A Coquitlam, B.C. ride company is bringing a mine museum’s past into the future.
The Britannia Mine Museum is the site of Mill 3, a 20-storey building with a gravity-fed ore processor located 55 kilometres north of Vancouver. The mill building was fully operational from the 1920s to its closing in 1974. In 1975 the museum was opened as the BC Museum of Mining before being renamed in 2010.
Dynamic Attractions, a ride systems builder, is building part of a new mill show experience for visitors that “brings back the operation of the mill in its glory days,” according to vice-president of engineering and strategic accounts David Lo.
“It’s not a real operating mill, a lot of it is smoke and mirrors. A skip is used to move ore 20 storeys up to the top of the mountain and deposit it into a gravity fed operator and our role is to recreate the moving skip and provide the illusion that we’re moving ore up the side,” Lo said.
Unlike other projects the company has worked on, the Britannia Mine Museum centres on an existing set of structures with a distinct heritage component.
“The safety aspect of course has to be looked at, and part of our challenge is that because it’s a heritage site, we want to preserve as much of the original structure as we can,” he said. “We’re not really hauling real ore. It’s all props, but it’s more important for us to have precision timing that syncs with the rest of the show.”
The biggest challenge, he said, is that since the mine is an old building “a lot of the documented information isn’t accurate, and we have to adapt it to modern technology.”
“The easy thing to do would be to rip out the track and put in a new one, but we can’t do that. It’s like restoring a heritage house,” Lo said.
“It’s also a very tight space, and with the old way it was constructed, some of the wood ties have rotted and trying to fit new equipment around these old structures presents unique challenges,” he said.
Lo said while Dynamic Attractions has worked on projects around the globe, including Russia, Hong Kong and the United Arab Emirates, as well as projects in the United States for both Disney and Universal, this was their first project in Canada.
“There isn’t a theme ride market in B.C. or Canada in general, so our first time was in our own backyard,” he said.
Dynamic Attractions also began in the industrial sector more than 100 years ago, Lo said. The company was founded as Vancouver Art Metal in 1926 and went through several name changes before ride manufacturing division Dynamic Attractions was spun off from Dynamic Structures.
“Markets change and they had to reinvent themselves. They worked on the Lionsgate Bridge along with the world’s largest telescope in Hawaii and other telescope projects,” he said.
Funding for the mill show experience and additional rehabilitation of museum infrastructure came from a $1.4 million contribution from the Government of Canada under the Building Canada Fund as well as $2.8 million from the Province of British Columbia and the B.C. mining industry.
“We are excited to unveil the designs of our new mill show and share the significant role it played in B.C.’s and Canada’s history and economic success,” Britannia Mine Museum executive director Kirstin Clausen said.
The mill show experience is scheduled to launch in 2019.
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