Fast Facts and Upcoming Acts

More musings about museums and money ….

I brainstormed last time about some of the ways individuals can help the museum, from making cash donations to purchasing memberships, from using one’s Food Lion cards to shopping in our Destinations gift store (though not with your Food Lion card). With VMT membership, by the way, you get discounts on gift shop purchases. And if you’re a dad, it isn’t too late to chuff some hints about items you would love to see rolling into your station for Father’s Day. Whoo-whoo!

Here are a few financial fast facts to chew on:
* The Museum spends $ 111.76 per day for heating, air conditioning and water (over $40,000 a year). That doesn’t include telephone and internet service.
* Insurance necessary to keep our doors open (not employee health or benefit coverage) is $ 79.19 per day.
* Our real estate taxes paid to Roanoke City come to $ 36.56 per day.

I didn’t include this in the previous blog, but another way you can help financially is to donate materials. Here are some of the urgent items currently on our wish list:
* 2008 Quickbooks Premier software (single user version)
* Cases of copy paper (maybe drop off a case every month for six months—like a pledge; the I dream of a ream campaign, maybe?)
* Staples gift cards that we could use for printer ink cartridges
* Repainting of the gallery floors in the main areas—that hasn’t been done in quite a while
* Carpet cleaning for our conference room and office hallways
* A projector that can do power point presentations—we have the software; we just need a horse to pull it (so to speak)
* A roll or two of stamps

Used items would be a great help in some instances. When businesses upgrade equip­ment (note the projector mentioned above), they may end up with quality stuff that needs a new home and will end up in the dumpster if a place isn’t found. Be on the lookout for opportunities like that and call us to see if we can use the “strays.”

Amid all the needs is one piece of good financial news—since our cars and trucks and trains seldom move, rising gas prices haven’t hit us that hard.

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Meanwhile, in other news (I’m a television anchor wannabe) ….

The museum’s African American Heritage Group and the Norfolk Southern Corpora­tion are sponsoring our annual Heritage Celebration on the 21st of June to coincide with Roanoke’s Juneteenth Freedom Celebration. The NS Exhibit Car and a locomotive simulator will be at VMT all day long. That night Dr. Benjamin Dixon, retired Vice President for Multicultural Affairs at Virginia Tech, will speak. The program runs from 6:30-8:30pm and is open to the public. Seating is limited. NS employees with ID's will be admitted for half-price all day.

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VMT’s newest photographic exhibit, Images of Rail: a Photo History of the Norfolk & Western, opened recently. It includes 38 of the more than two hundred photographs that are in the similarly-named book by Nelson Harris. The framed prints hang on a background painted to look like the side of an N&W passenger car. “Harvested” from VMT files, the photos depict crews, equipment, buildings, engines and the rugged landscape that N&W trains traveled from the late 1800s on.

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In case you missed the news, on May 1 the museum held the grand opening of the Auto­­motive Gallery and its first feature: From Mud to Mobility: 100 years of the Virginia Department of Transportation. VDOT and Advance Auto partnered with VMT to create the new gallery. The sponsors of Star City Motor Madness have also played a significant role (more on that in my next blog).

Visitors can view automobiles from every decade in the 1900s including a 1904 curved-dash Olds, a 1948 Packard Limo, and a 1963 Studebaker Lark Taxi. Also displayed are photographic billboards, informational displays, and a unique collection of Virginia li­cense plates dating back to 1917, long before anyone had ever heard of a “personalized” car tag. Com2VMT and CRPL8s.

Rails that Divide, Bridges that Connect

Railroad tracks unite.

And they divide.

The rails that spread like kudzu across the vast west following the War Between the States enabled the U.S. to grow faster and farther than anyone would have thought possible a couple decades earlier. The pounding of a golden spike at Promontory, Utah in 1869 was both a literal and symbolic uniting of America. Tracks continued to multiply in the last half of the 19th century, creating arteries and veins that provided the life blood of the towns and industries connected to them.

The railroad also divided. In its earlier years, the division was primarily cultural and political. Many Americans feared and loathed these danger-carrying, noise-screaming, smoke-spewing beasts. Few viewed trains through the rosy lenses of nostalgia as so many of us do today. The strange, newfangled trains and their owners, seen as greedy and rapacious devourers of land and resources, were usually detested.

The rails divided in other ways. They bisected towns and prairies, in many cases dictating where and how commerce would take root and people would settle. Often unintentionally, rail and crosstie became a steel and wood line of demarcation separating prosperity from failure and status from ignominy.

