The visitor centre and this locomotive are all dead easy to find - just look for the tall wooden oil derrick on the north side of the Crowsnest Highway, then park in the parking lot behind it.
This diesel locomotive was manufactured in 1948 at the Hudswell Clarke & Company Railway Foundry in Leeds, England. The distributor for Hudswell Clarke who most likely sold the locomotive was Hugh Wood & Company, sole distributor, of Gateshead on Tyne and London.
This little 0-6-0 locomotive spent its life pulling cars loaded with coal at one of the local mines. Being a diesel, one would think that this would have been an outside only engine, not working inside the mine tunnels. Hudswell Clarke, however, did manufacture underground diesel-powered mining locomotives, of which this may well be one. As opposed to the diesel electrics one now sees on every railway, this six cylinder diesel's power is applied to the driving wheels by way of a torque converter.
We can't say with certainty for which coal company this engine toiled (there were several in the area), but the largest was also the first, the
The Crow's Nest Pass Coal Company, and it could well have been them. A sign on the side of the engine indicates it to be of the 100 horsepower class.
Hudswell Clarke & Company was formed in Leeds in 1860 by William S Hudswell with John Clarke. The first product built in 1861 was a stationary engine which was completed in April 1861. The company first produced only steam engines, both standard gauge and narrow gauge, the first narrow gauge engine in 1911. The company began building diesel locomotives in the 'teens and by the 1920s the production of diesel locomotives had outstripped the building of steam locomotives. Hudswell Clarke & Company continued to manufacture steam locomotives until at least 1958.