I muse at the frequency with which our railway museums and tourist railways leave behind history in favor of a railfan "playing with trains" mentality.

The apocryphal signature is the historic piece of equipment with, instead of a historically correct paint scheme for the unit... or even one wrong for the unit but relevant to the railroad/region... the unit has an original scheme, or a bastardization of a historic one, proclaiming "Joe Blow's Crappy Railroad Museum" across the side. Um.

Joe Blow doesn't stop to realize, this does not happen at serious railway museums. And then Joe Blow wonders why nobody takes his little museum seriously. Now, that can certainly be forgiven for privately owned tourist railways... but - ugh - to come SO CLOSE to the NYC lightning-stripe, and then botch it by changing the name? A pity.

Or... gutting the mechanicals of something historic for the convenience of the museum. We have heard of a project to, well, I don't mean to bash the project, but it appears to turn a GG1 into an SD40. In another case, I've heard of diesel museums owning interurban motors wanting to tear off "all that silly useless underframe equipment". In other cases, museums doing tedious "crewman with radio" push-pull operations, when the lead car is an M.U. trailer with perfectly good cab controls which they ripped out... hello!

That equipment is not useless, merely non-understood. It's worked for 50-60 years, after all, that's why this stuff survived to preservation. Golly if you're hell-bent to remake something, fix a failure. Where were all the railfan hackers when the Boeing LRVs were being given away? Wait, there's more failing LRVs coming available soon...

It seems to me that all of this reflects a "playing with trains" mentality. And I suppose among private railfan-owners, well... it is their stuff. But it seems like it's much more powerful to respect the history. Take a look. Who are the big nonprofit museums, who gets the grants and membership? Which for-profit operations do you respect the most? There you go.

Given the lack of availability of many vintage components as replacement parts, some degree of substitution is likely to be necessary in many restoration projects, and that situation will continue to get worse in the future. The question is whether you can maintain the functionality without significantly altering the historic nature of the equipment. One area where I am totally in favor of substitutions is electrical wire and cable. It makes no sense to invest a lot of time and effort in re-wiring a piece of equipment and using anything less than the best and most durable replacement presently available on the market. It is also an important consideration for fire safety and electric shock safety.

I seem to recall that a brand new DMU car burned completely to the ground at Pueblo a few years back, and the risk of fire is even more of a concern with older equipment. I will always remember the advice my boss gave me when I went on my first assignment with FL9 locomotives: "Just remember, on an FL9 there is no such thing as a SMALL fire."

That being said, I am very impressed with the work that the folks at RMNE are doing, and when Howard describes their operating entity as a "Heritage Railroad", that is really an excellent description. If you want to see an excellent organization, be sure to visit Thomaston, Connecticut and drop by their new restoration shop.

PC

I can offer up some thoughts, at risk of sounding like an apologist for the foamer mentality. I'm not, but exploring the root causes might make some people recognize these tendencies and save them before they get carried away.

A lot of people in railway preservation are frustrated model railroaders. They had a layout once, or planned one, but preserving prototype equipment eventually usurped all their time, leaving them lots to do, but little outlet for creativity. White driver tires and stars on the axle ends, they feel, is the least they can do. They simply can't restrain themselves.

For all the amount of work maintaining equipment can be, at some point field expediency takes over. After a summer of needle scaling, welding patches and grinding out the welds, and mixing pounds of Bondo to fill the blemishes, when the coach is finally painted, what the heck do we do for lettering? Quick, run down to the sign shop and have them cut some vinyl. Waddya mean it's not the right lettering… it's lettering, isn't it?

Most restorationists (and most model railroaders, for that matter) aren't graphic artists. They don't know that railroad lettering is almost always different from printers type, mostly because of the proportions of the "page" it will be applied upon. I was just at Train Festival in Owosso, and saw a really nicely painted passenger car, a truly quality job, with nicely applied lettering that was horribly wrong. Not only wrong from a historic standpoint, but wrong from an aesthetic standpoint, because it wasn't proportioned to fit the car. Now, who is going to tell the guy who did all the work that it's wrong? Not me. The time that issue should have been raised is long past.

Typically, at the time these things should be addressed, the rush to get going is in full swing. There's no time to painstakingly sand through layers of paint to uncover old colors and lettering. Heck, that could take all summer, and we gotta git er done! It's only at museums where the curatorial staff has the upper hand that they have the power to put the brakes on the urge to fling paint.

Perhaps starting a bit later, but basically in parallel with the growth of the preservation railway movement has been the growth of historical societies dedicated to the preservation of the information needed to document our artifacts. In many instances, the impetus for this has come from the modeling community, to have better information to build accurate models. For some reason, the preservationists and historians never seem to talk to each other. When the preservationists realize they need something, they want it NOW! The historian, on the other hand, wonders why he wasn't asked three years ago, so he might have had some time to properly research the matter.

