Loco-in-motion
With apologies for the poor pun, and long posting.
Steam locomotives are evocative reminders of our industrial past. Big, noisy and smelly they have a really wide ranging appeal, my 3 year old loves them, and so does my (nearly) 90 year old Grandad. This appeal is greatly enhanced when they work, or better still you can ride on them. Until 2002 visitors to Prestongrange Museum could do just this on a short section of track, all as a result of the labours of the Prestongrange Railway Society. However, steam locos (never ever call it a train!) need a boiler inspection every 10 years, and invariably need some maintenance as well. This means that the boiler has to be lifted off the base of the loco for a boiler inspector from an insurance company to assess it, and advise on what needs to be done to get the boiler back into some kind of working order. At Prestongrange we lack many of the resources to do this - the equipment (a crane for example), the space, the manpower (we rely on a small long suffering band of dedicated volunteers) and of course money. 2002 saw the certificate on number 6 finally expire, and no steam locos have operated since then.
We know that visitors would like to see a loco operating again, and indeed many would come specifically for this (the figures demonstrate this), but how do we go about it, and should we? Museum curators are the butt of much mockery due to our seemingly odd habits of treating everyday objects with solemn and obsessive care (and our tendencies to wear tweed and corduroy). But this much maligned behaviour is based on common sense. If we treat the objects we are charged with the care of well, then they will be there for future generations to enjoy and learn from.
What has this got to do with steam locos? Well, since number 6 is part of the museum collection, shouldn’t we be wrapping it painstakingly in acid free tissue paper after discreetly numbering it, and then carefully pacing it on a shelf for no-one to touch, see or generally interfere with for the forseeable future, rather than using it and repairing it? No. Museums and curatorship is about much more than just preserving an object. When we choose to take an object into the collection it isn’t just the object we are preserving, it is the web of information, emotion and stories associated with that object too. Things in museum collections were made by, used by, loved, hated, played with and looked after by real people. The collection and interpretation of this information is very important in making these things make sense. In relation to the steam loco, we have lots of hard facts but the machine had a job to do, someone drove it and people maintained it. It would be impossible to recreate the sights, sounds and smells of a huge industrial complex like that at Prestongrange, but by operating a steam loco we can give some impression of the world as it once was, and crucially that impression is one made real by noise, sound, smell and sensation, not just flat text, and is all the more memorable for that.
By working towards the resteaming of number 6 we are focussing on a goal of accessability to the collections, even if in the long term the actual operation of the loco will wear out many of its working parts. This is a common dilemma for industrial curators - at what point do we stop conserving something and start restoring it? If we continually replace, repair and mend a machine does it stop being the object it once was? Very few parts of the Flying Scotsman (if any?) are those that it was originally made with, but that doesn’t stop it being one of the most popular (and iconic) museum exhibits in the country, perhaps in the world. Another aspect we need to consider is how is the work done? Ideally in the same way it would have been done when the loco was in operation - in our case up until the ealry 1980s. This way we go some way towards the preservation and recording of the engineering skills (many of which would die out otherwise) needed to maintain something like this.
So to get back to my story, we decided to apply for some grant aid from the Scottish Museums Council to start the long process of bringing number 6 back up to standard for steaming, and were awarded some money earlier this year.
The actual process of finding somewhere to do the work was laborious, and made even more so by a number of factors, not least that there aren’t many places we could turn to for the job, as it is something of a specialist market. Also in common with other public bodies East Lothian Council has a policy of transparent procurement proceedures for purchases over a certain value whereby a number of comparitive quotes need to be obtained. So this took uo some considerable time. However, in the end we decided to go with the first group we had approached, the Scottish Railway Preservation Society at Bo’ness, who run the Bo’ness and Kinneil Railway. Working with SRPS offers many advantages for us. They are local, they are a heritage orgainisation and (the clincher) they like us, viewed this as a partnership opportunity, with mutual benefits (as a training project for their new volunteers, and as a development opportunity for ELC staff and PRS volunteers). So FINALLY last Thursday things got moving at Prestongrange Museum.
It was a lovely sunny (but very cold) day and various ELC staff and volunteers and a PRS volunteer met a low loader and drivers from Allelys Heavy Haulage at Prestongrange at 8:30am. Getting the loco from the track to the lorry proved to be a challenge (met with gusto by everyone present) and eventually the loco was on its way to Bo’ness to be unloaded. It has been a complex job to get us to this stage, and whilst Thursday was very satisfying personally, as someone who has invested a huge amount of time and energy in this project, I know that there is plenty more to come.
There are some photos on flickr just search for Prestongrange, and there will also be a video on YouTube soon too.