Railway Carriage Significance
A
methodical approach to assessing the significance of ‘preserved’ railway
carriages and other artefacts with a view to advising potential funding bodies
By Richard Gibbon BSc Eng. C
Eng. F I Mech E.
Former
Head of Engineering Collections at the National Railway Museum, York
Ten years ago the President of the Heritage Railway Association, Dame
Margaret Weston, at a watershed HRA conference called “Operating or
Wrecking?” challenged the HRA membership to get out into the field and come up
with the answer to the question: “What of significance still survives in
railway vehicle preservation?”
In an endeavour to answer this question at the least for ‘preserved’
railway carriages, the NRM, HRA and the Transport Trust formed a group called
the Railway Carriage Register Group, secured funding from the Carnegie Trust and
set up a nation-wide survey with a team of approximately 15 volunteer assessors
who sought out every vehicle and assessed its condition and significance against
agreed descriptors. This work was co-ordinated by a number of Members of the
Vintage Carriages Trust (VCT), who also provided the technical expertise later
found necessary.
To date some 3,500 vehicles (90% of the known total) have been visited
and surveyed. Very nearly as many have been photographed. The data has been
placed on a Microsoft Access database and the images have been recorded
electronically. All this information is available via www.vintagecarriagestrust.org
or on a fully searchable CD-ROM, available from VCT. The data gathering exercise
has been hugely successful and is immensely valuable as a learning resource.
It is easy to think that the database is an end in itself. This however
is not the case, and we sometimes have to remind ourselves that the creation of
this huge body of work has not saved a single valuable vehicle from the ravages
of time and weather. What really
matters is what we do with this gathered information!
It fell to me to draw together the conclusions from this work. We needed
to seek to inform the grant-giving bodies, especially the Heritage Lottery Fund,
as to which of the extant vehicles are the most deserving of priority funding.
Therein lies the rub! No one had actually tried to measure
“deservingness”; we had been more interested in identification, originality,
condition and other relatively easily measurable factors. Early attempts to get
agreement between the community of volunteer assessors and experts in trying to
produce a list of the “Top Twenty Most Deserving Cases” resulted in a minor
revolt and considerable disquiet! A radically different approach was called for!
A report prepared for the April 2003 annual gathering of the Carriage
Register Group effectively ducked the issue of which actual carriages we should
be recommending as priority for assistance. Instead, it looked at the
possibility of numerical scoring systems as used by the (National) Railway
Heritage Committee and by the NRM. It suggested that similar techniques could be
applied to the work of the Carriage Group. Once again this proved to be
problematic, but after a lively discussion I do believe we can now put forward
an assessment system with reasonable confidence, even though I appreciate that
certain carriage enthusiasts might feel badly done to and may feel that there is
an unfair bias within the assessment system.
As used by the RHC, the assessment system works by artefacts being
brought to the attention of that Committee as a whole by individual members, by
railway workers or by members of the public. They are investigated and
discussed. When it is felt that an item is worth saving then the main Committee
can “designate” the artefact. Once this has been done then the item is given
a special status which theoretically protects it from destruction. The owners
are notified of its special significance and are prevented from disposing of the
item without the blessing of the Committee. At this stage the Committee can
“direct” the item to a suitable home in preservation where the Committee
feel the item has the best chance of surviving and being accessible. The new
owners may have to recompense the old owners for the loss of the scrap value of
the item, but usually this is not an issue.
This system might appear to be a perfect solution to the problem of using
the power of the RHC to save artefacts from the living railway by this process
of “designation”. However the RHC found themselves struggling with widely
variable assessments of the significance of the various items it was called upon
to deal with. There was an alarming tendency to recommend “designation if in
doubt”. This was clearly unsatisfactory for everyone, as it brought some items
into the net which should not have been there.
Members of the RHC devised and implemented a numerical system of scoring
the items against agreed criteria. This process had of course been going on
sub-consciously previously, but the new system enabled the Committee (once
Members were experienced in its use) to set a “cut-off” score which meant
that if an item did not achieve at least that figure it would not be considered
further.
The criteria that Committee agreed as descriptors are as follows:
a.
That the items are unique, as made or built/the last remaining one of a
group or class/extremely rare:
b.
That they are representative of a group that merits preservation:
c.
That they are illustrative of a type of activity that merits
preservation:
d.
That they represent an important technical or operational aspect of the
railway:
e.
That they represent an important aspect of the social impact of the
railway:
f.
That they form part of an established series or part of an assemblage
that is being collected by a recognised institution:
g.
That they represent an important stage in development:
h.
That they have been involved in some significant event, or have
associations with an important person or organisation:
i.
That they are of local, regional or national importance.
Early trials of the system used a simple numeric scoring system. Although
outstanding and important items were clearly defined, there was a large body of
material in the middle ground with little or no numeric separation. The scheme
fitted the classic “normal distribution” curve.
