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Step onto the grounds of the Railway Museum of British Columbia in Squamish, and you’re stepping into decades of someone’s spare time. Barbara Stover has volunteered there for more than 20 years. Jeremy Davy has put in 31. Between them, they’ve painted backdrops, restored steam locomotives, run the gift shop, and scheduled mini-rail crews.
Neither of them set out to become a railway museum volunteer. Stover got pulled in delivering a community newsletter to someone who signed her up for garden duty.
“And then one day I got summoned up to the office and would I like to help with Thomas [Buddy and Friends Festival],” she said. She had no background in trains or railways at all. “It was just kind of got worked into it,” she said
Davy’s path began a decade before he ever joined, touring a train collection with a railway-enthusiast boss during Expo 86. He didn’t sign up until after early retirement from Canada Post in 1997, when he wandered up to the museum one Saturday looking for something to fill his days.
There’s a huge variety of odd jobs for volunteers, and no single role once you’re there. Stover found her niche painting backdrops for model train displays, restoring carved figures kids pose with, and doing carpentry on a historic bunk car, all self-taught. ” [I’m] not much of a painter, but I enjoy doing it,” she said. “Very amateurish, but that’s okay. The backdrops are all important.”
Davy gravitated toward the miniature railway, where he now operates trains, schedules crews, and maintains track, while also serving on the board of directors. “Our view on the volunteer is that any hour is a good hour,” he said. “Some people come and maybe do three or four hours in a week, some will do three or four hours in a month.”
Both have memories they come back to. Stover was there for the museum’s first ever Buddy and Friends Festival event, and still gets called in every year to help prep backdrops for the North Pole Express.
Davy remembers being part of the crew at six in the morning for the roll out of the restored Royal Hudson steam locomotive, “crawling underneath the engine between his wheels and his boiler which was warming up,” he said. “That’s not really something that most people get to do.” He also worked on restoring the museum’s mail car ahead of its 2001 opening, an event that drew over a thousand visitors in a single day, the largest crowd the park had seen at that point.
What seems to keep both of them around, though, isn’t the big events. It’s the people. Stover’s favourite part of the job is simply working the gift shop counter and talking to visitors. “We have people literally from all over the world,” she said, recalling recent guests from Holland, Germany, Britain, and Australia, many arriving with old family photos and stories of relatives who worked on railroads themselves.
For Davy, the museum has become something closer to family. His wife, Donna Simon, volunteers from home doing statistics on volunteer hours, and the couple’s three granddaughters and son have all worked at the museum over the years, some starting at age nine pulling weeds off the mini rail tracks. Donna points out that the experience has paid off in concrete ways for the younger generation: “It is very important for the high school kids to volunteer,” she said, noting that scholarship and job applications take notice when students show up with real volunteer hours behind them.
If there’s a common thread, it’s that the museum will find a place for almost any interest. “The more volunteers we have, the more things we can have open,” Stover said.
The Railway Museum of British Columbia is open Fridays and Saturdays through the summer. Anyone interested in volunteering can learn more at wcra.org.
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