What is being preserved are the locomotives that the old men who run railroad museums used to watch as a kid with there old man. The RS3 isn't very importain in the grand scam of things but let's see how many have been preserved http://www.thedieselshop.us/AlcoSurv-RS-4.HTML Now let's take the F40PH, a locomotive that defined passenger railroads in North America for over 30 years last I checked there were 2 in museums. Since the old guys that make the decisions at railroad museums were around when the F40PH were new talking about saving one sends them into mid life crisis.

/RANT

You missed it, we're well past mid life.

Unless my museum had included in its mission any justification for saving a F40PH it wouldn't make sense for me to recommend it. We don't so I'm not. If your mileage varies, present your BOD with a plan for acquisition. If you don't have a workable plan, and they don't get one it's pretty much not their fault......... if they do turn down a workable plan for no good reason you have something to whine about.

[..enough dirt to protect it from the ballast...]
Can you elaborate on this? Thanks!
John

"Steam in service is not necessarily preserved . . ."

When you take into consideration how long it has been since steam locomotives have been built in the United States, I think it is safe to say that any steam locomotive that is extant and in service has been preserved.

"Restoration to service is not necessarily preservation".

Taking an artifact that is extant and making it service worthy is an extension of its life span, which certainly should qualify it as having been preserved.

The act of taking something and hiding it inside a barn for decades is in and of itself an element of preservation.

Keeping an engine in service is inherently more preserving then shoving them into a park to rot. When you scrub them clean, paint them shiny, and shove them into a multi-million dollar building, you have obliterated the smell of hot cylinder oil. When they are stored cold for all time, you have forgotten to preserve the raw feel, sound, sight of a oil burner's firebox roaring, red, and HOT. You think most people find the sight of antique iron stuffed and mounted any more compelling then old pottery under glass? These thinks shrunk the globe, pulled us out of mud and wood huts and into modern society. I am FIRMLY of the belief that it is indeed, STILL grandpa's ax even if the handle has been replaced 3 times and the head has been replaced twice. If you hang it on the wall behind a window, it's as lonely, remote, and uncompelling as the two rocks sitting next to it that a caveman used to beat a gazelle to death with.

At NSRM we take the decision of what to restore seriously. The factors which weigh heavily in the discussions are:
The mission of the institution: Preservation, interpretation, etc of regional railroad stuff and history therein,
The significance to the item in question in relation to the rest of the collection,
The funding opportunities:
The resources other than money that support the restoration:
And the political and social pressure and rewards for successful completion.
There are other factors which weigh in on the decision process but these are the ones that I focus on. We don’t really ever ask if a proposed project will influence, positively or negatively, the railroad preservation community across the country. In other words we might chose to restore something that is well represented in other institutions and would duplicate their work if our efforts help our institution in meeting its mission statement.
It would be foolishly optimistic to think that all institutions in the country could get together and decide collectively what each institution should do to better the collective purpose of railroad preservation across the nation. That will not work, ever. So in answer to the question first posited “So I ask you what is important to railroad preservation”, I believe it is to share a little something with the visitors and to give them a feeling of well being when they leave and to feel personally good about your own effort.
We do what we do as long as we can then we don’t.

CCdW

Most of the "cheapie" car barns I have seen are built initially with floors of the indigenous earth or gravel. If they are paved, that comes later. That is also true of WRM's deluxe Carhouse 3 - only the walkways are paved, under the ties is earthen material, then the vapor barrier, then more earth.

The vapor barrier is a flexible plastic sheet. Decent crushed stone has sharp edges. Under weight, that would lacerate the sheet and render it ineffective. In the case of CH3, ideal materials were selected and trucked in. A job on the cheap may be able to use the most suitable of the indigenous soils.

Vapor barrier can be very thin, cheap plastic, not just the 'usual' heavy polyethylene or Visqueen 'welded at the seams'. But it's very important that the plastic neither get punctured from above or below or that it move or shift enough to tear or separate.

Ideally you would lay down a layer of sand or other compliant material BEFORE placing the moisture barrier, then put down something with some 'stickiness' -- this is why dirt is better than washed sand here -- over the plastic, deep enough that none of the ballast edges can push down to puncture or stretch the plastic. Note that even small stones in the 'dirt' can cause problems, and small stones or roots in the 'ground' can, too.

As noted, this is a simple thing to do even when doing minimal 'grading' where the carbarn tracks are to go, but nearly impossible even to approximate (without digging everything out and segregating the materials!) afterwards.

