Volunteer of the Week: Levi chugs away at the Railway museum

As a train clickety clacks down the track, so does one young volunteer's heart beat to that rhythm as he talks about his volunteer time at the Railway and Forestry Museum.

Levi Squires, 11, has been volunteering most Thursday afternoons there for the last three years.

He loves trains and had to be coaxed away from the museum's train room to chat.

Levi's got a Lego cargo train operated by remote control and N-scale model trains at home. He's now trying to move up to HO, which is twice the size of the small scale N.

Mom Kelli said Levi has always loved trains and they started visiting the railway museum right after they moved to Prince George when he was three years old.

"When Levi volunteers he does anything that needs doing so that could be picking fruit, or picking weeds out of the mini rail track," said Kelli. "He waters the plants and paints whatever needs painting. There's always something that needs to be done around here and it's lovely because it allows him to pursue the things he loves to do."

Of course it's all about the people at the Railway and Forestry Museum.

"The staff here is fantastic," said Kelli. "They are always so welcoming and they adore Levi. They treat him with the utmost respect, they always find him work to do and Brian (Wich, the maintenance man at the museum) answers an amazing amount of questions."

Of course, the focus is always the Cottonwood mini rail and just because it happened to need fixing the day Levi was at the museum, he was lucky enough to help Wich replace the electrical circuit panel.

"Levi is a great help," said Wich. "I had Levi work on the mini rail engine with me when we burned it out hauling all those people around last year at the Celebration of Lights. I got Levi to put all the nuts on the electrical connections. He's always very interested and engaged."

A couple of weeks ago, Levi was one of the volunteers who helped Wich haul lights out onto the grounds in preparation for this year's Celebrations of Lights that begins Sunday and sees more than 100,000 lights set up around the museum.

"Brian is a really great guy and I like doing anything that has to do with the track," said Levi. "I like riding on the mini rail and when I grow up I'm going to have a part-time job here as an engineer for the CN Rail engines. I have to be 16 before I can be an engineer here."

Levi has his career all planned out and even knows who his future employer will be. He's going to work for CN Rail as a train engineer.

"I'd mostly like to drive trains through the Rockies," said Levi, who also thought working in the rail yard shunting trains cars would be OK once in a while, too.

The future in trains looks very bright to Levi.

Flip through The Citizen's Volunteer City series, featuring stand-out volunteers in Prince George: