I am seeing an ongoing theme in a series of posts… about scrapping F units in New Orleans… about a Rock Island Budd car… about a burned depot about a short line being forced to abandon and be scrapped...

The consistent question is why was this; scrapped, bull-dowsed, lost… why wasn’t it saved… who didn’t save it…

Collectively, we didn’t… Sometimes with good reason…

Too often, the complaints and questions come from those who are fans rather than preservationists… I tend to ignore their complaints…

There is a concept in preservation, called sustainability… the short definition is once you save it today, how are you going to make sure it continues to be preserved.
I run a house museum for a local government… House museums have sustainability issues too… lots of them… save the oldest house in town… find old furniture to put in it… have volunteers give tours Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday…. Charge $5.00 a person… $3.00 for children… on a good week you have about 100 people visit (60 of whom were the three school classes) You gross about $400 a week. Just enough to pay the non profit insurance policy, the light bill, the gardener, and have a few bucks at the end of the year for a volunteer banquet.

15 years goes by, and the house needs paint and a new roof… the organization has $12,000 in the bank… the low bid is $400,000… You beg, but there are not sufficient donations from members, the community, the local tourism board...

The business model was not sustainable… You are losing your house museum…

Our organization has 5 narrow gauge wooden box cars… 4 were donated outright… one was traded for a shed in the shape of a box car, cost $1,200… Transportation to our site was about $3,000 each… or $15,000 total. We have restored one (a body) cost $75,000 including replicating a set of trucks. A second came with trucks… its restoration is funded at about $15,000. The other three with be about $100,000 each… The total to this point is $462,000 for 5 box cars which cost us $1,200 to purchase.

If we put them inside our new car house, they will consume about 150 linear feet of track… Add another $120,000…

So buying the F units for scrap value, adding the cost of moving them, adding cost of storage… secure storage… a paint job… a quick going over with some spare parts… what if a wheel set is bad… a traction motor grounded… There is an air brake leak… the amount of money spent can be staggering… If you have a place to run them, and some passenger cars…

Can you attract enough paying customers to pay the cost of acquisition, the diesel used… some new ties… and back the cost of rebuilding a diesel in 10 years… insurance… then go for it…

Maybe it is not “US” who are allowing this equipment to be scrapped… maybe it is reality.

Agreed. The key difference between a railfan and an experienced preservationist is that while a railfan will say "somebody's gotta save this" or "why didn't somebody save this?", the preservationist will look realistically and critically at the item or situation in question, realize that there is or was no point in trying to "save this" (and why), and move on. Anyone who disagrees should get out of the bleachers and try doing actual preservation work for awhile; you'll soon learn that there are very good reasons why we don't try to "save everything" as some railfan/foamer types believe we should.

Please. When preservationists start constructing organizations that are truly functional, accountable and professional minded. THEN they can start telling the world what "reality" is.

Museums collect, preserve and teach. Show me a museum that has spent $200,000 over the years buying and moving and boarding-up and fixing and moving stuff which now sits essentially derelict, on land whose owners want to see the stuff gone but don't have the heart to Dick Jensen them...

... and I'll show you a museum that DID NOT spend $200,000 buying land and carbarns. Laying down reasonable collection policies. Seeding an endowment. They've done the collect at the expense of the preserve.

Of course they counter: "If we'd done that, none of that stuff would be saved now!"

Maybe. Maybe not. But I question how "saved" it really is right now!

I think my way is better. Given a choice between a museum with 36 ideal historically relevant pieces parked behind an old assembly plant in vandalville... and a museum with no cars and an empty 36-car carbarn... I'll take the second. Build it and they will come.

Just to get out of the rain.

So who buys and moves the equipment? Other people. Because it changes the game. It stops being about spending tens of thousands of dollars to hope against hope of keeping one step ahead of the scrapper... it becomes about preserving it for sure and for good. And that attracts better money.

That plan has not yet been tried. Until it has been tried, I don't think our sense of "reality" is well calibrated.

Well, I think one of the main problems is the "new is better" mentality. The majority of people will think that something of historic value is cool and all, but not know why they have that feeling, because they don't know enough to process their thought. After, people just go back to their iPhone or iPod, and completely forget about what they say unless they see a picture of it years later, but can't remember the important points because they didn't bother to learn anything in the first place! I would know, I can be one of those people at times, which I guess makes me a bit of a hypocrite, but as long as I know...

