Railroad Museums such as the IRM can boast large collections of historic railroad artifacts and so does the California State Railroad Museum and many more but one thing you will not be reading is "IRM to acquire 0 Series Shinkansen" or "BR Class 50 arriving soon at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania". I think it is time we broaden our horizons.

An interesting point, but do we have any examples elsewhere of U.S. equipment being displayed in proper context? Methinks even a GP-9 would be a hard fit in many overseas display halls.

Actually, a larger quantity of foreign equipment has been displayed here over the years than has U.S. equipment elsewhere.

Has anybody preserved any of the early Bullet Trains?

I think context based education is the most practical means of keeping our collections relevant and worth preserving.

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

"BR Class 50 arriving soon at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania".

If we assume for a minute that Pennsylvania is suddenly going to find a huge wad of cash and the guys under the dome (you know, like Vince Fumo, et al) are suddenly going to lose their impulse to use the public's money to make conspicuous payments (or as they like to call tossing around taxpayer money, "INVESTMENTS") to people eager to deliver votes or payola...

Why should the RRMPA (which is focused on Pennsylvania) acquire a British locomotive, which wasn't manufactured or operated in PA, instead of say the Baldwin Built and PA operated BLE 643??

You are kidding, right? Just trying to stir the pot??

The problem: Ethnocentrism. It's permanently hard-wired in the DNA of virtually every American rail enthusiast who does not end up working for an international rail supply company. It's hardly unique to the United States--you'll see aspects of that in Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Australia, you name it. But ask the editors of Trains and R&R about the flack they get if they publish articles on foreign railroads that have nothing to do with American rails (i.e. no American locos or rolling stock, don't look like American stuff, etc.). Heck, even the British Tornado wouldn't have gotten the press it did here if it were really impossible for a replica to be built in the states.............

I can count a total of five British locos in North American rail preservation: Two LNER A4's, an 0-4-4T inspection loco Dunrobin in Canada, a L&SWR O4 0-4-4T, and SR "Schools" 4-4-0 Repton. The latter two were repatriated to Britain from Steamtown. Steamtown also had a French 1877 switcher, which last I heard was still around Susquehanna, Pa.

Britain has--or had--an "international" steam railway, the Nene Valley Railway, which benefited from enlarged loading gauges that allowed larger foreign stock to operate on its line. Even so, after years of "mixed" operation they have largely abandoned running all of their Swedish, German, French, etc. steamers in favour of British locos and stock.

Supposing I could make a case that the British could spare a Stanier Black Five, a Class 37, or a Bullied Pacific. Where is it going to go, how is anyone going to "market" it so it's not some forgotten back-track orphan, and what do we send in purported "trade"? What town in Kansas or wherever are we going to make give up a Santa Fe 2-8-0? Where is it going to go once it's over there?

Do the same thing with electrics, or diesels. So we grab a GG1 and send it over there--do we really want a Class 87? Send them a spare F7; we get a Class 20 or 37. Then what? About the only museums that MIGHT have any use or interest MIGHT be the NRM Green Bay (which we've just spent some time trashing on this forum), the NMT St. Louis, and maybe the Canadian Railway Museum.

For the record, the National Railway Museum in York did go to extraordinary lengths to repatriate a British-built Chinese 4-8-4 years ago, and the Welsh Highland Railway is being run with South African two-foot-gauge Beyer-Garratts. And North America does have at least one Swedish steam loco and trainset in active tourist service for a while...... in Maine, of all places.............

The Museum of Technology in Mexico City has a UP DD40 on exhibit and many other American built items that operated in Mexico. There are American built trains in museums all over the world, remember that in our glory days we supplied the world.

As Sandy said, most of us here don't really care much about what happens outside of out borders. You hardly ever see an article in Railfan/Railroad or Trains about something overseas. It's a shame because the international aspect adds a whole new dimension to what we do. I grew up watching Great Railway Journeys on PBS and reading old "In Search of Steam" articles, they fueled my desire to take the international route. I advise everyone to have a look around and see that there is a lot of amazing railroading going on all around the world.

One "foreign" example that I think would make a great addition here in the U.S.A. is one of the SNCF Class 141R 2-8-2's that were built to help the French railroad system recover from the effects of the Second World War. All 3 of the major builders in the U.S. (Lima, Baldwin and ALCO) along with the two builders from north of the border (MLW and CLC) contributed to this effort, turning out 1340 Mikes between 1945 and 1947. Seventeen of the engines were lost at sea but the other 1323 helped rebuild the French system. And about a dozen of these engines still survive, some still operable, others on display and 3 that are strictly stored for parts. At least one from each of the 5 locomotive builders is represented. One returned to the North America would help explain just how American know how helped rebuild a shattered Europe. I know that one would sure look great at HVRM!

