Fort Edmonton Park steam train stuck in 'essentially condemned' maintenance building

Fort Edmonton Park's steam train has come to a screeching haltstuck in a structurally unsound building at the site.

"The building is essentially condemned," Mario Caligiuri, the general supervisor of facilities, planning and design at the City of Edmonton, told CBC News Monday. "It's unsafe for people to habitate, to work in that facility right now."

The train is sitting in its maintenance building, which was essentially built as a covered parking stall that was later converted into a maintenance barn.

• Fort Edmonton Park steam locomotive in for repairs

Caligiuri said some of the wooden poles holding the structure up are rotting, which makes the building unsafe to work in.

Over the next two weeks, construction crews will work to stabilize the building. Crews will remove the train and all other items in the structure, and then the building will be demolished.

Caligiuri is hoping to have the building stabilized by the end of March and have everything out of the building by the end of April.

The city is not sure how much the new building will cost, but the figure is expected bylate June or early July. The money will be separate from the $165 million earmarked for other park renovations.

The building is essentially condemned.- Mario Caligiuri, City of Edmonton

Caligiuri said despite the significant repairs needed, the timing was good for the discovery of the damage, as it will coincide with the other renovations being done over the next three years.

$165M in other renovations

Those new renovations include a new "Indigenous Peoples Experience," which includes a new building with a theatre to showcase pre- and post-contact Indigenous people.

"There's nothing out there right now like it," said Sandra Green, managing director of corporate and customer services for Fort Edmonton Park.

• Ottawa allocates $48Mto Fort Edmonton Park expansion

The planned retrofit includes a new front entry plaza, and expansions to the Selkirk Hotel and the midway.

The park's 1920s-themed Johnny J. Jones Midway will get several new attractions, including a maze, a roller coaster and a cookhouse tent that converts into a 200-seat revue theatre.

The railway station, which currently houses the admissions office and a gift shop, will be reclaimed as a exhibit on Alberta's railway history.

The Selkirk Hotel will be expanded with an additional 22 rooms and a banquet hall to accommodate 250 people.

The last day for full daily programming will be Sept. 3, 2018. It's unclear how the construction will affect daily programming in 2019 and 2020, but Fort Edmonton will run all of its main events, such as their annual Halloween event and their cinema series, and will try to run as much of their summer programming as possible.

The park will host a grand reopening in May 2021.

About 250,000 people visit Fort Edmonton every year. With the expansion, attendance is expected to double.

"We want to take it from a local gem into a destination for international tourists," Green said. "[We want to] just pick it up a few notches."