The current economy with donations way down and equipment scrap values way up is not a good time to be acquiring additional pieces for a collection. It is a time to evaluate what is already on the property, and make realistic decisions regarding what stays and what goes, and take the necessary steps to protect and preserve what can be maintained. This is necessary for the next main event, the hyperinflation economy, where it is going to be too expensive for your volunteers to come long distances to contribute their effort. The local groups here tell me we are already approaching this.

PC

I've often wondered, Has any body ever built a good and effective railroad muesum WITHOUT large artifacts?
It sounds a little wild at first, but I've been in museum that didn't have an artifact bigger than something the size of a coffey table and they were located in a new construction or and unrelated old construction building and they did a great job of telling the story.
Some times I feel like the Rail Preservation world likes to go after the biggest most expensive parts and leave out the part that touches the public the most.
(Please Note in this I am not including "museums" in depots with more than 5 lanterns on display)

Simply put, I think that 20k spent on quality display board that draw in the public, a good gift shop, and placed in a location where history minded people frequent (and a large number of the public) would make a much better start towards a railroad museum.
Atleast laying the ground work for a group that owns property, building and rollingstock, maybe even an operating railroad one day.

I am glad to see this kind of critical thinking introduced here. We can't save everything. There are a few glimmers of hope such as the continued shifting of collections between trolley museums in the northeast and elsewhere.

When do we realize that we have saved enough stuff of the early generations of equipment, even if it means that it is in someone else's collection half-way across the country? (The number of preserved Dover-class Pullmans and Toronto 4600 series PCCs come to mind here.) And, at the risk of stirring up the BART/WMATA and Turobliner discussions, how do we collectively make room for newer old stuff that has yet to come along? Or in the case of the Lake Shore Electric collection, being ready/able to save a collection that is about to be un-saved as it were when the next museum folds.

When our museum did its first strategic plan we realized that we have at least four streetcars that will require a minimum of $500,000 in paid and donated skills to restore, and that the average major restoration project takes 5 years minimum. More than 10 years later we have yet to complete work on one of those cars and are going to start developing a plan for the next car in the queue. Based on other posts here I assume that the same numbers begin to approach reality for a mainline coach or locomotive. Friends, walk your yard tracks, count the proverbial tarps and do the math.

Perhaps a future ARM/TRAIN conference could have a focus on "When to let stuff go".

Wesley

I am not sure the answer is to stop collecting… instead collect intelligently, and budget the stabilization and storage along with the cost of acquisition and transportation… IRM has a track and carbarn space charge built in to its acquisition process. Strasburg (yes, not a museum, but look at them for a good business model) has a developed process to cocoon a wooden car. John Smatlak has instructions on how to properly tarp a car at his web site (http://www.railwaypreservation.com/page3.html). The Nevada State Railroad Museum has a 100+ year supply of wooden restoration projects inside, preserved, for a future day when resources are available. This is not restoration, but responsible preservation.

As for a railroad museum, not based on large objects, the text book example might be the Railroader’s Memorial Museum in Altoona… yes, they are also one of the best examples of the issues surrounding restoration of a large object, but the primary museum is display and story driven, with the locomotives and rolling stock, outside in a separate display area.

Back to the original post, how many operating museums have a budget (hopefully with impounds) for long term maintenance… ties, wheels, heavy rebuilds… the things that you can ignore for a few years and keep going, until too many problems pile up and create a crisis?

I think that the concept Benjamin mentioned of displaying smaller items is very feasible, but it requires research and presentation support. The ideal way to present it is with locally produced interpretive devices, but that capability is lacking in many museums. The subject of railroad enthusiast and museum use of electronic presentation media has surfaced occasionally on RYPN and in some local organizations discussions, and it is surprising how limited the capability is in the preservation community. Most of the talent in the use of electronic presentation software is with the younger railfans who are trackside and have relatively little interest in what the older folks are doing at the local museum. And they are generally using their computer capability to produce modern electronic versions of "slide-music" presentations rather than to design interpretive tools for museum use.

PC

May I suggest something; Take something out of the British. Hell, use the British way of preservation! It's worked since the 60s, so they must have done something right, and still are doing great.

