Are any of your museums working on new displays this year that add to the scope and value of your presentations? Would you be interested in telling us about them, and in doing so, perhaps generating some publicity for them at the same time?

PC

The Delaware History Museum has a great exhibit that recently opened, "Almost as Fast as Birds Can Fly: the Railroad in Delaware History". Included are portions about car building, locomotive shops, stations, and the railroads themselves.

http://www.hsd.org/MuseumExhibits/Railr ... istory.htm

While they are not a railroad museum or tourist railroad they have done a nice job with the exhibit.

I have been told that TVRM has opened an exhibit about Pullman cars and how they were used. I think it is upstairs at the Grand Junction depot.

All aboard?

T7

"Street Cars Go to the Movies" combines a traditional photo exhibit about Washington DC movie palaces with three separate video programs featuring silent films of Harold Lloyd.

http://www.dctrolley.org/MainExhibitHall.htm#movies

Wesley

IRM has a small group of folks pushing along the concept of displays to go along with the collection. Like many other places, IRM is challenged with the financial realities of finding indoor storage for the collection, over and above any "museum type structures", something made all the more difficult in that basically everything at IRM has been built from the ground up in an ever widening area of former corn fields, ie there's never been anything that could have found some form of adaptive re-use (at least so far)

To this end two former "ArtTrain" cars have been designated as display halls.

The first of the two has been filled over the previous months with a handful of new displays including one which was up over the Memorial Day holidays with a Railroads/WWII theme.

Other displays include a small history on RPO cars and their operations, an overview of interurban operations in the general Fox Valley area which IRM operates (including it's "host" railroad, the former Elgin & Belvidere Electric, my own personal minor effort to aid in the cause). There is also a small collection of railroad art on display by a local artist.

Some other displays that are in the pipeline include one explaining and showing the routing of per diem shipments with URTX in the 1950's from points around the US and featuring many fallen flags both well known and some more obscure, also planned is a display of materials from the Chicago Railroad Fairs.

There are some other more long standing displays in various depts around the property, one of the more particularly well done displays is in the streamliner car department (which is immediately adjacent to the ArtTrain display cars)


To add a bit of personal opinion to this, in my mind, these are the types of efforts that make a museum truly a museum, and advance it beyond a collection. It takes a different skill set and every bit as much hard work as restorations and operations (albeit it mostly not as back-breaking or dirty !), but these are the things that really teach people and tell the story. If customers are still walking out the door on most days talking about the "choo-choo" train ride, you probably need to do more on the teaching and display side of things (just my opinion)

Displays are one area that clearly differentiates museums and limits the air of "sameness" that sometimes prevails with track after track of collection equipment that although beautifully restored doesn't have any human support available most of the time to tell its story.

I wonder in this current sour economy whether anybody will be motivated try out some of the spectacular stuff that EMD did in their years of promoting diesel motive power, like "visible" locomotives, engines as cutaways and their crankcases as open displays, crankshafts stood on end as artwork (20-645 anyone?), locomotive power trucks displayed on an angle so you could see the details on top and underneath, etc. Some of the pretty impressive "component" displays EMD did aren't particularly expensive to duplicate and do not require the use of operable machinery, a failed component would be just as useful if cleaned up properly.

Every time I walk through the commuter rail shops I look at the clean new pantographs, the overhauled HEP engines, and the components of EMD main engine installations, and wonder how some of those would be as a floor display at a museum. The public usually does not get to see the equipment up that close.

Back in 1947 EMD created a floor display consisting of the entire internal machinery package of an F-3 mounted on a base, and including the roof hatches, but without the rest of the locomotive. What a great use that would be for the components of a scrapped locomotive. Unfortunately, we are not likely to see things like that done again either in preservation or the industry.

PC

The B&O Museum will be working on integrating a multi-year series of exhibits relating to the B&O and the Civil War, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the conflict.

Baltimore Streetcar Museum is rearranging things inside the Visitors Center and working on a couple pieces for eventual rollout, as well as cleaning up a few pieces of junk here and there......

The Northwest Railway Museum opened a small exhibit in the Snoqualmie Depot entitled "Wellington Remembered" about the Great Northern Railway town of Wellington, 1892 - 1929, and introducing a series of never-before published photos taken by Casper Hansen in 1912/1913 at Wellington. There is a companion web site: http://www.wellingtonremembered.org

--Richard

If anyone else would like to describe their new displays, it would make a good article for RMQ.

