The historic Bassano train station in Beiseker caught fire in the early morning hours of Sept. 18 and Beiseker RCMP are investigating it as suspicious.
Sergeant Glen Demmon, detachment commander with Beiseker RCMP, said there was no power to the building at the time, but crews have yet to determine how the station caught fire.
“We can’t conclusively say whether (the fire) was set by a person or not at this time,” he said. “It’s just being treated as a suspicious fire.”
The nearly 50-metre long 104-year-old station lost about half the building before the fire was doused, said Fred Walters, treasurer of the Alberta 2005 Centennial Railway Museum Society (ACRMS) that had been working to transform the old station into a museum.
For Walters, hearing of the fire evoked emotions of anger and sadness, as a prospect of one day developing the Bassano station into a museum documenting the history of the railway in Western Canada is now up in smoke.
“I have spent a tremendous amount of hours involved with that project,” Walters said.
Built in 1911, the station had been used for maintaining and rebuilding cars from the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) since the early 90s, said Walters, and was set to be demolished in 2011 before Sabrina Nasse, the CAO in Bassano at the time, prevented it from happening.
“They had bulldozers lined up and everything else,” he said. “She put a stop to it.”
After that, ACRMS approached CPR with a proposal to purchase the station and in 2012 it was transported to Beiseker.
Moved onto a foundation in the fall of 2014, the building was about a year and a half away from opening up as the museum it was intended to be all along, Walters said.
“We had some problems with the foundation moving a bit,” Walters said. “There is a higher water table in Beiseker than we expected.”
ACRMS is now in a state of limbo, he said, until the adjustor sends a report to insurance and the society can determine future options.
However, according to Walters, a walk through the aftermath of the fire with the adjustor on Sept. 19 did not look positive.
“At this particular point, due to the amount of water damage, (the adjustor) thought it would have to come down,” he said.
The Bassano station was the last of its kind, according to Walters, as the society had searched for others like it but was unsuccessful.
Preserving the history of old railway stations was of a particular interest, he added, as it was usually cheaper and quicker to destroy.
If the Bassano station must come down, Walters said Alberta will have lost something important.
“We’ll have lost 104 years of history in the building itself (and) you’ve lost the last building of that type in Western Canada or… maybe all of Canada, I don’t know,” he said.