As a child, I remember hearing often that phrase, “the other side,” or “the wrong side” of the tracks,” meaning the poorer, seedier and more dangerous section of town. Sometimes I wondered why the less desirable neighborhoods were always the “other” side from where anyone I knew lived. Most of the time I just accepted it as an immutable fact of life.

Sadly, that other side was usually disproportionately African-American. Even after the end of slavery, blacks in both north and south were robbed of equal housing and job opportunities. In Roanoke and in many other places, minorities lived on the “wrong side” of the tracks.

That’s one more reason all Roanokers should rejoice in the re-opening of the aptly renamed Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Bridge. It spans rows of tracks and links the Gaineboro area with downtown literally and symbolically.

Does anyone feel more pleasure in that connecting walkway than those whose reminiscences are the heart of the Museum exhibit, African American Heritage on the Norfolk and Western Railway, 1930-1970? When I watch the video and read the signs in that display, I am equally impressed by two things: the level of injustice these N&W workers endured and the courage and dignity with which they served.

I am also struck by how different today’s landscape looks. In recent decades, railroad corporations such as Norfolk Southern have gone to great effort to lay new tracks of opportunity and fairness. For that we should salute them, Dr. King and railroaders like the ones depicted here.

Railroad tracks can divide. They can also unite, especially when people are willing to build bridges.

Listening to the Museum

Stories. In my last blog I highlighted the need for stories. Museums need to tell the dramas of people and their interactions with the exhibits on display.

Part of the genius of Winston Link’s photographs of Norfolk & Western steam trains was that he didn’t merely take “train pictures.” He captured the railroad’s interaction with the environment around it, a way of life that was disappearing as quickly as those steam locomotives.

VMT has plenty of stories. Some of them are already being told vividly and elegantly, such as the exhibit, “African American Heritage on the Norfolk & Western Railroad, 1930-70.” Others lie there like undiscovered treasure. I have already suggested some possibilities. Here are others.

Though the Museum of Transportation focuses on the N&W more than any other railroad, much gold remains to be mined. Consider this. What other rail museum lets you stand next to mammoth locomotives, gaze just steps away at the tracks along which they once stormed, then glance a few blocks down the street where those fire-bellowing creatures were created.

What about the drama of the big little railroad that “ran from nowhere to nowhere,” as someone characterized its lack of access to major metropolises, succeeding because it did almost everything more efficiently than its competitors? Then there is the story of the mouse that ate the cat—how the N&W, once owned in part by the Pennsylvania RR, turned the tables when Norfolk Southern bought half of Conrail, the successor to the Pennsy and other bankrupt northeastern roads.

Even the former freight station that houses VMT tells tales, as the words of a newer staff member describe:

When the museum is calm and I sit in the quiet of the building, I feel that old freight station trying to communicate with me. It speaks audibly in groans and creaks, bumps and bangs. The building seems to be telling a silent story, too. The floor fascinates me. I want to know the story of the holes, the chips, the ruts in the concrete. How about the wooden bricks and the scales? Who or what chipped the floor; what was weighed on the scales? How many times did those baggage carts transport goods from a box car to the loading dock? Light floods through the upper windows today, just as it did 80 years ago. Today it illuminates the artifacts that tell a story about transportation. But in 1918 it illuminated the people and machines that wrote the story.

Then there are the stories that our guests bring to us. That is what I like best about the museum: meeting our guests and listening to their stories. For so many people, coming to the museum is more like a pilgrimage than a tourist stop. They remember the 611 when it passed through their town or behind their home. They remember their daddy or granddaddy who was an engineer, a fireman, or who worked in the shops. They remember the last excursions of the 611 and still experience a shiver of excitement when they recall riding behind the majestic locomotive. The stories people tell about the trains are an absolute delight. I have learned so much from them.

Perhaps the thing that has surprised me most is the passion our guests feel for trains, especially the 611. Actually, passion is not a strong enough word. People have bonded with that engine. It is not an inanimate machine; it is a piece of their lives and an anchor that ties them to their own family history. They love that engine!

So many stories.

Telling Stories

Stories. Everyone loves a good story. From tiny toddler to old codger, from high school dropout to Ph. D., we all get hooked by stories.

They capture our attention and tickle our imagination. They entwine us in their plots. They captivate us with their color.

Think of the speeches, lectures, and sermons you’ve heard. After you had forgotten the talking points and the statistics, you remembered the tales about people and places and hopes and hardships.

To me, one of the most significant observations made in the museum consultants’ study of VMT is the importance of exhibits that tell stories. Information isn’t enough. Facts and figures are fine, but it’s the narrative that engrosses the visitor and makes the museum experience spring to life.

