Niagara Railway Museum

The museum's collection initially began in 1994, and was made up of various photographs and railway paperwork. In August 1996, they purchased their first rail vehicle, an ex-Canadian Pacific Railway track motorcar.^[1] The museum itself was founded by Ken S. Jones in 1997, as the Niagara Falls Railway Museum.^[2]

In 2001, Canadian Pacific donated three of their heritage 40 foot long boxcars to the museum,^[1] which were sent to Welland in December, before being put in storage at Brookfield Siding in the CP' Fort Erie subdivision a few months later, eventually arriving to the museum in October 2003.^[3] In 2006, the museum acquired their first steam locomotive, HEPC #46, which had been used to construct the Sir Adam Beck Hydroelectric Generating Station in the early 1920s and was the last surviving locomotive from the station's construction.^[1]

In March 2010, the museum relocated to the Canadian National Railway's former diesel workshop in Fort Erie, which had been built in the early 1950s,^[1] and was at one point one of the busiest industrial yards in Canada,^[4] before being decommissioned in 1989. On top of restoring the workshop, museum members also relayed track outside the workshop, which had been removed after its decommissioning.^[1]

In July 2023, two ex-JŽ class 62 locomotives were donated to the museum by Marineland, which had originally been acquired from Yugoslav Railways in 1981 by the park's founder John Holer for a proposed train ride at the park,^[5] making it one of only two places in Ontario with at least four steam locomotives, along with the Canada Science and Technology Museum in Ottawa.^[6]