PTM fortunately has access to city water. However, over half the cost of our sprinkler installations was installing the water supply piping between the city water mains and our buildings.

The RR museum of Pennsylvania has a pretty nice compromise between a lot of their collection under cover and room to look around. There could be a little more space but it’s still very nice. I love how one portion near the entrance sort of has a ‘big city underground station’ look to it, something that has been exploited for some photo shoots in magazines in the past few years.

Car barns can be had cheap if you know where to look
http://www.farmtek.com/farm/supplies/ca ... dings.html

These structures can be very useful in a rural environment, for storage. They're fairly cheap and can cover a large space.

If you're in an urban location, have security concerns, and if you will be allowing visitors inside, you're into a whole different part of the building code. In this situation, you can't get away with anything less than a strong, permanent building.

Steve Hunter

Evan,

I just went to that site. Hard to imagine a more perfect wedding than this one;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUov-4IJ20M

Of course my wife may disagree.

With that being said where do they actually do maintenance on their equipment? If I had limited resources available, my first priority would likely be to put the restoration shop in the roundhouse. Somehow having it serve as a wedding hall would be rather low on the priority list.

This reminds me of one of the "coulda been" stories from U.K. preservation. One of the locomotive groups to which I belong was seeking to erect a permanent workshop and enginehouse for its two--later to become three--locomotives. Once it was agreed which railway and site, the building design and procurement started, with fundraising. After numerous false starts and fits, a member of the group, working in a different capacity, found that he was being ordered to dismantle a now-disused National Coal Board industrial building, which happened to be of the "industrial kit" form--big enough for SIX locomotives on two tracks, with generous shop room, even complete with overhead crane! With a little bit of bureaucracy, the building was carefully dismantled and transferred to the loco group gratis, with them paying only transport and storage!

Long story short, the planned loco depot never came about on that particular line due to logistical and operational changes, so the building was eventually brokered to another historic-preservation outfit, at a price that quite more than paid for the transport and storage....... and went a long ways towards paying for the shop building that would eventually be erected.

The new Southeastern Narrow Gauge & Shortline Museum is currently under construction and we are raising funds for just such a project.

You can go to www.newtondepot.com and click on "Museum Plan" for our artistic renderings and architectural plans... There is a another button which has our budget..

Bottom line, our capital campaign is aiming to collect $750,000, of which the covered structure (which has 300 covered feet of dual gauge track) is only $237.000. This includes the L-shaped custom design cover (designed after the local Carolina & North-Western shop building), ample display/viewing space, bird proofing in the rafters, LED lighting, fencing, and outdoor motion sensing/security.

Thus far we have raised about $350k of the target amount since kicking off the cammpaign in October. Available funds are exceedingly tight, but this was expected...

Click on the website and offer your comments and constructive critiques... we appreciate your input!

Matt Bumgarner
Alexander Chapter-NRHS

WCRA has an impressive amount of shop space available to them. Separate from the roundhouse, they have a former PGE shop building within the Heritage Park, and across the street they lease space in the former BC Rail Motive Power shops. Below is a picture from the ARM 2009 meeting in the PGE shop building:

Several notes on this issue.

#1 -- fabric moisture barrier well below the track (beyond reach of tamper tines). Very easy to install at construction time and nigh-impossible to install once track is put down and cars moved in. This feature alone, is what makes WRM's Barn 3 so much better than WRM's Barn 2. Moisture comes up through the floor, filling the barn with the stench of mildew year-round. That may smell like victory if you didn't have a carbarn before -- but GOOD GOD, for a few thousand dollars you could have SO much better of a carbarn. Do not handwave this or let it slip through the cracks - this is serious business.

Even if it's a cheapie pole barn. Think what happens to the longeity of one if all the poles and wood frames are inside the moisture barrier.

#2 -- "buildings to preserve the collection are a higher priority" -- correct. I am doing some back-of-napkin work on one museum, armed with the everyday working knowledge of how it was successfully done at another. "Carbarn first, or shop?" came down to this: "You can work on cars in a carbarn, but you can't store cars in a shop."

Besides, you (the humans) will be spending so much time in the shop that it really needs to be visionary in design and utility, and your first building will never be that. You don't want a pole barn or a steel building in the snowbelt, or you'll have Seashore's problem; the building will be uninhabitable 3 months out of the year, and/or you'll have heating bills to beat the band. There are ways to beat that problem, but they take guts because your building inspector will be saying "Huh?" a lot.

#3 - BUILD BIG. Consider various sizes of building, and compute the cost per car. You will find a "sweet spot" - cheapest cost per car - somewhere. My guess is it'll be pretty close to the large carbarns at IRM, WRM, OERM and the like. Don't downsize off that size to fit your collection, your collection will get bigger.

Excellent advice.
Thanks! - Doug Debs

Here are two photos of Street Car Hall at National Capital Trolley Museum. The building opened to the public in 2009.

At the west end of the hall, Jim Hogan explains features of Blackpool 606 to our visitors and compares its design with DCTS 1101 (St. Louis 1937) and DCTS 0522 (American Car 1898) on adjacent tracks.



Lighted kiosks contain photos and facts about RbG 955 (Dusseldorf) and STIB 17 (Brussels) displayed at the east end of the hall.



Wesley

The Cumbres and Toltec is building a new restoration shop barn for its historic passenger car fleet. I saw this photo and realized it is an innovative and presumably cheaper design that might be replicated by smaller museum groups.
http://www.coloradonewmexicosteamtrain.org/FriendsForum/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=2124

Don't build them in areas with high winds or heavy snow. Similar structures are popular in the agricultural and equine worlds... at least five collapsed last year in a thirty mile radius of my home. I wouldn't want to try insuring one.

One of my neighbours had one (used as a hay barn) collapse in January and has spent slightly more to replace it with a proper steel building. Needless to say, he regrets ever having "cheaped out" on the original structure.

Steve Hunter

Collapse means not enough structural ribs. Everyone thinks they are clever saving a couple of bucks by having so few. What they overlook is the cost of foundation work, permitting, entitlements, utilities, engineer review, property taxes, mob payola, bathrooms, ADA accommodation, roadways and walkways, groundbreaking events, funding drives, yada yada. The difference between 17 ribs and 25 is trivial by comparison. But not trivial when the "100 year storm" rolls thorugh, which you may notice they are now doing on 5-year intervals thanks to Al Gore. Also not trivial when you go to rent your roof for solar panels. Also not trivial when you decide it's time to hang sprinkler pipes from the ceiling.

Errrr... Did you bother to look at the image that was linked to the last message:

http://www.coloradonewmexicosteamtrain. ... =64&t=2124

This is one of those fabric covered structural "tents", which I hardly think qualifies as a permanent building... Although I've often thought that this would be useful for a locomotive restoration that needed to be done outside, the "building" only being used for the life of the project, then dismantled. Here on the windswept plains of Illinois, we have a pipeline contractor that has an almost identical installation in his yard that he uses to pre-fab complicated connectors, etc. His is even taller, by virtue of having lengths of 16 or 18 inch I beam on top of the containers to hold the truss anchors. This one is oriented north and south, which could, I suppose, form a snow drift on the lee side with our prevailing west winds, but I'd be more afraid that the huge sail area presented to the wind would create more wind load than any possible snow load. However, it's been standing about three years now with no signs of trouble.