We’re already doing this in some areas. The new Advance Auto gallery does not merely offer a lineup of old cars. A curving roadway with guard rails, traffic markers, Burma Shave signs and a country gas station add drama. Helping to thread the story together are the VDOT displays, “From Mud to Mobility,” which track a century of highway development in Virginia. The context turns a static exhibit into a story.

The “African Americans on the Norfolk and Western” exhibit opens a treasure chest of firsthand accounts told in print and on video. Together those reminiscences piece together like a jigsaw puzzle to create a poignant and powerful picture of courageous men toiling with dignity amid an unjust system. In the same room, “Working the High Iron” carries you on a visual journey of the history of the N&W.

What other stories lie among the artifacts, ready to be given a spellbinding treatment?

How about coal? It was N&W’s lifeblood and the Virginian Railway’s almost sole reason for existence. The two roads raced neck and neck from mountain to ocean, each straining to transport the black gold faster and more economically than its rival. The Virginian even electrified its line between Roanoke and Mullens, West Virginia, a plot twist graphically illustrated by the hulking EL-C 135 electric loco still standing in the museum’s rail yard.

Coal’s story is implicit throughout VMT, from the HO scale tipple diorama to the giant tenders of the steam locomotives. It needs to be told more explicitly: how the coal was mined and transported to market, how the mines fueled the success of the railroads—literally and figuratively, where the coal went and how it was used. Such storytelling underlines the importance of restoring endangered equipment such as the three vintage coal hoppers rusting outside the museum.

Another storyline is the saga of the different railroads which ran through Virginia. Where did their tracks go? How did they compete and cooperate with one another? Where did they each end up during the years of merger mania? What developments led to Virginia becoming the headquarters of two of the “Big Four” rail giants remaining in America?

A ready-made tale of now and then lies as near as VMT’s back porch. There you can stand on the old freight docks, surveying the weathered survivors of steam and early diesel against the backdrop of a busy modern rail line, that of Norfolk Southern. What a great vantage point for telling how railroading today is alike and dissimilar to yesterday. For explaining how locomotives and rolling stock have changed. For depicting the goods that provide modern railroads’ revenue. You can see history and current events rubbing shoulders just steps away from where you stand.

So many stories to tell … these are just a few. What tales do you hear being whispered at VMT along the galleries and out in the yard?

Carol of the Bells

I couldn't help myself. I read over some of the old posts here, and noticed a trend -- we complain about money a lot. I'm not saying there isn't a good reason for that, nor that there isn't some interesting stuff there. Just an observation, that's all. So, in our continuing effort for consistency, here's another rant post about money.

Hark! how the bells, sweet silver bells, all seem to say "Throw cares away."

Last year, we sold a locomotive (a sentence I never thought I'd use before I started working here). By the calendar, that happened this year, but as far as our finances are concerned, that was last year. Anyway, if not for that sale, we'd have ended up in the red. This year doesn't look a lot better, and we're all out of locomotives to sell.

Christmas is here, bringing good cheer to young and old, meek and the bold.

The situation isn't terrible, as we've still got some chunks of local money and other donations coming in, but the outlook is not good. Citizens of Virginia are well-aware of the budget crunch facing the Commonwealth, and the murmurs in Richmond say that there will be no state funding for non-state agencies. As a tax-payer, I can't personally fault this sentiment, but working for a struggling non-profit, it's a dark cloud. It's also worth noting that your Virginia Museum of Transportation is the Official Transportation Museum of the Commonwealth. That designation isn't just fluff -- it came directly from the legislature in Richmond years ago. While the title is nice, it does not make us an agency of the state. Ergo, when goes the money, so goes the show.

Ding, dong, ding, dong -- that is their song, with joyful ring, all caroling.

The City of Roanoke hasn't been much help, either. We expected and accepted that long ago, so this is no great surprise. Our funding from the city is at an all-time low, but the city has its own budget needs, too.

So what does that mean for the 44-year old caretaker of Virginia's transportation heritage?

One seems to hear words of good cheer from everywhere, filling the air.

It means we've got three possible futures.

In the first, we receive a substantial donation from a major player, to be continued in perpetuity. The B&O Railroad Museum receives substantial funding from CSX. They get a lot of donations, too, of course, but this is an example of what a large corporate partner can do. Last year, Norfolk Southern very generously contributed tens of thousands of dollars to us. This year, they're again doing so with the caveat that we now match their donation. However, in neither case was the money enough to get us through a year. We're no less grateful; merely honest.