As someone who has been involved in railway preservation for over 40 years, I'd like to make a few comments:
Back in the early days, my "home museum" didn't have an official collections policy or "mission statement", so we wound up with all sorts of artifacts that were gathered in because they were old and someone brought them out (for example, the remnants of a cable-pull oilfield pumping system from near downtown LA). One writer who had visited an Eastern trolley museum in the 1950's used the term "oddly specialized dump". Another observer of early-days railway museums said that some were like "12-inches-to-the-foot model railroad clubs". First-time visitors to these museums often expected a large Greek-revival building with stone lions on either side of the main entrance, with "stuffed and mounted" railway cars and locomotives in huge display cases; they were most surprised to find an odd assortment of rolling stock, a few hundred feet of rickety track, and (for trolley museums) an elderly diesel generator.
Over the years, the museums that have succeeded have learned a number of things:
>You can't save everything.
>Land, lots of land, but do fence it in. Have enough acreage to get the "chicken coops" out of the public-access areas.
>Get those relics under cover.
>Operating exhibits are a big plus (we had one member back in the 1970's who had been a volunteer at a well-known but, at the time, static display, museum in the midwest; he found our operating museum much more interesting.)
>When cars are "just sitting" historical information signs should be added to (or near) them.
>You have to attract and leave a favorable impression with "normal people", which means clean restrooms, park-like setting and a good reception center/bookstore/gift shop.
>Maintain good relations with neighbors and local governments. Some members may scoff at "kissing up to the local politicos", but having the folks at city hall or the local county supervisor on your side can pay big dividends.

Thank you Randy et al. I find my tolerance for uninformed and emotional postings even less than normal of late, probably in need of a railroading fix to get grounded and centered again. The quality of this thread has been mostly great so far, apart from the concept that we are in any way able to impersonate the British about industrial preservation or that nobody has thought that through many times over, even on this forum, but then you'd have to have researched that before reactively posting, so.......

But we do need to balance the emotional with the rational in order to succeed. Our management needs to be based in rational reality, but what we market to our visitors needs to connect with them emotionally and viscerally, or they will patronize other vendors of recreation that do. Railfans will visit us only to take photos and tell us what we are doing wrong. Academics and students of history and technology will visit for very noble reasons, and can reciprocate by being great resources for us in turn, but that market is limited and almost as underfunded as we are, no basis for sustainabaility there.

I think what I'm suggesting here is that impacing our audience is as valid a concern in collections management (and all other aspects of everything we do) as any other more traditionally academic one. I think there's consensus that things that emit noise, movement, and colors and smells are very interesting, and rusty dusty cold things are not. Also, most people appreciate things they experience more when in context than as just an object sitting somewhere.

CSRM has developed static displays into an art museum of railroading - they set the bar high, have a collection based on colorful early examples, allow some hands-on interaction, and use a nicely produced multimedia presentation as an orientation to the experiencing of the collection on display. More context is provided in written form at each display location, which visitors can choose to read or not, depending on their level of interest. B&O Museum has a great static collection as well, but it isn't as interesting to the visiting public. If we're going to rely on a static collection we have to show it very well to succeed.

Dynamic stuff - getting in and riding, hearing, smelling, seeing movement - is what most of us have to provide in some sense to attract visitors adequate to sustain us. There's a broader tolerance of quality of experience possible here based on the greater impact of experience as a whole. The richer, more contextual, and complete the presentation we provide our audience the better we will do all else being equal. This is why every aspect of our operation needs to be part of a complete concept supporting the overall "brand" or character we offer as our product. If you're (for example) advertising the Southern Shortline Railroad experience in all its color and eccentric informality, you don't want a modern prestressed concrete backshop with automated tools, you want a pole barn sheathed in Board and Batten or Corrugated Steel and old manual machinery, with appropriate busted wheels and bits of junk laying around here and there. The restrooms in the old wooden depot need to be clean and modern, but that's about all. Your whole railroad is a stage set, and your visitors want to get caught up in the action of the play.

Nothing we "preserve" matters if nobody cares, and we need to approach people in ways that make them care and want to take part. This requires thinking less like the Smithsonian and more like MOMA or Disney. Our challenge is finding ways to do it on our budgets.

Installment 2 - the stuff we are preserving is only important since it is what we use to link materially to the historic experiences we share and the stories we tell about them, which is what we really gather together to preserve. I see a lot of stuff and hear a lot of concern about the stuff but very little about the experiences and stories - which we should have pretty well ironed out - before we can even rationally start deciding what stuff we want to acquire. Preserving stuff is nothing but technical work and housing, but knowing why you want that particular stuff and what you need it for and using it well for that purpose - that's the failure we need to address or the rest of what we worry about is just meaningless worry, yet we seem to be addressing most of our efforts to those technical issues. So, before you worry about how to paint that rusty thing out there, tell us what you want to use it for and how that relates to the bringing to life of parts of previous lives you want to accomplish.

dave

Tell you the truth, I quite disagree.

On the question of binge scrapping: First that's not our mission and we all find it distasteful. Second, metal prices are going to go a lot higher. China and India have invested correctly in their economies; they are much bigger than us; they are in it for the very long game; they know their demand will stress resource supply and drive up prices; and have planned accordingly. We have not; we keep longing for the good old days; case in point refusing to volunteer because you are shocked that gas is $4.25/gallon again.