Les

Does this include the British 0-6-0T in Louisville?

Sir R.J. Corman has a 1986 2-10-2 freshly overhauled and brought here from China. There have been a couple of outings. I, as well as others here locally, don't have much interest in it, as it is being advertised as "relive our history when steam was on the rails", etc. etc.. It is not historic preservation of our locale, and is a poor substitute for an American engine. I would rather see the funding and effort spent on any one of the American pieces rusting away that our grandparents worked on and around.

My opinion?....a new Chinese engine isn't the "real thing"....it's a substitute....a railroad whore.

Valley Railroad is very much working on converting one of the SY-class 2-8-2's to an American NYNH&H lookalike. And if you've every tried to figure out how to pay for steam with your own money, that's how the Chinese stuff happens. There's a lot of shared DNA in there, particularly to China, and the raw material is typically in much better physical shape.

Not that it isn't true, it just isn't true to the general public as much as you would think. It's one of those things where you're personally dead-set against it until the moment you watch it run, and then realize that no matter what accent you put on it - Chinese, Swedish, Austrailian, etc, the soul is still very much in the machine. If the public had issues with it and didn't/wouldn't ride it, this would never work.

In every volunteer-based rail museum I've seen, the foreign stuff gets 'back of the bus' treatment, and free labor votes with a scraper on the domestic/historic stuff. If people don't want to work on it, it suffers. I've seen it all over, streetcars, etc. The upside is that some of the more radical ideas can still flourish where the equipment is NOT 'historically significant'. Carving up a Melbourne streetcar to be ADA-accessible for Savannah (basically doing everything under the roofline over) didn't raise an historic eyebrow, and Gomaco has given Milan cars the same deal. To the general public, it's still a streetcar and they love it.

I think the problem might be closer to xenophobia than ethnocentrism.

It seems to me that the typical US railfan has the mind set of "if it don't look American I don't like it". And I do believe we suffer from this more than other countries.

Look at what TVRM did to the 610. It didn't look American enough with its low cab and short stack so it had to be Americanized. Look at how proud we are of the S-160's that remained in the states. They were built in large numbers to help win the war and yet not one is preserved here in anything resembling historic paint. You can go to the UK and you can find several proudly wearing USA on their tenders. There is even one in Poland restored properly. Throw buffers on something and residents of the US can't run away fast enough. Heck, throw an all weather cab on an otherwise US steamer and hear the grumbles of "those Canadian locomotives".

Maybe it is because my interests are more in steam as a technology than a purely historical thing that I appreciate foreign steam. I love going to museums overseas and poking my head through the frame to check out different designs and construction methods, or looking into an open smokebox to see something other than a master mechanics front end. I wish there were places where you could see side by side a typical UK commuter locomotive next to a US one of similar size and era. I wish that the French 4-4-2 that the Pennsy tried out was preserved next to the 7002 (8063) in Strasburg.

As far as a Chinese 2-10-2 being a whore, at least it was built and operated as a hard working functioning locomotive, with its design based on a US locomotive at that. I would hate to think what you think of Leviathan. A replica that never earned a dime in revenue service.

Roger

Problem is, If I have to close my eyes to enjoy it, I risk getting run down.



As well it should. Unless the museum mission is to present technology from the world over, the foreign stuff doesn't fit, and doesn't belong. If the purpose is to evoke nostalgia for the past, our past, the weird foreign stuff doesn't cut it.



And to the preservationist, it was junk to begin with, so nothing is lost.

Isn't the most fiscally successful steam locomotive in the USA a copy of a British 0-6-0T - blue with a smiley face?

I'd suggest context is a problem except that so few of us actually create context, or even consider it in our programming. Pole barns and leftover hunks of miscellaneous track going through nothing much to nowhere or landlocked sites housing a dogs breakfast of rusty hardware..........doesn't recreate life as it was even as well as the bowdlerized circumstances of a Williamsburg or Old Stourbridge Village. I think we can drop the contextual argument out of consideration. City streetcars running in open fields......can't we recreate working streetscapes of the 1920's or run our streetcar musuems in existing legitimate historic neighborhoods? Please, run through mine........I'm tired of having no practical option other than driving as car everywhere I need to go. And if it is from Melbourne, Milan, Greece or Timbuctoo I don't care.

I kind of think a variety makes for an interesting comparative interpretation. A modern Sulzer rack steamer operating next to a Cog Railway steamer would be extremely enlightening to hardware geeks like most of us. A1 running commuter trains in a ping pong schedule with a K4? Black 5 alongside a LIRR 4-6-0?

I've had the limited good fortune to see and ride historic lines in Australia and the UK but nowhere else, and came away more than impressed with the quality of the experience. We have nothing to lose by including it in our consciousness.

dave
edited once to change a sentence that made no sense the way i wrote it

FWIW one my my lottery-winning fantasies is a Vulcan museum in Wilkes-Barre, PA with stream locomotives representing the breadth of Vulcan's export trade.

