Warrnambool's beloved Uncle Ron's Train finds new home at school

For nearly sixty years, a small red train sat inside a shoe shop on Fairy Street in Warrnambool, and for nearly sixty years, families made the pilgrimage there each summer. Children would board it, sit inside its narrow cars, and emerge fitted for school shoes—a rite of passage so embedded in the region's memory that people still mention it decades later, still ask what happened to that train.

When Rauerts Shoex announced it would close in August 2024, Kerrie Marney from Koroit decided the train could not simply disappear. She had ridden it herself as a child, part of her family's annual journey from Koroit to Warrnambool, a trip that felt like an expedition to the city. The train was not just a novelty; it was the thing that made the errand memorable, the detail that turned a shopping trip into an event. Marney began exploring where it might go, who might want it, how it could be saved.

Leon Carey, a staff member at Merri River School, saw the answer. The school's foyer could hold it. The space was right. Principal Dean Clements agreed immediately. "It's like it was meant to be," he said later. Within weeks, children were climbing on it, refusing to leave, and staff members were walking past it struck by their own childhood memories.

The restoration fell to the Warrnambool Men's Shed, whose members rebuilt the train's base and structural frame. Marney did most of the painting herself, working through the details until the train looked as it had in its original home. Graeme Mason and John Malin, both Men's Shed members, oversaw the work. Malin had once brought his own children to Rauerts when he lived at Lake Bolac, part of a generation for whom Warrnambool felt like a shared playground, a place where the region's families converged.

The Warrnambool Rotary Club funded the recreation of the mural that had hung behind the train for six decades—the backdrop that defined the space. Cassign, a local business, brought that mural back to life and created a new tribute to Ron Rauert, the man who started it all. In 1950, at nineteen, Rauert had begun repairing shoes in Ballarat. Three years later he bought a small repair business in Warrnambool. By 1951 he moved into retail with just four hundred dollars' worth of stock. Business grew quickly. In 1954 he shifted a few doors up Fairy Street, converting an old café into a proper shoe store. Somewhere in those early years, he built the train—a small red engine and cars that would become the reason families remembered his shop, the reason they came back.

Now the train sits in the foyer at Merri River School, painted and restored, the mural hanging behind it. Marney, standing in front of it for the first time after months of work, felt goosebumps rise on her skin. The train had not been lost. It had been moved, preserved, handed to a new generation of children who will board it and carry the memory forward. In a region where people still say "Rauerts Shoes" and wait for someone to ask about the train, that continuity matters. The train is running again, not on rails but through time, carrying the weight of sixty years into whatever comes next.