“Travel, even the luxurious travel of today in the comfort of Canadian Pacific Scenic Domes, is an adventure. Travel, the Canadian Pacific way from tidewater to tidewater across the wide provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec, is an adventure in which the traveler of today retraces the trails blazed in a glorious past through the promise of a boundless future.”

Informed by the stainless steel passenger trains entering service in the United States, the Canadian Pacific followed suit in the early 1950s with an order for 173 state-of-the-car cars for its flagship trains, comprising the largest order ever placed with the Budd Company. These cars were so reliable that many are still in daily passenger use today.

Riding Mountain Park was once part of “The Canadian,” a first-class passenger train that operated between Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver and was one of eighteen such Park-series cars.

Deemed surplus by Via Rail Canada, the successor to Canada’s passenger rail service, and later sold into private ownership in 2005, Riding Mountain Park had been in storage for over ten years at the Adrian & Blissfield Rail Road Company in Blissfield, Michigan before it was acquired by the Fort Wayne Railroad. It largely retains its original interior and artwork created by members of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. All Park-series cars were described in 1954 as being the “feature car of each train.” It is one of three such Canadian Pacific dome cars in preservation.

While dome cars were not especially common in the American Midwest, the Riding Mountain Park bears similarity to the Wabash Railroad’s stainless steel “Domeliner” and its lounge class and observation end were popular features on the New York Central’s first-class passenger trains which operated through nearby Waterloo, Indiana and Hillsdale, Michigan.