That there's a foreen storee with real American gumption. ;-)

Rob

The museum with which I volunteer, National Capital Trolley Museum, has ended up with a large international collection for essentially accidental and historical reasons.

When the museum adopted a formal collections plan some years back it made a conscious decision to continue collecting internationally. I don't have the plan in front of me, but it justifies the international cars as offering a comparison with US practices, leading to the opportunity to better understand what technological and social factors were generic worldwide to the first electric street railway era, and what was unique to America or, more specifically, to Washington DC.

As a working docent operating non-US cars, I find it encourages me to concentrate my interpretive talk on the impact of street railways on urban life (creating the suburbs) and less on the technical details of the car. Non-railfan visitors (95-plus percent of all visitors) like this. Some of our cars also offer interesting chances to talk about the Marshall Plan, which resonates well with the general interest in the WWII era.

It may not be the "real thing", but it certainly has roots in the "real thing". Alco sent 2-10-4s and Baldwin sent 2-10-2s to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Russia modified the designs, then basically gave the design to China, who did a bunch of redesigning themselves. The end result was the QJ. Under the cosmetic detailing (which is admittedly Russian-influenced), most people agree that you have a pretty basic 1930s design. Now, how much of the original US design is remains in the QJ after all the redesigns might be up for debate, but I'm sure there are parts that are still there. I seriously doubt they redesigned the whole thing from the ground up, and even if they did, it's a redesign off of an American engine.

The SY is even closer to an American engine--for all practical purposes, it is one. Alco sent a 2-8-2 to Japan-controlled Korea in the 1920s. Japan took over China, and a bunch of Japanese designs came with them--including that 2-8-2. Ever wonder why that SY looks so American if you change out the cab and tender? It's not that surprising.

To muddy the waters even more, how about the Baldwin-built 2-8-0 that the Chinese have running at Tiefa? Pure American homebuilt except for it's current location. Or the Russian decapods, which SHOULD by all rights and means have been sent overseas a long time ago, but managed to stay stateside due to some quirk of fate? Same goes with a bunch of American locos sold to Mexico, Cuba, or various places in Central and South America either new or second-hand. Look at pictures of the Teresa Cristena in Brazil in the early 80s, and there is little to tell that you aren't somewhere in the southeast. For the second-hand ones engines that ended up overseas after the US owners dieselized, other than their current location, those things are as American as a Norfolk & Western Class J. Where to they fit in?

Where does one draw the line between what is American versus what isn't? Does it have to have been built in the US? Operated in regular service in the US? Owned by someone who saw a picture of New York City in a bakery while traveling one day?

Maybe I'm more open-minded than some because I've been overseas. I've seen working steam. I saw the QJs in service on Jingpeng Pass. I've seen SYs working hard on coal trains. It's still steam, and makes all the requisite sights, sounds and smells. If you were there when it climbed Jett Hitt coming out of Frankfort on the first trip (with revenue freight!) and closed your eyes, it was pretty darn real. It may have been a substitute for the real thing, but no worse than a Southern Pacific Daylight in Michigan, or a Texas & Pacific 2-10-4 climbing Blue Ridge out of Roanoke, or a Canadian Pacific Royal Hudson running the Clinchfield in southwest Virginia coal country, or a Norfolk & Western J in North Florida, or any of the other strange events that nobody would have believed would come true. Other than the original operating country of the engine, those engines were all still a substitute for the real thing.

I keep encountering this sentiment over and over. I'm just curious--where do you draw the line?

[quote="Kevin Gilliam) I keep encountering this sentiment over and over. I'm just curious--where do you draw the line?[/quote]

If you are an individual, the breadth of your mind. If an institution, the breadth of your mission statement.

Nothing wrong with deliberately choosing to do a bang-up intensive job of interpreting or recreating a small slice of history rather than a lousy, facile job of trying to cover a wider slice. It is a rational approach for smaller groups with limited resources. CSRM and Colorado State RR Museum have done a fine job of limiting their focus and given us great results. Probably others out there but my exposure has been limited, add what you will.

It would be really cool to see some great, well-funded institution take on the challenge of an internationally diverse museum of railroad technology and development, but apart from the occasional almost accidentaly collected bit, no such animal in the US yet apart from NCTM.

I'm left to wonder of 2 foot gage tourist lines wouldn't be the place to start - 60cm gage industrial lokies run fine on the track, and they are small and easily portable, apart from the Garrats. I'd plan a special trip to Maine to see a Darjeeling and Himalaya tank engine and a German trench engine visit along with the little Mallet from Cripple Creek and the outside Bagnall-Price valve geared 4-4-0 from Texas, all running around for a long weekend.

dave