I sent the following letter to the Director and Trustees of the CRRM today and thought I would share it with the NGDF community.
For what it is worth;
August 3, 2015
An open letter to the Trustees and Executive Director of the Colorado Railroad Museum;
I have been a regular visitor to the Colorado Railroad Museum for over 35 years as well as an active volunteer and donor for the past 20 years. The Museum has always been a pleasure to visit and a place that I felt supremely comfortable in donating what time and money I had available. Sadly, that is no longer the case.
For the past few years I have noticed a decided change in the Museum’s focus as well as the environment at the Museum. While I was not really in favor of many of the changes, they at first seemed to be working well for the Museum and its collection. Over the past year, I began to hear rumblings that things were starting to change for the worse, a view that was confirmed by my visit to the Museum on July 31, when I found three D&RGW gondolas had been destroyed and for the umpteenth time, most of the equipment was not accessible.
My experience at the Museum that day was disconcerting enough, having to break the rules to see equipment that I had worked on moving to the museum (D&RGW 1217) or donated to the Museum (D&RGW 06299) either destroyed (1217) or hidden away and neglected to the point of collapse (06299), that I finally felt compelled to share my views with the Museum as well as publicly, through the Narrow Gauge Discussion Forum website. (A copy of my post is enclosed for your reference.)
Museum founder Bob Richardson was always of the mind not to take government money, lest the Museum become a slave to it. At this point, Bob’s fears have come true; the Museum is a slave to the SCFD funding. It is my belief that a realistic analysis will show that, in the long run, far more money is being spent to adhere to the demands of the SCFD than is being received from it. It is also clear to anyone and everyone that the Museum’s acquisition and restoration efforts as of late are being driven solely by the desire to host ever more non railroad history related special events so that SCFD standards can be met. A great deal of money has been spent in the past couple of years on acquiring and moving railroad equipment that is, at best, loosely tied to the Museum’s stated mission while truly unique and historically priceless items in the collection are shuffled out of sight and allowed to decay, or even worse are just destroyed (D&RG RPO No. 6 for example). Museum staff and volunteer time also appear to be devoted solely to the special event venue mission, of the paid staff listed on the website, only two are there to work on restoration of the Museum’s collection, the remainder all appear to be special event support staff. Even the restoration staff and volunteers are now exclusively focused on special events, be it converting cars from the Museum’s collection into rider cars, building rider cars, or working on the newly acquired White Pass rider cars. The only actual restoration project going on at the moment is the Uintah Combine, which, of course, will be used as an ADA accessible rider car once it is complete. Even the magnificent return to operation of D&RGW locomotive 491 came about for only one reason; it could haul more rider cars around the Museum than D&RGW 346.
For myself, and I would have to imagine quite a few others, the Museum is no longer an enjoyable place to visit. What equipment is accessible is no longer displayed in a manner that communicates is purpose and history and most of the equipment is now stored on tracks in areas of the Museum that are no longer accessible as the barriers keeping people off the live track during special events are left in place perpetually. The Museum store, once the source for railroad books, is no longer so. The few books that are displayed are very haphazard and mangled, clearly communicating their importance.
At this point in time, it appears that the Colorado Railroad Museum is at a crossroads. Is the Museum “The Center for Preserving Rocky Mountain Rail History” as was proudly proclaimed on the dust covers of the Museum’s “Colorado Rail Annual” series or is it “The Center for Railroad Themed Wine Tastings & Puppet Shows”?
Change can be good and different avenues need to be tried, but a balance must be struck, a balance that tips in favor of the Museum’s original purpose as well as its current stated mission of “preserving for future generations a tangible record of Colorado’s dynamic railroad era and particularly its pioneering, narrow gauge mountain railroads”. The current program of focusing only on more and more special events and the ability to carry passengers at a tourist railroad level while dismantling said unique, tangible records be it for parts or repurposing, and spending money to acquire equipment that in no way fits the stated mission, is not sustainable.
Speaking for myself, I would hope that the leaders of the Museum quickly choose to swing the balance back towards the preservation and interpretation of its important collection of equipment, artifacts and documents.
Should the decision be made to continue the current course of action, efforts should be made to find homes for the pieces in the collection that are not “revenue generating”, lest they be lost through repurposing or neglect. Gone is gone and that is not a good thing. Everything in the Museum’s collection got there because it was no longer capable of generating revenue for its prior owner, the Museum was created to save its collection for posterity, not kick it to the curb because it does not actively bring in money.
Sincerely,
Jason Midyette
Bendena, Kansas
