The other day I received the occasional publication, "On Track," of the California State Railroad Museum Foundation. The CSRMF is the membership support organization for the CSRM.

"On Track" reported a couple of significant happenings at CSRM.

!. The offsite storage of artifacts and documents has been moved from the West Sacramento warehouse(s) to a facility at the former McClellan Air Force Base. These offsite facilities are used by all of the Sacramento Region State Parks and State Parks beyond the local region. The old facilities were located in a FEMA floor hazard area and the new location is high above the flood area. Also the new location will be equipped with a state-of-the-art processing facility.

2. The California State Railroad Museum made a trade with the Western Pacific Railway Museum in Portola, California. CSRM exchanged a former WP California Zephyr dining car which will become part of a representative CZ train at the Portola museum. in return the CSRM received the former Foley Brothers GE-IR box-cab diesel locomotive built in 1930. This 600hp boxcab diesel is the only serving western boxcab diesel.

The Portola museum already had WP 841 "Silver Plate"- is this a different CZ diner then? I wonder what they plan to do with two of them.

Brian says....>>>>>"Also the new location will be equipped with a state-of-the-art processing facility."



What is a processing facility? What do they process?

I believe that the WP museum traded the boxcab for the "Silver Plate" but as the boxcab was just moved recently, I am betting they didn't bother updating until the trade was actually complete.

I may have left off a phrase there -- process and conserve collection items (artifacts, documents, etc.).

When an artifact comes into a historic collection it is documented with photographs, written description, etc. Depending of the kind of object it may be cleaned or fumigated. It will often be placed into a protective box or other container. Documents may be inventoried, sorted, organized. Some documents may be placed in protective sleeves, etc.

Many of the back-room activities of museums and archive/manuscript collections.

I hear CSRM is going to start scrapping some stuff as well, one of the first being SPMW 8209, a rotary power car that was never finished, and started as an F7B.