Here is a little thought. What if it were 1950 and you were told the B&O was making a museum. Now you have the choice between making a display area out of the roundhouse like it has been for the last 50 years or you can choose to use the roundhouse to show what the placed looked like as an operating car shop with the historic equipment collection displayed elsewhere. I sometimes visit a place like that and wonder.

How would you make the call?



Forgotten Delaware
tom@forgottendelaware.com

If I could use present-day concepts and knowledge:

No way would I display all the stock in the carshop. When I was an active volunteer there I participated in more than one equiptment shift in an out of the car shop tracks, and let me tell you it was a bear every time. Just from a collections management and train crew point of view it was an ungodly pain in the tail.

Now, if I had to make the decision using the state of knowledge and thought avaialble in 1950:

Sure, stick it in the car shop. SOcial history had barely been invented yet as an academic discipline; Colonial Williamsburg was just an early glimmer in Mrs. Rockefeller's eye; the demolition of Penn Station was just barely starting the national preservation movement. Given what people thought and how they though back in the day, I don't think the idea would ever have occured to anyone--even an academic or museum person, much less a railroad officer.

Though as I think about it, it makes me appreciate even more how remarkable and far-sighted the B&O's corporate committment to heritage was in the 1950s. They were WAY ahead of their time, if not always doing things the way and for the reasons we would in 2002.

Steam Over Scranton online edition
eledbetter@rypn.org

One VAST difference, however, between 1950 and today:

IF the Powers That Be had been forward-thinking enough, in 1950 there were LOTS of other shop buildings available as either covered storage, display space, or "original shops" for preservation. Most of these buildings were destroyed by a series of large fires and demolitions between the 1940s and today. Several half-shells exist along the "First Mile" as reminders of what had been and what could have been.

As it stands now, there are but two buildings available to the Museum for storage and preservation/presentation: the roundhouse and the one remaining shop building (minus a medley of its original tracks). This of course does not count the B&O Museum's office buildings (including that "first station") and the former office buildings now occupied by a defunct shopping center and a medical services office.

If you see that big (and alive) shopping center to the west of the B&O Museum and south of Pratt Street, consider the possibilities if that real estate had been additional museum land as well. A moot point, I know. And I do occasionally shop in one or two of those stores, so......

lner4472@bcpl.net

Preserving the history of historic preservation - McLuhan proven correct. Interesting thread.

Could we expand the B&O museum not only to include industrial properties but to include the housing nearby sort of like Swindon?

Dave

irondave@bellsouth.net

> Could we expand the B&O museum not only
> to include industrial properties but to
> include the housing nearby sort of like
> Swindon?

Funny you should say that......

There IS a preservation effort underway on several nineteenth-century rowhouses on nearby Lemmon Street (1/2 block north of Pratt, the street of the main B&O entrance) as historic properties.

In their wisdom, the preservationists have marketed their efforts widely. Because the houses were the dwellings of the first middle-class Irish immigrants in Baltimore (craftsmen working for the Mt. Clare Shops), the fundraising is heavy in the Baltimore Irish-American community, and I think the official moniker is the "Baltimore Irish Heritage Centre". In addition, some hat-passing has occured in the local community and the railfan and museum community as well. (Hey, Erik, time for another news item?)

lner4472@bcpl.net