Not that many people would do this, but if you are building a 'controlled environment' building, you might want to put some insulation in with the vapor barrier, as a 'thermal break' with what will typically be an average of 55 to 57-degree-F "infinite source/sink" (we use it as such for ground-source heat pump HVAC). It might be a reasonably short payback if the 'rest' of the building is well-insulated as built, and you have doors with good seals...

I doubt we really have much to say about what we preserve. That decision seems to have been made by the Fates who favored the few surviving pieces that fill our collections. Yes, occasionally some far-sighted individuals made decisions that spared particular pieces from the torch, but I submit that chance, more often than not, is to be thanked for selecting just what we preserve.

And when we go choosing which piece gets to go under cover, or stay out in the weather, or which piece gets to be restorplicated, is it historical significance or the ability of a particular piece to attract money that makes the difference? The choice may have more to do with fundability than significance. Seems to me that "significance" is too often used to justify actions that had little to do with significance at all.

And, this may be a good thing. It may well be that too much (or too easy) money is harmful to preservation. While a well-executed restoration may take the viewer "back in time" to experience all the sensations associated with a particular object operating in its full glory, how much of the original object--as it came down to us--was lost in the process? We have to ask, is our goal to preserve the object, or the experience the object provided? While some objects are so far gone that restorplication is appropriate, it seems to me that some things--perhaps the most significant things--are best preserved by leaving them alone.

And the historical significance of the replica locomotives at Promontory? Well, their creation allowed the two stand-in locomotives (the V&T's Inyo and Dayton) to be repatriated to Carson City. That makes them significant in some subtle way.

DJS

Robby, Thank you for asking a open ended hard question

The original question had two elements… (Robby, excuse me for restating if this was not your intention)

1) Are the replica locomotives at Golden Spike National Monument “Historic?”

and

2) If they are not, should we be using our collective resources to create/preserve/interpet them or something else… followed by (in later responses) examples of things which we might alternately be saving…

Along the way we have asked what is important about what we preserve… is it rivets or a specific brake valve or the smell of steam and lube oil…

My thoughts…

The original question (parts 1 & 2) made an assumption that if we did not create the Golden Spike replicas, that the money used for that would be redirected to another railroad preservation project… This assumes we are a monolithic movement with making common decisions… for a common goal … Preserving Railroad History… side story… Lynn Modeninger was the key note speaker at the Viginia & Truckee conference at the Nevada State Railroad Museum back in the late 1990’s… He spoke of a world with a “benevolent dictator” responsible for railroad preservation… an if he was that benevolent dictator, what he would do… sending locomotives and cars to other, presumably better homes… for the good of us all… and for the good of the objects… and for the good of railroad preservation and interpretation… The original question was as much a fantasy as Lynn’s speech…

I would suggest that we are not a monolithic movement, and money not spent on the two replica locomotives at Promontory would if not spent there, would NOT be spent at Steamtown, for railroad preservation (note, keeping the money in the same organization), but instead would be spent building new boardwalks at Yellowstone… Money not spent on another PCC car, would not then be available to preserve an Amtrak F-40…

We are instead a broad collection of groups, some large, some small, each with a specific mission… hopefully that mission is well thought out… Thinking locally, the mission of a small group in California, which calls for preserving wooden narrow gauge cars and until recently used horses as locomotives is different than the mission of a “trolley” museum 100 miles to the north that is preserving electric railway equipment, mostly interurbans… and different than the State railroad museum (run by a the State Parks Department) which is preserving the story of railroads in California, or the museum 60 miles up the road dedicated to a specific narrow gauge railroad (but seems to collect equipment from a well known narrow gauge logging railroad…

Each of the above (and the 10 other groups in the area) have their mission and interpretive model, and will (an should) work to that model… And should use their specific model to make decisions about new items for the collection, and how each object is preserved/interpreted/restored… So the wooden car museum or the group preserving a single railroad’s narrow gauge (on the original site) would not be expected to think about SD-40’s or Budd passenger cars…

What we should expect, as a larger community, is a set of standards for processes and scholarship, which lead to the decisions that each group makes. In museums in general, there is accreditation… a process by which a groups policies and practices are reviewed or audited by an outside organization… asking what is your museum’s mission, how do you work to that, and have you followed those policies and practices in real life…

ARM (before the merger) took this on after a well known eastern “trolley museum” was threatened with the loss of its museum accreditation… by a national “general” museum accreditation group… that group, more familiar with oil paintings and traditional museum objects, didn’t understand the way we operate and because we operate need to maintain and repair and rebuild railroad cars… (to be fair, that museum had reportedly not upheld the standards which had won it accreditation in the first place) The result was ARM “Recommended Practices”. A document defining how a railroad museum might be run, and how they should make decisions…

