A keystone piece of equipment for the ARE / AOE was a former NYC obs, I believe it was Sandy Creek. I saw it intact and in historical condition at Noblesville IN before it went into tourist train service which completely gutted the car as well as rebuilt it in other ways. Some preservationists I know thought of this as wrongsizing a museum's collection.

Fortunately, the Hickory Creek has been salvaged and restored.

http://bobcarper99.wordpress.com/2008/01/03/restoration-of-new-york-centrals-hickory-creek/

One difference between railway preservation and "indoor" museums is that many of our exhibits have been modified during their service in the "real world", as opposed to (for example) art works which are expected to look as they did when the artist set down his paintbrush or chisel and said, "Looks good". For example Pacific Electric 418 at Orange Empire started out as IER 344 with a pantograph and wire-mesh gates. It received trolley poles and had its couplers relocated to run on PE during World War II, and a few years later had its interior modernized to match other PE cars. Santa Fe 4-8-4 3751 received major upgrades around 1940. SF Muni line car 0304 has had several "makeovers" during its 100+ years in The City. Western Railway Museum volunteers have backdated Muni PCC 1016 as close as they can to its original 1952 appearance, and have "undid" many years of modifications and hard usage to take Sacramento Northern 1005 back to 1934.
To answer the original discussion, if turning a vintage passenger car into a "cruise liner" keeps it out of the scrap yard, that's a good thing, assuming that the car wasn't a "primo" example of its type.
And regarding "rightsizing" collections: A good example is Fraser Valley Heritage Railway Society's work on British Columbia Electric interurban 1225; another is SF Muni restoring streetcar 162 back to service it spent over 40 years at Orange Empire, below Muni 171 on the priority list.

Which ex-NYC "Creek" obs was owned by Ringling Bros. (or was it Strates?) I'm sure it wasn't exactly in historical condition when they got through with it.

There seems to be a LOT of confusion on this point. Several websites make claims for RBBB ownership/operation for BOTH cars--which, of course, is not impossible. The folks currently promoting charters on the "now-restored-to-original-configuration" Hickory Creek claim their car was gutted by RBBB before being restored; it's safe to assume that whatever Sandy Creek (the AOE/Xanterra one) looks like now is not an authentic restoration.

Sandy Creek shows up in a 1976 roster book (Railway Passenger Car Annual) as being owned by a private group out of Indianapolis, and my scribbled annotations say it was at Indiana Transportation Museum in the 1982 time frame, looking intact/original.......

Don't forget that the Hickory Creek is not true restoration either. The number and type of bedrooms on the car were modified by the current operator in order to increase the size of the kitchen. This was done for anticipated Amtrak charter service.

I can tell you for sure that I saw Hickory Creek as either the show or train manager's car on the RBBX train at Akron, OH in the late '70's (I'm thinking '78, but I'm not totally sure), (painted in either a light gray or off-white - I don't think they were using the silver metallic color they use today). It still had some of it's original 20th Century Ltd. sign on the rear door, and it carried the Hickory Creek name. I know I photographed it, but I don't know where the slides currently are (I had a major disaster with a double slide file box and a pile of dirty snow about 30 years ago and either lost or messed up most of my early slide collection). They used to park most of the train on the CT&V sub intermodal tracks under the old North HIll viaduct next to what is now the Akron Northside station for the CVSR, when the circus played the old Richfield Coliseum. I have some not-very-good shots of then-CVL #4070 passing the circus cars.

Here is a photo of Hickory Creek in circus train service. IIRC it was the only car in the consist that was allowed to keep its name. This was taken in Champaign, Illinois around 1977-1979.

I wish I'd investigated further to see what they were doing for heat & power in those pre-HEP days. They'd spend a lot of time parked at unimproved facilities (in this case, the sidings for the university's power plant). Since it was moved as a freight train they must've had their own steam generator car. Maybe they only chose to buy cars that used Ice Engines for A/C. Then you'd only need simple hookups for cars' MG sets.



One of my old TRAINS from the early 1970's has a classified ad for one of the Creek cars--I cannot recall which--offering it for something like $8000.

Steve

Every once in a while someone on this board attempts to compare railway preservation to the field of fine art conservation. I do not know where this comes from except that the complete inappropriateness of an "art conservation" approach suggests that the correct alternative must be "anything goes" --I realize I am exaggerating on this point here.

The Secretary of the Interior Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties (http://www.nps.gov/hps/tps/standguide/) were written with architecture in mind, and are far more appropriate to our field. This approach offers a somewhat flexible and common sense process that balances practical necessity with conservation with an aim towards maintaining the property's historic integrity. As I said, these guidelines were not written for the preservation of railroad equipment, but a functional historic building (frequently modified, in constant need of maintenance) has a lot more in common with a Twentieth Century Limited Observation than a painting by Monet.

Ahem Aren't we forgetting a organization here.