Sidebar: IRM is "challenged" by indoor storage? I would say they have taken on the challenge, unlike what, 90? 95?% of the museums out there whose stuff rusts in the rain. I'd also say having a virgin location is hardly a difficulty; it is a tabula rasa in which you can build what you want, without being married to someone else's bad idea. Believe me, you'll come up with enough bad ideas all your own! *grin*

One thing IRM does right is make people "rat maze" through the campus to get to the train ride they expect. This forces them to discover the campus proper, and find all the real exhibits and carbarns. Daddy brought Johnny for a train ride, and a train ride is what Joh-- oh cool! Look at all those signals! What's in this building? That would never happen if you TOLD them "hey, cool stuff way over there." They have to find it for themselves, and with a tabula rasa, you can help them. That's why Disney puts all the "E-ticket" rides in the back. If they were all by the entrance, no one would go back there. Seriously - this is better than forcing visitors to go through the shop to get to the restrooms because that's where the S.P. put them.

At the Railroad Museum of Long Island we have...

At our Riverhead site a new exhibit that displays the history of the Riverhead Long Island Rail Road station since it turns 100 this year. We have many intere4sting pieces that where used with trains and train stations.

At our Greenport site we have on loan from the MTA New York City Transit Museum- "The Route of the Dashing Commuter" 175 years of the Long Island Rail Road.

All good things all around

Anthony

At the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum, we have made a few additions to our East Rochester Despatch Car Shops: A History in Pictures exhibit which is house inside of the Merchants Despatch Transportation refrigerator car #14053. We have several other exhibits and all of them are listed here on our website.



We hope to add some new exhibits next year, and I know I plan to spend some of my time over the long Rochester winter working on them.

As Preston has also alluded to, our partner museum, New York Museum of Transportation, exhibits two prime mover cutaways. These cutaways of an EMD 567 and ALCO 244 actually belong to the Rochester & Genesee Valley Railroad Museum, but the NYMT is kind enough to exhibit them in their display barn for us.

Thanks and great topic! I would also love to hear what others are thinking about introducing new technologies. From solid state media players with flat screen displays to push button MP3 players, there seem to be are a lot of possibilities now at a very low price point although I am still searching for a good push button MP3 player solution at a reasonable price.

Regards,
Chris Hauf
R&GVRRM

Chris, those two engine cutaways at the New York Museum of Transportation are SUPERB and a "must see" for railroad museum staff and volunteers looking for ideas on how to make cutaway displays. I was not fully aware of the heritage of those engines until I recently found a magazine article that showed the EMD engine on board the Erie Railroad's Centennial Display Train in the early 1950s. The ALCO 244 cutaway, which is the finest job of sectioning a 244 that I have seen, also shows up in some photos in the Marion Diesel Shop in Ohio shortly after the ALCO FA's were delivered.

While I am getting into some "topic drift" here, I just want to mention that the detailed sectioning of equipment is an ART that requires skill and planning, and surviving examples of sectioned diesel engines and locomotive machinery are very fascinating and valuable display items. For a detailed look at sectioned engines by EMD, ALCO, CAT, and others, see this link:

http://tugboatenthusiastsociety.org/Pag ... ngines.htm

PC

If I may correct my intent,, when I said IRM is challenged for indoor storage, I meant in terms of a "museum" type structure, as opposed to indoor storage for the collection.

Not mutually exclusive terms necessarily, but IRM's barns are not what I think most of us have in mind in terms of displays for materials related to that same collection. Certainly none of the barns are appropriate to any type of controlled conditions such as heat/cold, humidity, etc. All things which effect the equipment to some degree (no pun intended) but even more adverse effect to the likes of documents, photos, etc.

Sturtevant Rails (ie the Western Union Junction RR Museum) has been working on converting our 50' PS boxcar into display space, so far a floor has been framed inside of the car, next walls will be raised inside of the car. one section will be done up as an old depot office, to show people how a rr depot's office would of looked, the rest of the car will include other displays including a railway maintance display and a small sales area to help raise funds for the museum