One of the area’s most popular annual events is happening now at the Simcoe County Museum in Midhurst.
The two-day Last Blast event greets visitors with tooting horns from steam engines and the rumble of iron workhorses of yesteryear, and continues through Sunday until 4 p.m.
Hosted by the museum and the Historical Construction Equipment Association (HCEA) of Canada, the museum property boasts working examples of steam shovels, rollers, graders, standalone power generating engines, vintage dump trucks and tractors, and much more.
Jim Huntington, 72, of Waubaushene, a “mechanic of too many years,” loves to show off the old road building equipment to kids who visit the museum, which he has been doing for the last 15 years.
“Hopefully it kindles something in them to do something like this,” he says. “Too many kids aren’t interested. Too busy playing on their phones. This is a lot more interesting than playing on some stupid phone.”
Huntington laments the fact there aren’t too many of them left to operate the machines during the annual event.
“There’s just nobody here to run them,” he says. “I’m not really an operator, but I’ve done enough work on them. I make them move.”
Moving down the ladder in age, Easton Bast, 5, of Flesherton, was a fan of the gravel pit and its machinery working away moving earth from one spot to another.
“I like the most … the big digging,” after giving it a moment's thought, “because they were all minder trucks.”
“Mining trucks?” his mother asked.
“Yes, minder trucks.”
Bast added he didn’t mind the loud noise of the engines at all.
Piper Wilson, 19, of Barrie, says, “we’ve been coming for a few years now and we always think it’s awesome, definitely the pit with all the machinery actually operating.”
Her eight-year-old brother, Sawyer, loved “riding on the tractor around the pit,” and “learning that (the equipment) was steam powered.”
Next up on the museum’s event schedule is A Night at the Booseum on Oct. 25 at 6 p.m. and Oct. 27 at 8:30 p.m., where visitors will “embark on a delightfully spooky adventure for the whole family, tailored for children aged three to 12.”
