Storage-shed fire ruins weekend dinner plans for dozens booked on miniature train

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This article was published 12/09/2018 (2747 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A special dining experience this weekend aboard a tiny train in Winnipeg has been cancelled after what organizers believe was a deliberately set fire that destroyed a shed housing equipment for the event.

The Assiniboine Valley Railway club announced that plans for its Dinner Train Weekend are off.

“Unfortunately, we were storing the Dinner Train tables there, so they are now a pile of twisted metal,” president Len LaRue said on Facebook. “There is no way we could build new ones before the weekend, so this year’s Dinner Train Weekend is cancelled.”

LaRue said firefighters were only able to put out the last of the flames in the pile of rubble that had been the storage shed. It housed the railway’s custom-made dinner tabletops used during the annual fall dinner weekend.

“We’re really upset we couldn’t do the dinner train,” said LaRue, who spent Tuesday phoning people with reservations to give them the bad news.

“The people planning on coming were very disappointed,” he said Wednesday. “They looked forward to it.”

The miniature battery-powered dinner train — one-eighth the size of a real diesel-powered train — travels at 3 km/h through dense aspen forest just west of Assiniboine Park on Roblin Boulevard.

Tickets for the “3-Course Deluxe Hamburger Meal” were $15 for adults and $12 for children 12 and under. Close to 90 diners were expected, said LaRue. Several offered to donate their ticket refunds to help pay for the materials needed to rebuild the steel-tube-framed dining tables or trays that attached to the tiny train gondolas, he said.

They couldn’t be built in time for the weekend, though.

“It would take us a number of weeks to get more trays,” he said.

LaRue built the original dining train tables with his good friend and railroad property owner, the late Bill Taylor. Taylor founded the volunteer-run Assiniboine Valley Railway in 1995.

Taylor devoted much of his time and energy to the railway that offered rides to the public and turned into a winter wonderland in December with Christmas lights and decorations along the meandering 1 1/2 kilometres of track. After Taylor’s death in 2013, the evening Christmas train stopped because not enough railway volunteers could commit the time to keeping it running, said LaRue.

Now the stored Christmas light displays — dozens of decorative wooden forms, including giant candy canes and arches — are destroyed, said LaRue, who added he isn’t sure if or when the Winnipeg holiday tradition will return.

“It all needs to be completely rebuilt,” he said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca