The Pacific Southwest Railway Museum membership has approved and the Board has authorized a searching for a good museum home for our C&O caboose.

http://www.psrm.org/roster/caboose/cab90751/index.html

The caboose is in terrific condition, needing only a repaint - it's total and all here. It simply needs to find it's way back east to a Museum which can provide a good, enclosed museum home for public display.

We are looking for a win-win-win solution here for the caboose, a new museum and our museum. Please contact me with any proposals your museum group can provide.

We can load it with our cranes.

Please help us get the word out.

Thanks -

Jim

You love loaded questions Jim.

It doesn't have to be hard, until you get people involved. Try to avoid democratic forms of management when making controversial decisions, and have somebody who is leaving anyhow be the unpopular decision maker.

dave

Oh sure. Take away the voice of the members - great idea.

What are you smoking?

Gave up years ago, Jim.

Nobody else seems to have a better idea to post.

When individual members are capable of making choices that are entirely rational, mission statement or business based, unemotional or nonpolitical, I'm interested in what they have to suggest. In my experience that pretty well limits it to maybe 15% of them, if you are lucky, although I don't know your membership, so this is generic not personal. The rest is just static.

The buck needs to stop somewhere, not get passed around by a committee or be subject to a popularity contest, or yes, deaccessioning will be not only painful, but difficult. Eliminating the difficulty leaves only the pain, which isn't as bad - same result but easier process.

dave

Dave -

as museum's and museum membership matures, I see it is becoming easier.

Our membership vote was 103-101. There is absolutely no reason to have a C&O caboose in California. I hope it finds a good, new, eastcoast museum home. Time will tell.

Jim

Whats Dave smoking??? Well if I was a smoker, I'd probably be using that brand.

Dave mentions an area that is strictly "taboo" in open politics but a definte reality.

As someone who spent 14 years planning, organizing and doing all the fanatical things involved running an organization I can readily identify with his statements. And no longer having the heart (figuretively), or stomach (literally) I also agree with his second post which almost completes the scenario. It's reasons like this that we see continual postings of equipment languishing throughout the country.

As someone mentioned, there hasn't been much response to this topic, so I'll back out now.

Regards:

R.O.

With all due respect, I'm trying to remember the last time any rail organization to which I've belonged actually polled the membership before making a decision such as this.

About the closest I can come is the Deltic Preservation Society in the UK asking its members what paint scheme (of three) was favored for the restoration of one of the two locomotives, back in 1983 or so.

Aside from that, I don't think I've even HEARD of a decision regarding acquisition, deaccession, etc. ever being put to a membership vote at any major museum.

This is one of at least 6 wooden cabooses that I know of currently available either for the taking, or on the cheap. Is demand that low, or are trucking funds that scarce?

Rob

With our Museum, it's a requirement for equipment classified as catagory 1 - historic in nature.

Wooden cars take maintenance and they need to be indoors - and funds are always tight with most Museums.

That being said, we would look at a coboose that worked on So. Calif.

Deaccession of any piece of equipment on the Illinois Railway Museum's "Permanent Collection List" requires a majority vote of the full regular membership for approval. Hence, on rare occasions the IRM annual meeting includes a vote on whether to deaccess something on the Permanent Collection List. The regular membership must also vote on any additions to the List.

Part of it has to be costs, which have escalated enormously since a move I was involved in maybe five years ago. Trucking prices, and presumably permits and regulations have been tightened to where many such moves may be out of reach.

This week I got a quote for a 54,000 lb railcar for a trucking move less than 250 miles. The tab - $10,000!!! Any organization in preservation, and especially many smaller or local groups simply do not have that kind of money, only to take on what must be classified as a long term project. No matter the history, provenance, or attraction to local lines and history.

Bob Kutella

Bylaws that require the approval of the membership for the acquisition or disposal of collection items show distrust by their writers for delegating responsibility to the Board of Directors (Trustees). Such writers either purposely or inadvertently make the process of rationalizing collections difficult.

Having said that, Boards of Directors and Officers must develop a transparent process for the acquisition, accession and de-accession of collection items. That starts with appropriate Mission Statements and Collection Policies. Collection Policies need to set forth the deliberate process used to acquire and remove items from the collections.

In railway museums that are substantially supported by volunteers, the volunteers need to be part of the process. They need to be part of the Collections Management Committee.

Boards of Directors and Officers (whether also volunteers or not) must be ready to interact with members of the active volunteer force to obtain input and build consensus for coming actions.

This overall discussion cuts both ways. Just because I said I'd never heard of an organization polling its members doesn't make it an unwise move or a wise one. But I've heard many a tale, from major museums to fringe political parties, that literally became unable to function because they felt compelled to put every last decision to a fully democratic vote, allocate equal time for every possible viewpoint to be aired, etc. An attempt to be excruciatingly "fair" can create far more dysfunction than any feuds that erupt over, say, leasing a locomotive to another group.

Similarly, however, I've heard some background behind one museum with which I've dealt that, because of unethical shenanigans in decades past in another branch of that museum system, has basically made it all but impossible to deaccession anything without, as a curator told me, "an act of God co-signed by Mohammad and Buddha". And I can say that this particular institution has had some difficulty with its collections policy as a result.

That being said, however, the board of directors does owe its membership an honest and forthright explanation of any such situation, as well as, say, the "right of first refusal" to their own membership, as in "we have a private party that has proposed leasing our doodlebug for ten years, to be returned to us in restored and operable condition, while he uses and insures it in the meantime. Do we have anyone in our group that can make a convincing counter-proposal or that can tell us if this guy is disreputable in any way?" And within a membership, we should expect something much more forthright than the generic code "does not suit our present needs or mission"--how about being honest and saying "we only have it because it was the co-founder's pet locomotive, and the B&O doesn't come within 2,000 miles of Washington State, and there's simply no way to justify running an EM-1 on a logging railroad!"