Sometimes you just don't know what you've got till it's gone..............

Wes

Topic Drift Warning...

These bits and pieces of Yellow Taxi following Dave's comment remind me of the afternoon cookout in at Orange Empire when they last hosted the ARM convention. As we walked the buffet line past the baked beans, someone said "Have some more beans, Taggart?" and the Blazing Saddles one liners just went down the line for several minutes.

OK - back to the Bitter Choices.

Wesley

Quick, get a rope........ (although that could also apply to collections policies)

While moving equipment has a cost, there also is a benefit. We have found that when we trade/give a piece of equipment to a museum for which that artifact is consistent with their mission statement, but not with ours, the piece is preserved/restored in a way that we simply did not have the resources for.

an adage from my computer class...you can't fix a flat tire by dropping F-bombs and kicking the tire.

When a piece of equipment is down to museum time, there may be no such thing as "investment" anymore as you should not expect a return from money spent. Its not about the money anymore. Money is just a tool to accomplish what you need. Just like a wrench, a screwdriver.

IRM is just as guilty to scrapping rare equipment for equity, today its harder to find things to save from the old era as many have found their way to museums. IRM has established its roots so may not need to be scrapping equipment for equity.


and BTW what to me is a better use of $200,000...I would look for 20 cars needing saving and get them moved out of harms way, the rest will come later, go as you go, if that issue comes up, like saving the trolleyville collection.
If you can't find 20 cars, earmark it for car barns.

(is there a "clear" rustoleum?)

Or, with a thorough restoration job costing between $15,000 and $50,000 or even much more, should we really be spending anything on restoration until everything is under cover?

Should we not get everything, even the derelicts, under cover before starting major restoration projects? Until that point, limit the work to stabilization and quick paint jobs?

Realizing that the expensive restoration will begin to suffer from the weather immediately, and its cost is a significant portion of a building's cost, in most cases I'd argue the building should come first. And, if a museum doesn't own its land, it had better get busy finding a home.

I've argued this many times and usually get ignored, but my home museum is finally working toward the goal of properly housing its collection. It's a big job and will take a while, though.

Steve Hunter

One thing that has not been discussed is the change in the visitors at a typical railway or trolley museum. What do we owe our visitors who pay for admission?

Today the number of visitors on a nostalgia trip approaches zero. "I remember taking one of those cars to go to school." Back in the 1950's probably 85% of the visitors were on a nostalgia trip.

The number of railfan visitors today has been estimated at less than 10% at several museums. Estimating the number accurately is difficult because fans come in so many flavors. Some foamers have clothes covered with rail patches. Others may have had a Lionel train as a kid and have always thought trains were neat.

What do you do if you give a party and no one comes? Can we justify maintaining a museum just for ourselves? How can we preserve a collection without the income from visitor tickets?

One way to break out of the "railfan haven" mode is to host special events, such as Thomas the Tank Engine or Polar Express. Presentations of this type take a lot of effort on the part of the membership, and draw resources away from the actual work of preservation and restoration, but they bring in young families. If just a small percentage of visitors to these events get "bit by the vintage railway bug", it will mean that as members grow old and pass away, there will be new faces in the carbarns and workshop. Well-run events also bring in money, very important in an era when prefab buildings erected by contractors are the norm, and member-constructed "pole barns" are frowned upon by local building authorities.

We can build all of the barn space we want, but what about the unfunded liability represented by all of the large objects we've saved? What is the cost to restore the stuff under the tarps or at the back of the barn?

At NCTM I can account for three double truck cars that need a complete restoration/reconstruction. At a ballpark of $500,000 each in paid and/or volunteer time we are looking at raising $1.5 million over the next umpteen years in addition to the normal operating costs and maintenance of the collection. Your mileage may vary, but the numbers add up quickly.

Wesley

Correct. Take an auto assembly plant, a bunch of normal business financial rules apply, and those rules absolutely decide whether the plant runs or is scrapped. Now take the Statue of Liberty. Total breakdown of those business rules because of this tremendous cultural value. That's our situation at museums.

The business rules do not fit us. Trying to force a fit results in ridiculousness like "priceless" = $0 = "worthless".


