Bomber Command Museum of Canada – Honouring those who served with Bomber Command.

I went on vacation last week to Montana and on the way back I stopped off at Nanton, Alberta.

This small town has a museum that might as well be the Smithsonian of Canadian bomber command. Sure, Canada has much larger museums in Calgary and back east but this museum is unique because it actually has a running Lancaster. Lancaster bombers were pretty much sold between 350 and $500 a piece. Farmers took parts off the planes and often sold them for scrap.

7377 Lancaster bombers were produced in the Canada and in the United kingdom. 1/4 of the engines were Merlin engines made by Packard who subcontracted them out to Maytag. The valve covers from a Packard engine say may tag on them while the valve covers from a Rolls-Royce says Rolls-Royce on them. There is one flyable Lancaster left in Canada and one left in the uk. Only 17 remain even though a couple of them, like this one, the engine still run but it is not certified to fly.

The Canadians lost over 10,000 Airmen during the WW2. Canada had over 100 training bases. Over 105,000 were trained here in Canada and they came from all over the British Empire.

In the next few weeks, I'll be posting more pictures from this Museum. This Museum featured the Dam Busters story. They featured the story of The Great Escape because it had Canadians in the group that were killed by the Gestapo.

This particular Lancaster did not serve in the air War but it was a training aircraft. The very last lancasters were pulled from service in 1964. They were used as long range reconnaissance anti-submarine Warfare bombers.

I have included a couple of the links that were listed on a couple of exhibits. I will be making at least five or six different postings of pictures that I took while visiting this Museum.

This museum is about 1 hour south of Calgary and about 4 hours north of the United States Montana border. The town does have a couple small hotels but I'd recommend that someone should continue to drive to Calgary and find better accommodations there. The results with town about 2 hours away called vulcan, Alberta and this town was named for Roman god of fire and was also used as a training base for pilots during World War II but it has since built a large replica of the USS Enterprise and they do have Star Trek conventions there too. I will post this in the comments.