And so it goes.

These questions of authenticity are not so much of an issue in other fields of preservation. For example, museum warships are obtained from the Navy with no functional weapons, they take a torch and cut a couple holes in the breech block and that is that. Despite having nonfunctional weapons, museum warships still maintain a respectable degree of historical authenticity and host some memorable displays. The USS Slater in particular comes to mind in that regard, probably one of the finest warship restorations anywhere in the world. Lots of 20mm Oerlikons, 40mm Bofors, and three inch fiftys, none of them are functional.

PC

Sounds like you had an interesting trip, Robert.

I find that many museums haven't decided on what story they want to tell, usually dressed up in academic terms like "interpretation", and some that have settled on a story to tell do a lot of stuff around its periphery (like playing trains) without actually telling it.

This is also appplicable to tourist railroads as well, at least those advanced enough to recognise that they are in the entertainment rather than transportation industry. Some focus on entertaining their members rather than their visitors, which leads to ever fewer visitors, for both museums and tourist lines.

Replicas and demonstration tools used actively to help tell the story get used up and require fabric be replaced in both museums and tourist lines. Practical alterations made to demonstration tools - not "preserved artifacts" - to keep them operating safely and in compliance with modern regulatory requirements don't concern me much, provided it isn't intrusive from the audiences POV. Impossible to demonstrate without it, and the loss of the visceral experience detracts more from the story than the little alterations.

No new ground covered here.

If your decisions are rationally based on responsibly telling your story and carrying out your mission, you won't go far off track. If you donlt have an interesting story to tell, why are you doing anything at all?

dave

Dennis summed up one of my pet peaves, lettering. This not only a railroad problem as I have been to a respected avaiation museum in Seattle with the lettering on WW2 aircraft being vinyl letters! The sad part it would have been almost as easy to make paint masks.

For this reason I invested $1500 in a Graphtec CE3000-60 plotter cutter to make paint masks. First step is tracing what I can on the artifact and cleaning it up in Corel Draw. The cutter has a 24" carriage and removable vinvyl runs about $22 for a 30 foot roll. Used about two rolls on a 1932 Northern Pacific single sheathed boxcar. The lettering was much clearer then any hand cut stencil and a heck of a lot quicker. Also if I need to change some aspect of the stencil it is a lot easier to rework it on the computer instead of re-cutting a stencil.

Richard Wilkens

I agree 100% with historical integrety. If possible, it should be maintained.

That said, I'll say something less enthusiastic: There is so much "preserved" railroad equipment that is in horrible states of decay in almost every "museum" that ANY paint of ANY color is better than none. Aside from the major tourist railroads and major museums, most smaller organizations have more equipment, track, and related issues than they can maintain with paid or volunteer labor.

Quite some time ago, I volunteered to paint several pieces of equipment that were badly rusted and had no original lettering remaining. The museum would not grant any funds for paint or tools due to budget restraints. I was condemned for painting the wrong color (I got a good deal on grey paint and painted it all grey......I paid for the paint!) and not properly repainting into proper preservation paint schemes. The equipment is not on public display and is still to this day sitting on the same siding with my grey paint faded away........

I know one place like that, they had a lot of cars with cab controllers but restoring them to working condition fitting all there cars with M.U. cables wasn't worth it never mind the fact that the railroad that they ran on ruled agents operating a train with anything other than a locomotive in front. I have to admit I cring when I see earley wooden cars with engins under them to provide H.E.P. but other things like useing a remote controll to controll the train in a push pull operation seem like a no brainer since it dosen't affect the equipment.

I've always felt that "operating railroad museums" were more about "playing train" due to their quasi entertainment/tourist activities and severely less about any preservation -- after all, passengers might be interested in a little history but they want to enjoy a train ride. Thus also "operating railroad museums" have the tendency to attract volunteers or members that are vitally more interested in working on the train or track, and less interested in the history of the rail line or the rail cars and other equipment.

Sure the people want to see them painted nicely but NYC didn't repaint their LSMS cars based on preservation, they painted them based on getting the job done and reflecting their image, and Penn Central changed the NYC and Conrail the PC, and so it goes on. And this also gives the foamers something new to talk about since some new railroad is repainting engines or cars in their image.

In fact, reading several chat and news rooms, including here, there a quite a number of "policies" created by railroad museums to try to curb that "train enthusiast" wanting to jump into the engineer or other crew positions, by stipulating that they work in restoration or other areas while they learn how to operate or work on the train. Does it work -- some yes, others no. So, that continues to lead me to believe that the true "historian", "curator," or "preservationist" is outnumbered in this hobby and which leads to the number of pieces of equipment that lay around on museum grounds that are unpainted or not in working order, or scrapped.

Operating museums tend to work on the operating equipment first in order to keep it going. Perhaps the preservationists should work on the static equipment first so that the public coming out to take a train ride have something to see more than the train taking them on a trip! It takes painstaking detail and trial and error to see if you can find parts and paints, let alone the time to do a good job without having to send the equipment out the next day or week to be used.

