Todays brief on Orange Empire adds details to an interresting feature of today's traction museums. There is a veritable building boom going on in the museum world! Here in California, both of our traction museum museum are building barns. Others that have recently done so are the Illinois Railway Museum and the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum. Now I hear that the Halton County Radial Museum in Canada is doing a barn project.This bodes well for the future of traction preservation; street cars are typically built of lightweight materiels and are not able to stand up to long term out door storage. A tarp is a tempory solution at best. A recent issue of Railway Museum Quarterly has a more complete list of projects.Has anyone heard if there are plans at the National Capital trolley Museum to replace the barn that burned a couple of years ago?Ted Miles

Ted, long before the Barn burned NTCM was engaged in a major capital project to create a new fireproof display carbarn and visitor's center at a site about 1/4 or 1/2 mile from the current barn location. This was to be a major steel-framed building unlike the current barns. In fact, a check was cut for part of the project the morning before the fire. The project also involves a right of way extension.Plans and work for the new building proceed, though they have been held up at times by state bureaucracy and other issues.So yes, there will be a new and much better building, but no, it is not a replacement for the barn that burned; it was planned long prior.

I now have in hand the Railway Museum Quarterly that I refered to in the earlier post.The list is in the Winter 2005 issue on page 6. And as Editor Aaron Isaacs says, "and the list is impressive."i certinly hope the boom continues!Ted Miles