Al,

I think almost everyone here is with you. Unfortunately there are always talkers ready to mock whatever the do-ers are doing. And they generally have lots of time to start posts here...

> There isn't anyplace that is 100 percent
> safe, but there are locations that are
> better than others. This should always be
> taken into consideration when choosing
> locations for a facility.

Just a minute here!

Everybody here ought to know that we can't always choose where our museums are built, particularly the operating museums. Often it's a choice between a really lousy location, a poor location, and a downright awful one. SCRM is a case in point -- several old heads have told me that a line down by Charleston was considered for a while as the Museum's home. Trouble was it was more than half timber trestles that were ready to collapse.

Our current location has a lot of advantages. It also has a number of disadvantages. My point is that you've got to take what's available. No location is going to be perfect. It's a tradeoff. I agree that critical structures like storage barns should be in the safest location available. But sometimes you HAVE to build something in a flood plain because that's the only place you have to put it.

The South Carolina Railroad Museum
mconrad@compuzone.net

> Absolutely incorrect. What the News Journal
> article shows is the bias of their editorial
> board who want us all to live in the city
> and take a bus to the pristine country every
> weekend.

*Much as I *HATE* to be possibly perceived as defending a rag like the Snooze-Journal...... The defense should be to prove they're wrong, not reject the information simply because of the source. Unfortunately, both 20 years of my firsthand observation of the area and the flood gauges in Red Clay Creek back up the Journal.

FYI, I went to the University of Delaware in 1982-86 and volunteered at the W&W for much of that time (as much as college classes and an hour's bike ride each way would let me....). And I still have close friends in Wilmington, Greenville, Newark, and elsewhere up there, and know the countryside up there firsthand--well enough to navigate all the closed roads yesterday, detour around Hoopes Reservior, etc. Where there were two-lane roads, there are now four-lane divided highways in many places. Compare Hockessin, and more importantly lower Chester County, then and now. Yes, the remnants of Henri dumped 8-12 inches in a short time on saturated ground; but the fact remains the Red Clay watershed has had a tremendous population and development boom, and that boom threatens both the rural character of the W&W and its mere presence in the valley, sad to say.

AS THE TITLE OF MY POST SAID, "A serious reappraisal is in order", NOT "Time to give up".

> And thanks for slapping all of us Wilmington
> & Western volunteers with your
> "attitude". It's just what we need
> right now, like being poked in the eye with
> a stick ...

*I apologize for seeming like I'm attacking a railroad I really love, but I won't apologize for telling the truth. One doesn't attack the doctor for telling you your loved one has potentially-terminal cancer. (And no, neither I nor anyone else on this board has an M.D. in Steam Railroading....)

And as far as my "attitude", I say the first "attitude" that must be aaddresses in that area is the apparently-prevalent attitude of "if it's downstream/downhill from us; it doesn't matter."


LNER4472-NOSPAM-@bcpl.net