Superior, IA (Northwestiowanow.com) — The Railroad Equipment Restoration Association of Canada is the non-profit historical group that has purchased those passenger cars that had been abandoned in Dickinson County.

CEO Dan Barnes tells KICD News the preservation group hopes to have the cars fully restored and operating as part of the Prairie Sky Heritage Railway in Saskatchewan by 2027, but that timeline depends on volunteers and donations.

The cars are from the Canadian Pacific “Twenty-two hundred” series that were constructed in the years following World War 2, and very few of them appear to have survived, and to be in a condition where restoration is even possible.

Getting the train back to Canada will require specialized rail transport and coordination with multiple railroads in the 900-plus mile stretch from Superior to the province in central Canada.

Many locals have mistakingly read the name on the cars as coming form the “Algona Central Railway” and assumed they ran out of Kossuth County, Iowa. They were actually from the Algoma – with an “M” – Central Railway in Ontario.

They wound up in Spirit Lake in the 1990s as a local group of rail enthusiasts attempted to make a go of it as a dinner / excursion train.