Vulcan road photos

[oscar]

In summer 2012, I spent a few hours in Vulcan, Alberta southeast of Calgary, self-proclaimed "Star Trek Capital of Canada". Below are some of the kinda-road-related photos I took there. I returned to Vulcan in June 2025 during the annual Spock Days festival, restocking my Star Trek merch at the visitor centre and also taking more photos.

The Vulcan County county line sign with its Star Trek fonts, entering the county from the north on Alberta highway 23, foreshadows the Trek exploitation to follow (2012):



Then there's the replica Vulcan starship at the main Vulcan town entrance on highway 23 (2012):



Just west of the replica is the futuristic visitor centre, at which you can stock up on Star Trek souvenirs (mostly from the original TV series, but there's a smattering of stuff from some later series and movies). Those include the T-shirt I've occasionally worn to road meets. (2012): 



Another view of the visitor centre, from Centre Street (2025):



A closeup of the visitor centre entrance, and a replica of a starship shuttle craft (2025):



A banner inside the centre, with a Borg "Resistance is Futile" slogan used in the Next Generation series (2025):



Even the Vulcan County government gets in on the act (2012):



As does the Vulcan post office (2025):



Street blades in Vulcan incorporate the insignia worn by Starfleet personnel on its starships. The signs also show that Vulcan streets were once named for Roman gods, like the town was and still is (2025):

[agentsteel53]

FXS-1995-A?  is that one of those hypothesized* starships with an all-Vulcan crew?

* by fans who wonder if humans are really the alpha species of the Federation, or it's just how they're shown on TV

[crawls back into dork cave]

[oscar]

FXS-1995-A?  is that one of those hypothesized* starships with an all-Vulcan crew?

* by fans who wonder if humans are really the alpha species of the Federation, or it's just how they're shown on TV

[crawls back into dork cave]

That'd be my guess, though I'm not enough of a dork to follow up.  A plaque at the base of the replica confirms that it is of a Vulcan, rather than other Federation, starship (and also that the s/n is FX6-1995-A).  Also, the plaque suggests that the "1995" is the date for the erection of the replica, rather than an actual fictional Star Fleet ship number. 

The "A" suffix might reflect the off-screen destruction of the original Vulcan-crewed starship in one of the original TV series episodes (or one of the early movies?), much as a similar suffix was applied to the replacement Enterprise rolled out at the end of the Star Trek III movie. 

[hbelkins]

Wasn't the name of the starship with the all-Vulcan crew the "Intrepid?"

[kkt]

Wasn't the name of the starship with the all-Vulcan crew the "Intrepid?"

Yes, the Intrepid was mentioned in the original series as having an all-Vulcan crew.  There was also the T'Kumbra, from DS9, and probably more.

[tdindy88]

For a second I thought this would be a series of pictures of the various highways on Vulcan. Though I suppose in the light of recent events those highways would now be "decomissioned."

[oscar]

I went back to Vulcan last month, and took more photos. Five of them have been added to the original post above.

[lepidopteran]

For what it's worth, a widely-published tornado photograph was from a storm that took place on July 8th, 1927 in Vulcan, Alberta.  I remember this picture in the Encyclopedia Britannica and its mention of Vulcan, several years before I'd ever heard of anything from Star Trek.

[hbelkins]

I had forgotten about this thread, even though I'd posted in it. My first thought was that Oscar had gone to the Vulcan statue in Birmingham, Ala. My second thought was that he'd been to Vulcan, WV, which gained notoriety because it was only accessible via a bridge across the Tug Fork of the Big Sandy River from Kentucky, and the "mayor" of Vulcan had asked the Soviet Union for help in replacing it in the 1970s because West Virginia refused to do so.

https://blueridgecountry.com/newsstand/magazine/curios-the-bridge-the-soviets-nearly-built/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcan_Bridge

Given my location in eastern Kentucky, this story was big news in the regional media at the time.

The Vulcan bridge was the last border crossing between Kentucky and West Virginia that I crossed. I finally drove across it in December 2023.