[quote="Randolph R. RuizThe Secretary of the Interior Standards for the Treatment of Historic Properties (http://www.nps.gov/hps/tps/standguide/) were written with architecture in mind, and are far more appropriate to our field.[/quote]

Having made my living for about 35 years working on both historic buildings and railroad equipment, I can agree with this to a point. Standards and practices are very different since the fabric itself is very different, but the philosophy that some change and compromise is necessary to keep the structure useful and vibrant is well applied to most of our situations as well. Most buildings, if you don't use them you lose them faster than if you keep them in use. Railroad equipment, if you use them you lose them much faster than if you don't. Few pieces of rolling stock are either deserving of being hermetically sealed in an inert environment for pure preservation or are practically capable of it, and even if you do solve the deterioration through weather, insolation, organisms, etc there's still that pesky gravity to contend with.

About all we can do is have a well considered and concretely written plan and use it as the basis for everything we each decide to do and how we carry it out. Since there is a wide range of organizational personalities doing somewhat similar but not identical kinds of programming, any one-size-fits-all set of criteria is doomed to fail, we need to stop working from that POV, or basing our judgements of others efforts on our chosen criteria which may not apply.

So, we start by each group asking itself "what do I want to be when I grow up?" followed by "and how am I going to get there?" Once you have those big picture things worked out and pretty concretely explained, then start working on smaller and smaller details until you have your conservation / restoration / operation strategies set in stone - and your collection needs figured out as well.

We've been through all this before, gents.

dave

RCD -

Thanks for the photo of Shelburne Falls Railway #10. Always love to see photos of this remarkable restoration of the combine, AND the railroad.

Les

Mr. Davis made the comment, about ten posts up, about "turning a vintage passenger car into a cruse liner" and keeping "it out of the scrap yard." To my thinking, this is an 'adaptive reuse', which is a phrase I first read about in one of my Father's real estate journals years ago; I'm surprised that I haven't seen that term in any of the postings so far.

And railroad equipment, over its lifetime, does get adapted and modified. Didn't the Reading T-1s begin life as large 2-8-0s? And what about the Wabash 2-8-2s that became modern 4-6-4s? Ma and Pa had some freight cars that went through many changes, like from boxcar to flat to gon. I'm sure there are countless other examples.

It may be "adaptive reuse," but that does not mean it's still historically significant.

Following the Sec. of the Interior/National Park Service approach, any given object/building/railcar/etc. has a period during which it was historically significant. This period of significance is finite and specific and must be at least 50 years ago. For a railcar to still be historic, it has to have integrity to that specific period. In other words, to be historic, a railcar needs to retain a great deal of the fabric, character, appearance, etc from the period during which it was contributing in some significant way to the history of our country.

Until, and only if, the American Orient Express is itself considered historic, cars that have been transformed for that service are no longer historically significant even if in a previous incarnation, they could have been seen as historic for their part in a significant train such as the 20th Century Limited.

Occasionally, people here like to refer to the use and evolution of historic equipment during preservation. It is very difficult to argue that this use ever will be historically significant in itself. By the time something has been preserved, its period of historical significance is fixed. History for that equipment has in fact ended.

At this point, one could argue that perhaps some of the equipment in use at the Strasburg RR in 1959 (needs to be at least 50 years ago) is historically significant for its role in the early days of the American Heritage Railway movement. But then again, Strasburg is not a museum, and this example is an extremely rare case.

Which in part demonstrates the reason the Secretary of the Interiors Standards aren't completely applicable to our purposes. For example, I'd be hard put to explain how the railway car in which the Armistice was signed wasn't historically significant the minute the signatories left it. Hitler considered it so significant that he ordered it removed and eventually destroyed less than 25 years afterward.....and removed from preservation, BTW.

Arbitrary criteria like "50 years" don't mean a lot. Suppose something very signifiicant happened in an American Orient Express car tomorrow?

dave

Which is why the Sec of Int Stds do allow exceptions to the 50 yr guideline for extraordinarily significant events. Otherwise, 50 years is considered an adequate period of time for history to "pass judgment" on the value of our past. Does this mean you can not preserve something when it is only 30 years old? No, just that by their standards, the Dept of the Interior is very reluctant to recognize something as historically significant. Their guidelines on this subject are here: http://www.nps.gov/history/nr/publications/bulletins/nrb22/nrb22_IV.htm. It is conceivable that something such as an F40PH would qualify under these guidelines as they were never intended to last for 50 years and given their important role in the rehabilitation of passenger trains in this country. An SD40-2 however? As ubiquitous and important as they were, I am not so sure that one should qualify for this exception.

As for something significant happening on the AOE (or some similar train) tomorrow, I think we all understand given your example of the Armistice that it would have to be extremely important, such as, well, an armistice.

I am sure the fire apparatus destroyed in September of 2001 qualify, but if you rebuilt one of these engines into a tour bus, it would not.