society — opens when Alberta Prairie excursion trains roll in, and across the yard the stark ruins of the roundhouse form an open-air interpretive park, open year-round.
Plan a visit →Wainwright & District Museum
The town museum makes its home in Wainwright's historic CN station in the centre of the historic district, alongside the visitor information centre, with displays on the district's history, a gift store and a restaurant.
Plan a visit →Outlook & District Heritage Museum
Outlook's museum fills the town's former CPR station — its home since 1993 — with artifacts and photographs of the prairie district the railway built.
Plan a visit →Dauphin Rail Museum
The museum sits in the former baggage room of the 1912 Château-style Canadian Northern station — 'Manitoba's Most Beautiful Station' — a Heritage Railway Station of Canada built of Tyndall stone. Inside: a large HO-scale model of Dauphin's rail operations in 1954, a hand car ('jigger') visitors can explore, a caboose, and the roundhouse and turntable nearby.
Plan a visit →Miami Railway Station Museum
A small wooden storey-and-a-half station built in 1889 for the Northern Pacific and Manitoba Railway — a rare surviving example of a Canadian Northern standard-plan depot, designated a National Historic Site in 1976. Station, warehouse and agent's residence stand combined under one hipped roof; the museum opens in summer, and a Cold War fallout reporting shelter shares the site.
Plan a visit →Souris Railway Museum
Souris's vintage station museum showcases the community's ties to the rail industry with artifacts and photographs — and one of Canada's only diesel engine simulator modules, which runs by appointment outside museum hours.
Plan a visit →Canada Southern Railway Station
The grand Canada Southern station in the city once known as the Railway Capital of Canada: 16-foot ceilings, opulent faux-gas lamps and massive archways, restored as an events venue, with the North America Railway Hall of Fame's exhibit — opened in September 2013 — on the second floor.
Plan a visit →St. Marys Junction Station
Built in 1858 of local limestone, this Italianate Grand Trunk station — a National Historic Site since 1973 and one of Canada's oldest surviving stations — worked until 1970. Today it pours beer instead of tickets: Broken Rail Brewing's taproom occupies the station on Glass Street.
Plan a visit →Union Station
More than the country's busiest transportation hub — over 300,000 visitors a day — Union Station is a National Historic Site (designated 1975), a Beaux-Arts landmark opened in 1927, and today a shopping, dining and cultural destination as well as the Toronto departure point for VIA Rail's Canadian.
Plan a visit →Gare du Palais
Québec City's Château-style station, built in 1915 — the first union station in the province and, after the Château Frontenac, the city's best example of the style. A Heritage Railway Station of Canada since June 4, 1992, and still the city's working VIA Rail station, on its unusual Y-shaped plan in the Lower Town.
Plan a visit →Antigonish Heritage Museum
Antigonish's community museum makes its home in the town's former CN Rail station: two display rooms of town and county history and material culture, and a resource room of photographs and records for researchers and genealogists.
Plan a visit →Halifax Railway Station
The eastern terminus of The Ocean — and of VIA Rail's whole passenger network: a large Beaux-Arts station built 1928–30 as part of a hotel-and-station complex with the Hotel Nova Scotian, beside Cornwallis Park. Protected as a Heritage Railway Station of Canada since 1991, and still very much a working station.
Plan a visit →McAdam Railway Station
Canadian Pacific's grand station for the junction town of McAdam — a National Historic Site and Provincial Historic Site that works as a museum and visitor information centre, with a nature trail circling McAdam Pond behind it.
Plan a visit →Musquodoboit Harbour Railway Museum
The restored 1918 Canadian Northern station at Musquodoboit Harbour: posters, tickets, maps and photographs inside; a rare ex-CN GE 44-tonner, a snowplow car, a caboose and a mail crane outside; and a visitor information centre and gift shop in the front room.
Plan a visit →Orangedale Railway Station Museum
Nova Scotia's oldest surviving railway station (1886) and the last surviving wooden Intercolonial station in the province: the agent's office and waiting rooms below, the stationmaster's family quarters above, rolling stock outside and a freight-shed gift shop.
Plan a visit →Railway Coastal Museum
St. John's Riverhead Station — completed in 1903, built of Newfoundland granite as the Reid Newfoundland Company's headquarters station — now houses the museum of the Newfoundland Railway and the coastal boat services that overcame the island's isolation. The museum occupies the station's whole ground floor and the passenger platform at the rear.
Plan a visit →Sydney Mines Heritage Museum
Sydney Mines' heritage museum occupies the town's historic train station building (c. 1905), next door to the Cape Breton Fossil Centre: objects donated by the local community tell the town's story, from coal miners' tools to the jersey of local marathon legend Johnny Miles. Museum admission is included with Fossil Centre tickets.
Plan a visit →Landmarks & engineering — 4
Engineering works and historic places with no door to knock on — you go to look, and the looking is the point.
Rogers Pass National Historic Site
The Selkirk Mountain gap that made the CPR possible, found by Major A. B. Rogers in 1881 and now a national historic site inside Glacier National Park. Stone ruins, trestle remains and the Rogers Pass Discovery Centre tell the story of holding a railway through some 12 metres of annual snowfall and constant avalanche danger.
Plan a visit →The Last Spike
At Craigellachie in Eagle Pass, Donald Smith drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway on November 7, 1885, completing Canada's first transcontinental railway. A national monument, interpretive displays, a gift shop and picnic areas mark the spot, a short drive west of Revelstoke.
Plan a visit →Lethbridge Viaduct
The High Level Bridge: more than 1,600 metres long and 95 metres high over the Oldman River, built 1907–1909 for the Canadian Pacific's Crowsnest Pass route and still carrying trains. Parks Canada calls it the longest and highest of its kind in Canada; its construction is a National Historic Event (designated 2005).
Plan a visit →Québec Bridge
The longest clear-span cantilever bridge in the world — 548.6 metres between its main piers — completed in 1917 after the collapse of an earlier span in 1907 cost 76 lives. The first major bridge to use the K-truss and nickel steel, built principally by Canadians, it still carries trains over the St. Lawrence between Québec City and Lévis and is a National Historic Site (designated 1995).
Plan a visit →Rail trails — 1
Railway lines turned trails — walk or cycle the grade the trains used.
Missing a site?
Canada has far more preserved stations and small railway museums than any one list can hold. This section starts with the sites that could be verified properly; if a site you know is missing — or a detail here has changed — the contact page is the way to flag it. Suggestions are checked against the official source before anything is added.