A historic private train car is riding the rails to raise awareness and money for Alzheimer’s research.

We wrote about the Pacific in 2010, after discovering it on a railway siding behind an Ajax coffee plant while checking out a bumpy level crossing, and immediately knew we had found something special.

The immaculately preserved car, built in 1924, had the ornate insignia of King George VI on its side, who used it for a cross-Canada tour in 1939 to drum up colonial support for the war effort.

It is owned by Michael and Paul Higgins, proprietors of the Mother Parkers coffee empire, whose father, Paul Sr., bought it from CN Rail in 1972, when the railway got rid of its fleet of private cars.

The Pacific is nothing short of a rolling palace, the equivalent of a private jet before the ultra-rich adopted air travel, and filled with artifacts from the 1939 Royal Tour.

The brothers inherited it from their father, who suffered from Alzheimer’s before he died in 2004 at age 92, and have meticulously maintained it ever since.

With the 100th anniversary of Mother Parkers this year, the boys decided to honour their father and the family business by putting it back on track for the first time since 2000, to raise $1 million for the Alzheimer Society.

“We wanted to get the car back into the public eye because it’s historic and a Canadian treasure,” said Paul Higgins, noting that only one company in a thousand is still operating after 100 years.

“Our father struggled with Alzheimer’s for years. We know the research into it is underfunded, so we saw an opportunity to use it to raise money.”

Railways are no longer in the business of hooking up Pullman-style cars to trains, said Higgins, so it took some negotiating with CN and VIA Rail, and a major tuneup, before the tour could begin.

The Higgins put a lot of money into the initiative themselves, including all the costs of the tour and a $100,000 donation toward the $1 million goal.

It went to Montreal in May and just returned from a July 1 weekend in Ottawa before it leaves later this month for Cochrane and Moosonee, he said.

They hope to send the car to Western Canada later this year, and possibly the East Coast, if it can be arranged with the railways, said Higgins.

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To read more about the Pacific or contribute to the Alzheimer’s fundraising campaign, go to www.motherparkersremembers.ca.

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