Re: [NSW] Dorrigo (was: 6042 in south australia?)

["Trevor Edmonds" <tedmonds@tmx.com.au>]

James,

You have raised a number of issues. I will attempt to address each one at a
time.

<<You are right that I have never visited Dorrigo.>>

Let me know if you untend to visit and I will try to get you in. I am in
Dorrigo about once a month, but we have work groups there most weekends.

<<It has been on TV a number of times and I have seen reports about it over
the years in a number of railway magazines.>>

You need to ask what the TV programs are trying to achieve. Most are looking
for scandal and intrigue. They walk past rows of rolling stock in good
condition looking for something in poor condition. The most popular target
is CPH33. It was wrecked in a collision with a locomotive while in railway
service. We took it as a source of parts. That doesn't matter when the TV
shows pictures of CPH33 and it is presented as typical of Dorrigo.

One of the programs you may have seen was The Investigators on ABC. Waht you
were never told was that one of our members made a formal complaint about
the program and it was formaly investigated by the ABC complaints unit. The
findings were highly critical of the presentation of the segment, calling it
biased and unbalanced foot in the door journalism. There were numerous
instances sited where the program presentation failed the ABC standards. The
Investigators chose not to highlight their deficiencies.

As for the railway magazines, we make information available to the
magazines. We get good coverage in The Railway News, but for some reason in
recent years Railway Digest has not seen fit to print anything we have
supplied. Even when we have been criticised in Railway Digest, our requests
for a reply have been refused.

<<I hope you succesfully manage to conserve and eventually restore your
collection. But with such a large collection to preserve, you need a large
amount of resources to do it properly.>>

We think we are doing a reasonable job at the moment. Obviously we could
always use more volunteers and more money. What preservation group doesn't?

<<In addition to all this Dorrigo's reputation isn't very good,>>

Our biggest problem is we have not been as effective with propaganda as have
some of our detractors. Scandal will always be a better headline and will be
better remembered. Both DSRM and Keith Jones have been accused of all sorts
of things over the years, which have triggered investigations by the
Australian Taxation Office, Police Fraud Squad, Corporate Affairs
Commission, Social Security and National Parks. None of these investigations
found any problems, but that did not get reported.

The last sentence is actually a fib. Corporate Affairs found that the sign
on the gate identifying the registered office of DSRM did not fully meet
their requirements.

<<so I don't know how you will manage to get enough volunteers when you
aren't showing any significant signs of progress to the general railfan
community.>>

We have about 700 members. As is usual, only a small fraction are active. We
are not (and have never been) the one man band that has become an urban
myth. If you saw the amount of work that is being done you would be
staggered.

<<In Railway Digest and other magazines we keep reading about locos and
rollingstock being purchased by Dorrigo, but we never hear of any
restoration of these items.>>

None of them are being restored. They are being conserved, so they will be
able to be restored in the future. We need to establish our static display
site and move the rest of our rolling stock to Dorrigo first.

We do keep buying rolling stock, but is there anything we have purchased
that you think should not have been preserved?

Trevor