Within this discussion, beyond the original question, there is the question of how we preserve… with three options offered… (in this case using steam locomotives as the example) cold, but restored and presented, hot with smells and the experience, or dead in the weeds, forgotten… Hot is good… it provides a sensory experience not otherwise available, and in the case of steam something especially wonderful… But static and preserved is preservation... maybe to a higher standard of preservation if a lower standard of interpretation… (we will all accept that dead in the weeds or disassembled on a collection of pallets is not preservation (but if work is ongoing and the pallets are protected… maybe?) ) But what if you have many locomotives… most stuffed and mounted, but with several operable and hot… maybe that is the best of both worlds… a couple locomotives running, more inside preserved and presented and interpreted…

Also within the discussion… there was a question of technical details… in this case brake valves… In a previous discussion it concerned which diesel engine and generator might be found in a “restored” carbody… in either case, what is the mission of the preservation/restoration/ interpretation … FOR THIS SPECIFIC OBJECT… If the goal is to run a locomotive daily, to demonstrate a “train” then a modern brake valve may be the best option… but if preserving a GP 9 as built, and the technology it represents… particularly in a collection which might include more modern diesels, then that wouldn’t be a good choice.

Do we need to revisit and revise/update the ARM recommended practices?

Randy

Just to play devil's advocate, one issue that hasn't been raised is that the Golden Spike monument perpetrates the myth that the first transcontinental railroad was completed there. Much like how Abner Doubleday invented baseball in 1839. The events of May 10th, 1869, celebrated the completion of a railroad from Omaha to Sacramento. It seems to me that a transcontinental railroad would run from border to border, or in this case, from ocean to ocean. That wasn't accomplished until the completion of the Kansas Pacific near Strasburg, Colorado on August 15th, 1870. So exactly what is being preserved at Promontory Summit?

At the risk of being sidetracked, the celebration at Promontory was a celebration of the meeting of the two lines, effectively creating a transcontinental transportation system… and yes there were holes…

Note that the Pacific Railroad Act did not propose to build a railroad from the Pacific to the Atlantic but instead to connect the two halves of the country, by building a railroad from Omaha to “The Pacific” (with the definition of what “The Pacific” open to interpretation (Central Pacific was ok with the Sacramento River, which was navagatable to the Pacific, while San Francisco capitalists wanted a connection to San Francisco Bay, preferably to San Francisco, but eventually they settled for Oakland.

The line from Sacramento to San Francisco Bay (Built by the Western Pacific (of 1862)) wouldn’t open until September 7th 1869… that connection being made at Mossburg on the San Joaquin River.

The bigger hole in the original route was at Omaha… There wouldn’t be a bridge over the Missouri River at Omaha until March 1873 (although some equipment was moved on temporary tracks laid across the ice before)

As someone with a western view of our nation's history, it was the meeting of the rails at Promontory which connected the two halves of the country, and that was celebrated at the time widely; The spike maul that drove the last spike was wired to the telegraph, and the blows transmitted nationally (apparently that may not have worked and a quick thinking telegrapher on site may have faked it) there were parades and several day celebrations in Sacramento and San Francisco... In contrast there was apparently no celebration at Mossburg... but there was a celebration in early November 1869 in Downtown Oakland when the first train (which had terminated at a temporary ferry terminal in Alameda previously) finally arrived... and passed through on its way to the ferry terminal without stopping for the celebration...

I would also argue that by the construction of the two replica locomotives at Promontory, the technology of steam locomotives and there construction was preserved, and by running them regularly, we are preserving the skills needed to operate other steam locomotives... Preservation is more than just objects.

They are also the correct objects to interpret that site... It is a remote wind swept dry plateau... with a granite monument and a flag... Then two wonderful, colorful machines arrive and you begin to understand that something important happened here... An F unit and a 0-6-0 could not tell that story...

Randy

"it seems to me that some things--perhaps the most significant things--are best preserved by leaving them alone".

If you want to see some things "left alone", you only need to visit the back lot of a museum. They're everywhere.

Randy -

Your statement got me to thinking. I seem to recall a couple of static 0-6-0's (maybe ex-Union Pacific?) standing in at one time at that site. I think there was a photo of them in an old TRAINS Magazine. But perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me again.


Les

I am not aware of any 0-6-0s but for several years, two 1870's V&T 4-4-0s, Dayton (Central Pacific Shops) and Inyo (Baldwin) were on site... the two had been sold to Hollywood studios for movie use in the 1930's, and were cleaned up and painted for the 1969 celebration, remaining on site until the replicas were complete... both are now part of the collection of the Nevada State Railroad Museum, Carson City, with Dayton displayed in Virginia City.

Randy