Third, you will be buying equipment in the future: Imagine you had an acquisition fund for that purpose. What should it be invested in? Not dollars or stocks, no, you need an investment that moves in lock-step with what you're buying. Invest in steel itself. Unfortunately you can't log into your brokerage account and buy 1000 tons of steel. You must physically own the steel. But if it's in conveniently sized ingots, someone could come on the property Tuesday at 7am and steal them. You want your steel in ungainly, theft-proof packages. Such as, golly! A steam crane or Lackawanna coach. Yes my friend, you already have an acquisition fund, already invested correctly! Now leave it alone and let it appreciate.

On the question of buying equipment - yes you should buy what is appropriate and relevant, not least because other people are scrapping it! The market for historic railroad equipment is very soft right now, practically defined by scrap value.


I'm not sure I agree, but if you're right, the value of a dollar is going to drop dramatically. That means dollars are HIGH.

Land and equipment are LOW.

What's the rule again? Buy ____ Sell ____? Seriously, it's amazing how people always psych themselves into doing the exact opposite. How many people do you know that dumped their stocks when they bottomed out in 2009.

So here we are, land and equipment are LOW, dollars are HIGH. What action would be perverse? What action would be RIGHT?


That is a temporary emotional reaction to the fact that gas has dramatically gone up, and people don't know where to fit $5/gal. gas into their current budget. Fact is, the cost of commuting to the museum is a tiny part of overall cost of volunteering, and tiny by comparison to the benefits therein. Further, costs drop 50% by carpooling. Once folks adapt to reality, they'll be back.

I feel this topic relates closely to the recent article in Trains magazine written by Chris Zahrt. The world we will be living in in the coming years will be much more difficult to prosper in compared to the recent good decades we've enjoyed. Honestly I feel that the checks and balances of time are making up for some of the laziness that has been predominant in this country for past few decades as we led the world in technology, and then rested on our laurels, albeit unknowingly. I was born in the 80's, and have found that doing anything on your own outside what the grocery store or Walmart provides is now considered 'artisan' or niche.

There are not many people out there that understand where we are coming from. If they see smoke from an engine it's automatically pollution. If it doesn't go more than 50 MPH or lacks air conditioning, it "sucks". We need to do a better job at illustrating just how awesome this stuff was and can be. Hide the derelict collection and streamline your appearance. If you have an active restoration, show it off. I personally have an affection for oil and watercolor paintings from contemporary artists that "get it". One thing about a painting of a steam train is you can't embellish much. Show your guests that.

Aside from all this, I have to argue for continuing to burn coal. If you know what you are doing, coal firing can be extremely clean. Make it part of your training if you run coal burning steam engines to make sure a fireman understands how to properly fire an engine, not just make it operable. This is the lost art. Last year I was flattered to hear a prominent official from a very successful (oil fired) tourist operation comment that he didn't know a coal burning engine could fire with a clear stack. That wasn't luck or good coal.

You've got maybe half the point, John.

We're in a cyclical downturn but perhaps less well prepared for it than our grandparents (in your case, G,G, GPs) were, but it too will pass, along with our national dominance since we have no frontier to populate and exploit or manufacturing base on which to build a strong middle class. Wealth gets concentrated based on manipulations of some individuals and organizations with both political and economic power for a while, then it gets redistributed again to some extent. Wars were great economic redistributors, but the current one isn't doing it in the necessary direction, at least not yet. Basing wealth on as ephimeral a commodity as momentarily useful information rather than steel and oil and grain, pork bellies, etc........well, I hope you see the point by now.

Which doesn't mean prosperity will be impossible well into the future. It is possible now, but we need to reinvent ourselves in ways that result in it.

Cheap energy was a blessing and a curse, and that era may well be over if we can't develop the technology to use it differently and in different forms. Unfortunately, our economic system and entire society has been sculpted by the availability of artificially cheap and plentuful energy for over a century now. We can reinvent ourselves and rebuild our society....and it will look a lot more like 1880 than 1980, but with electronics, and way too many people.

Which makes our history more imperative.

So, how do you sell the general public on why we're more imperative when they can't even understand why $5 per gallon gas doesn't even pay for itself, or envision not owning a car unless you live way out in nowhere and farm, when they mostly live way out in nowhere but sprawl now and have never seen a farm?

Get busy on it, and please give my best regards to Zahrt, pleased he's stayed in the business.

dave