‘A cool privilege’: Princess Elizabeth 1951 tour convertible to be restored in Alberta school

Students at NAIT are restoring a car originally built for then-Princess Elizabeth's first visit to Canada. Amanda Anderson has the story.

This year’s auto body students at the Northern Alberta Institute of Technology (NAIT) have been tasked with the restoration of one of the 1951 Lincoln Cosmopolitan convertibles that Canada bought for Princess Elizabeth’s tour that year.

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According to NAIT auto body instructor Ryan Pomedli, the car was one of 60 the Canadian government bought for the future queen and was purchased in 2024 by Ron Lyons, owner of the Legends Golf and Country Club east of Edmonton, who has previously had NAIT students restore other vehicles for the club’s Golf Car Museum.

“It was a phenomenal opportunity for the students to be able to be part of Alberta’s history, Canada’s history, but even world history,” Pomedli said.

The students won’t be doing any mechanical work; the Lincoln doesn’t need it anyway, the instructor said. What it does need is body work and a new paint job, as it was last restored about 50 years ago.

First-year apprentices on Monday were finishing up preparing the body to be painted later in the semester.

“(The paint) was bubbling. It had some scratches and some dents and things like that, just from being old. So we completely stripped off all of that paint. Any of the dents or minor imperfections were either taken out by moving the metal or we filled the imperfections with filler. Then we block sanded it and primed it,” Pomedli told CTV News Edmonton.

That would suffice for a vehicle for everyday use, he said, but because of the Lincoln’s historical significance, the students are going the extra mile: block sanding the primer, re-priming, and block sanding one more time.

“The really, really minor, almost insignificant imperfections on a car like this, we’re still treating them as significant imperfections,” Pomedli said.

“It’s being painted black to its original colour. With black, you can see a lot of little dents,” added student Andrew Balaneski.

“That’s pretty tedious work. It’s definitely a workout.”

Outside of school, he works at Edmonton Kenworth. Earlier on Monday, he had been working on a Leduc County bus.

“So it was pretty interesting to switch over to this,” Balaneski said.

“It’s just a pretty cool privilege to get to work on something that has that much history,” another student, Yasmine Uden, commented.

Before the semester is over and the car is revealed at NAIT’s June car show, about 60 students will have contributed to the project.

Lyons said the car will then be added to his collection.

“Theoretically, if this new paint job that we do lasts another 50 years, it could be one of those things where these students that are working on it right now see it in a museum in the future,” Pomedli said.

CTV News Edmonton was not able to confirm the capacity in which the convertible was used during the 1951 royal tour.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Amanda Anderson