Re: RTM 19th Century Treasures

["Robert Lee" <robsl@ozemail.com.au>]

Well, this has become quite a debate. I want to say just a few things.

First, anyone who devotes large slabs of their life to any volunteer
organisation has a right (in my opinion) to have a large input into policy.
I may often think they are misguided, even wrong, but I'll only say that in
private, and always in a spirit of friendly and constructive criticism. The
issue of preserving quantity or quality is a very tricky one. It's
impossible even for the best-funded organisations to <conserve> a very large
number of items. Keeping them in a state where future generations may one
day conserve them is another matter.

It's almost impossible for any organisation to be both a museum and an
operating railway. In my humble opinion, both Dorrigo and the RTM try to do
too much and thus run the risk of falling between two stools. I know no
organisation anywhere in the world, not even the best funded and most
professional, that do both effectively. Does anyone?? In our own country,
the best operating heritage railways make no claims to be a museum. I have
in mind Puffing Billy, Zig Zag, and Pichi Richi - all very different and
none of them a musuem, although there is a small and none too wonderful
museum at Menzies Creek. PB, by the way, is the world's second most
successful heritage railway (after North Yorkshire Moors) with around
250,000 passenger per annum. It runs with one class of loco. There's a
lesson there.

In my experience, the best museums have a relatively small number of
well-chosen exhibits in coherently thought through environs. eg, if you have
a 59 class, make the exhibit tell the visitor something about Baldwin, about
the decline of steam building in the USA, and about the design and WW2. I'd
like to exhibit an AC16 (or Asian metre-gauge equivalent) beside a 59, for
instance, to make the point. All, of course, illustrated with pics of the
Philadelphia works and AWDs in India, Macarthurs in Thailand etc. This kind
of "smart" display can be replicated many times (but not TOO many) over.
It's called putting exhibits into context. It's very different from having a
row of rusting or black-oiled hulks. But that row of hulks is still needed
somewhere as a kind of reservoir for  posterity. Let's just nor pretend that
it's a museum, because it's not. A museum conserves, interprets and
educates, it does not just preserve.

Operations are very different. For Dorrigo to work, for instance, it should
have a fleet of 6 (at the most!) locos (all either rather small or rather
modern, to make maintenance easy), a dozen cars, and a handful of wagons for
perway purposes. Any more are just a drain on resources for an OPERATING
railway. For a museum it's another matter. But a volunteer organisation just
can't do both well. It's a matter of resources, financial and human. And
that means hard decisions.