The problem there is getting the right people that are willing to do the restoration job rather than the operating job. Many museums have trouble finding that balance.

The USS Slater in particular comes to mind in that regard, probably one of the finest warship restorations anywhere in the world. Lots of 20mm Oerlikons, 40mm Bofors, and three inch fiftys, none of them are functional.

PC[/quote]

PC,

I had the privilege of visiting the Slater in Albany this past May. She really is beautifully maintained, and sets the standard for how to take care of a retired warship. To throw in a railroad link, she has 3 EMD 567 prime movers.

Slater has one other thing going for her, a superbly trained corps of tour guides. My mother-in-law once said that a docent can make or break a museum visit. She would be shocked that I am quoting her on this forum, but she is absolutely right on this one. The only other tour guides I have met in a naval museum setting that come close are those on the USS Hornet at Alameda.

I have to admit to a bit of bias, but I think my brother (and sister) docents at the B&O Museum do an equally fine job with our visitors.

Kevin Gillespie

Cowboy Train Robberies?

Talk with the people at the Smithsonian. I did recently about such issues. One of their people who chose to remain nameless pretty much summed it up. With real preservation, you can either: A. have something working or B. looking exactly as it did back in the day. You rarely can have both. He said with regards to trains, he could count the number of operators who restored operating equipment to their standards on both his hands.
People who run trains at museums and tourist operations are limited to the talents at hand and often what “looks” good. How many locomotives are running with the “road name” of the tourist RR on the tender instead of the RR it originally ran for? Is that preservation or a rebuilt steam engine hauling people? It IS preservation, no doubt, but possibly only in the sense that it didn’t get scrapped, as far as many serious preservationists would see it.
I am very familiar with older airplanes and it’s even worse there. How many P-51 Mustangs currently flyable are painted as 8th Air Force birds with “invasion stripes” when next to none of the original aircraft to wear that paint exist today? Not one of the B-17 bombers flying today has the paint scheme on it that it actually had before 1945.
Lettering has always been an odd thing. People want to use vinyl machines to make markings either as decals or as paint masks. Neither is historically correct. They painted most of these things with stencils which were hand-filled in the gaps. Don’t get me started on airbrushed nose art on currently flying WW2 airplanes…
True. There are a few that tell a good story as well as provide running equipment (CSRM comes to mind) but generally speaking after seeing hundreds of “RR museums” around the world, I have noticed that many in the US are simply a set of running equipment (half the time not painted or marked for its original owner) where the public gets on, rides to one spot, goes back, gets off, and then leaves. There is sometimes a RR station building of some sort and almost always a grouping of other cars and locomotives parked nearby (usually in poor repair) with no explanation of what it’s all about. In the end, they’re a storage ground for RR equipment and offering a train ride. I wouldn’t call that a “RR museum.”

SLATER is actually not the example warship to use for your observation. SLATER is a bit of an anomaly, in that she is not owned by the U.S. Navy. The Navy lost all say in the matter when the Greeks purchased her. When the DE crowd obtained her back from the Greeks, title passed to the them, not back to the Navy.

This caused some problems, and the State Dept. was quite upset that a civilian group would have a warship with armaments. In order to make the government happy, the title of the guns was passed to (I think) the City of Albany. The guns are demilled, but not butchered.

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Will

One problem I have with railroad museums (as well as some other types of museums) is that the story they choose to tell often tramples other stories. Specifically, just about all railroad museums want to tell the "experience of the rails", yet very few - maybe none - really want to tell the stories of the engineers that designed the machines. Every time an alteration is made to keep a locomotive running, even ever so minor, a piece of some engineers work is erased. How many museums document these alterations, and keep the stuff that is removed? Not many, certainly.

There is a large amount of history in all of the inner workings of railroad equipment. Each assembly is there for a reason, or maybe a bunch of reasons. They could be because of physics, timing, economics, politics, bad hair, supply issues, who was sleeping with who, and dozens more. These issues may seem unimportant right now, but after we have studied all the paint schemes and timetables to death, we may find that these trivial engineering issues may actually be interesting.

Let me remind everyone of a field of classic archaeology - specifically Egyptology. Back 50 or 100 years ago, all of the interest and research was centered on the royal families with their great tombs. Most everyone ignored the rest of the society. These days, however, we have figured out that the really interesting stuff is centered around how the common people lived - the inner workings of the society. The problem is that so much of what evidence we could use has been erased, 50 or 100 years ago.

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Will

Will, you are correct, I should have separated the thoughts more clearly in referencing the USS SLATER. Also, unlike museum warships acquired directly from the USN, the USS SLATER is not immobilized. Her propulsion machinery is complete and would be functional if the volunteers and resources were available to overhaul and maintain it.

PC