In the second, we become a state agency. This is probably the most ideal course for us. State funding ensures our continuation, and provides resources beyond our current means. This would resurrect our restoration, curatorial, and education departments -- three neglected and presently inactive areas of our operation forced into dormancy by a lack of funding. It would also help us cross the hurdle we've been stuck on for a while, and get out of the rather regional focus we have in our collection and exhibits. At its last meeting, the VMT Board of Directors voted to pursue this course, but their consent is not the only cog in this wheel.

In the third, we continue as we are. The only end game for this particular circumstance will be the closing of our doors. We could get by a few more years, but if we made it to a 50th birthday, it would surprise everyone involved.

O, how they pound, raising the sound, o'er hill and dale, telling their tale.

Virginia's Explore Park just shut down, largely for the same reasons. The brand new Art Museum of Western Virginia has not yet opened, now costing nearly double its initial $40.5 million price tag. The History Museum of Western Virginia resembles a ghost town. Despite some [reasonably] successful events and increased attendance, your VMT in the same trenches.

Gaily they ring, while people sing songs of good cheer. Christmas is here!

During the holidays, everyone has a hand out, asking for toys, clothes, money, food, time, prayers, and company. There's never enough to go around, this is true. What we don't seem to realize is that this holds true during the rest of the year, too. We just don't notice it unless we stand outside in a Santa suit and ring a bell.

Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas!
Merry, merry, merry, merry Christmas!

Show me the... wait, where'd it go?

Museum life has its ups and downs. Saying something that trite is not only painful, but also painfully true.

An article in last week's Roanoke Times reports that the City of Roanoke has promised up to $500,000 in matching funds to the Mill Mountain Zoo for capital improvements. That is great news. We have some good friends at the zoo, and those facilities have been in need of repair and upgrading for some time. This was a long time coming for them, and hopefully worth the wait.

Meanwhile, the new Art Museum of Western Virginia is churning along, unfurling like a cross between the Flying Nun's habit and a vague monument to bourgeois taste (that's alright, because it fits in so seamlessly with Roanoke's general architectural scheme). All of this at $66 million. All kidding aside, we have some good friends at the art museum and we're happy they're receiving a new facility.

Naturally, one might think that with the city being so generous to the Mill Mountain Zoo and the Art Museum of Western Virginia, your Virginia Museum of Transportation might be on the eve of a great windfall, a financial bonanza that would be a new sunrise for the museum.

Not only was our grant proposal answered with a mere $24,900, but the latest kick in the teeth came when the city began soliciting bids for a strategic plan for the museum, funded by the Norfolk Southern Corporation. Let us be more clear. We're happy to receive a strategic plan, but the city has so far kept us out of the loop on the bidding process. We're sorry, City of Roanoke, but the last time we checked, we were still a private organization. Unless you're creating a strategic plan for the locomotives themselves, we think we've got a more than legitimate right to input on any and all decisions relating to this museum.

The City of Roanoke owns about 45% of our collection, including the only surviving Norfolk & Western Class J and Class A locomotives, and the largest collection of diesel locomotives in the south. The City of Roanoke, which cut our funding from $60,000* two years ago to $52,000 last year, already has a sizable investment in our museum. In many ways, our museum better than any other, tells the story of Roanoke. Further, admissions figures show that nearly 80% of our patrons come from out of town. How many other museums in Roanoke can boast that?

The building that houses that collection, tells that story, and draws those tourists was built in 1918. Some of the electrical wiring inside is original. More than 75% of the roll-down doors that line the front and rear of the building are in horrible states of repair, and their improper seals make for extremely inefficient heating and cooling. Moreover, damage from the storm last summer that ripped off about 10,000 square feet of our roof left two offices, a conference room, and a bathroom condemned due to water damage in the electrical system. Further, it forced the complete replacement of two HVAC units to heat and cool the building, not to mention a new roof which still hasn't been installed (it took nearly six months to receive the first check from the insurance company after lengthy negotiations and adjustments). If you came by the museum this winter, you discovered what those of us working here encountered daily -- no heat. That same storm tore the main gas line off the building like an old band-aid and permanently damaged the heaters up there.

Census data tells us that the Roanoke metropolitan area is home to roughly 200,000 people. If it costs 66 million dollars to build a new art museum, half a million dollars to restore the zoo to a high level of quality, and if there are more than 35 non-profit organizations in that same metropolitan area, the question is this:

Just how much money will be left for anybody?

We don't think we're more deserving than any other institution in town. Except, maybe we are. Roanoke's investment here has already been illustrated. So maybe we should ask, how much is it worth to protect and develop that investment? It's becoming increasingly clear what the city thinks.

* To put this figure in perspective, $60,000 covers slightly less than two months of our operating expenses.