I don't think money works the way you think it works.
Equity is not money. Equity is the natural, intrinsic value in your possessions. When you scrap something, you are gaining cash by STRIPPING EQUITY. That is a trade term for the practice of trashing ones assets to raise cash. Stripping equity also includes:
- Selling property
- Mortgaging assets (reducing equity)
- Borrowing money
- Defaulting (stripping your credit rating)
- Deferring maintenance*
- Trashing your reputation



Yes, that's the "Move 20 cars" option I specified above. Trouble is there will ALWAYS be more cars that need "saving" (to use that term loosely). A collector's work is never done.

As long as a carbarn is second priority, there'll never be spare cash for it, and it will not ever happen.

You don't believe me? Look around. At the average railroad museum, carbarns aren't even second priority, they are third behind Sisyphean (futile, endless) efforts to maintain the equipment while it is outdoors. And they wring their hands and they say "This is the best we can do."

We know exactly what those look like after 20 years.

I propose let some stuff go to scrap so you can cover what you got. Yes I walk my talk and yes it hurts. But in the end, it'll save a lot more stuff.

Which is why you shouldn't do them.

The type of situation you describe is really a much bigger underlying problem: the business side of the operation has failed. It does not have a viable publicity machine, so it doesn't have a steady stream of paying customers. It does not have customer-focus so you have things like appalling bathrooms, stale displays, and terrible Yelp reviews. They don't actively maintain mailing lists and don't passionately promote their organization except to foamers. A lot of visitors don't even realize it's a nonprofit, they just think it's a really shabby tourist line. As a DIRECT result of this, they are having financial trouble.


Of course they are prideful, so they tell each other stories as to why their basic business cannot possibly work. And so they stop trying. That doesn't pay the bills obviously, so "Special events" get foisted as a silver bullet, to solve all their problems.

What a load.

The problem is, if they're bad at their business generally, they're not going to "suddenly become good at it" when a special event comes along. If they can't promote their business regularly, they won't promote their special event properly. If they can't get crews for regular runs, they'll have the same problem with the special event. Except they'll also have a bunch of new burdens and costs associated with the special event, and by the time the thing is over, people will be WORN OUT, exhausted and fed up. Even worse if the event fails, which further undercuts their ability to do the business thing.

Special events should never be done as an attempt to cure a problem. They should be built on top of your existing business success. You need to build that first. You need to master the basics.

If you can barely fly, Icarus, don't try to fly high.

And one of the rules about special events is that revenue gained from them is to be used for capital improvements (such as carbarns, better restrooms for the paying customers, landscaping, and paving streets). If a museum depends on special event income to keep the lights on, it does indeed have a problem.

I like the idea of directing all profits to a special project fund.

Now, what happens if the event loses money? Is that special project fund looted to pay for it? Does it become a burden to the organization's general fund? Unless the event is a proven money-maker with a long history (every group has 1 or 2 such events), I don't think it's fair to burden the organization with the business risk. I think the promoters should bear the risk individually. That will eliminate the more expensive and hair-brained schemes, while encouraging, at least, economical and low-scale events that meld with (and support) normal operations.

To be clear I'm not against the 1-2 traditional special events every museum has that are regularly successful: Thomas, the spook train, holiday train, fall color train, pumpkin patch, Santa train, easter bunny specials, wildflower train, whatever your moneymaker is. But you're right, they should go into a special restricted fund.

I'm against the idea that you can just fart out a bunch more big events and they'll just work magically. They won't.

"The railroad preservation community may be at the same point. Perhaps we need to collectively look at what we have, talk to each other, and decide who can preserve what. This is part of the museum profession, refining your collection policy...."

This is a key issue -- talking with each other. Sometimes what happens is that we talk only to those we know about exchanging or taking someone else's railcar that doesn't fit into what the museum has chosen to take on. Somehow, we need to expand the talking arena as to what's available before it's listed with Ozark or someone else.

While car barns can "preserve" against deteriorating conditions from outside weather, the museum must have ready hands or obtain them to complete the restoration processes. While it may not be a this year thing, do you really want to continue to store something that may never get worked on in twenty years?

Especially something that might not be relevant to the railroad museum's history, philosophy, purpose, or mission. That is a question where the collection policies come into play, and I think, that's where the original writer's statement was taking us. Choices to be made.

Have a look at what happened when Colonial Williamsburg sold off an asset..,

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/the-sorry-fate-of-a-tech-pioneer-halsey-minor-and-historic-virginia-estate-carters-grove/2012/05/30/gJQAwdJG4U_story.html

Wesley