A refinement was thus introduced which limited the individual scores to a
crude “logarithmic” scale. This allowed for possible scores under each
heading being 0, 1, 2, 6 or a maximum of 10. It was agreed that for further
consideration each item must score at least one 10, must have a total score of
25 or more, and must have some score in category “i”. This revised scheme
gave much better separation of the final totals, and fitted the purposes of the
Committee very well.
The RHC found that scoring is best done as a group activity. There are
usually extreme values put forward through possible inadvertent personal bias
that are effectively diluted by the weight of the majority verdicts.
We can apply similar techniques to the work of the Carriage Group. For
the more specific requirements of carriages rather than for the wide range of
objects the RHC needs to consider, I am suggesting using the following criteria
– broadly similar to the RHC criteria, but more appropriate for our
consideration of railway carriages:
A.
That the carriage is unique, as made or built/the last remaining one of a
group or class/extremely rare:
B.
That they are representative or illustrative of an activity that merits
preservation:
C.
That they form part of an established series that is being collected and
cared for:
D.
That they have been involved in some significant event, or have
associations with an important person or organisation:
E.
That they represent an important technical or operational aspect or stage
of carriage development:
F.
That they illustrate an important aspect of the social impact of the
railway:
G.
That they are of local, regional or national importance.
Again, individual possible scores are limited to 0, 1, 2, 6 or 10. Again,
each vehicle must score at least one 10, must have a total score of 25 or more,
and must have some score in category “G”.
We have applied this scoring method to a number of typical but well-known
carriages – please now consider the Table! You will see that at the end of
this we have added a few other carriages (and a Class 108 DMBS) as examples of
vehicles which aren’t especially deserving – please make your own
comparisons between all these.
The objective of drawing up this table of examples is to get this scoring
system out into the public domain now we have argued it out amongst ourselves.
You might wonder what good that will do. So let me try and reassure you by
saying that I believe that this system was the key item in the Heritage Lottery
Fund granting the huge amount of money towards saving and restoring the Gresley
Quad-Art set. It was the fact that the assessors were able to say that the
vehicle was unequivocally at the top of the list that our Group was drawing up.
So there is proof in my mind that this exercise is worthwhile!
I believe there should be no hard and fast rule about what must
be in and what must be out of the list. The status of a vehicle can radically
change as our knowledge unfolds.
To illustrate that I would like to use the example of the Vintage
Carriages Trust’s GNR Coach 2856, which I suggest to you would not have made a
hypothetical “top-twenty deserving cases” listing if it were still in store
outside at the NYMR. However as the work got under way, it became like an
archaeological dig that gradually revealed more and more wonders and excitement
as the job progressed. This meant that the status of the vehicle in terms of its
significance was climbing throughout the process of restoration, and few would
deny now that it is going to be a truly important vehicle when completed. The
physical condition of the coach with its broken and distorted frame, as
received, also played a part in marking its status down, however much we would
like to believe this were not so.
To me, this means that whatever scoring system or listing we put in place
there must be a simple process whereby a vehicle not on the list, which has been
discovered or has not been recognised for its true worth, can come galloping up
on the outside rail and still be able to gain full recognition. Our list can
therefore only be a guide, but what in effect it would mean is that if any
proposal came forward from our list we could definitely “champion” it to HLF
or other grant giving body, according to its rating. However, we would point out
to HLF and other potential grant giving bodies that there will be other
applications from outside our list which could be equally deserving, depending
on the circumstances prevailing. Under those conditions it will be necessary for
the proposer to present a compelling case, based I suggest on the criteria that
we have judged the original draft list against, and explaining why the
vehicle’s significance was not initially recognised. That way, the various
cases can be individually assessed on their merit and those that have intimate
knowledge of their particular favourite vehicle can use the above criteria to
make their own case for others to score later.
Two other issues have troubled us in compiling our draft list from the
individual recommendations of our assessors. The first is the question of a
vehicle being recognised as being “at risk”. Should we say that funding
applications should be confined to only those historic vehicles that are “at
risk”? Clearly that would be a nonsense! It would be a great incentive for
those who were carefully cherishing significant historic vehicles under cover
but who have no resources to restore them, to decide to put them outside in all
weathers so they qualified as “at risk”! No, we must look wider than at just
the “at risk” category in our database. However, clearly time is not on our
side if vehicles are “at risk” and there has to be a greater urgency applied
to such vehicles.
Secondly, there is the question of duplicate or near duplicate vehicles.
For example we have on the list two Coronation “Beavertail” coaches, two
Hull & Barnsley Brake Third coaches, two American Pullman Car bodies at
Butterley, two ‘Barnum’ cars at Ruddington. How are we to treat these in our
list? Surely we should not expect our funders to fork out for both
vehicles in each case. My own feeling is that it should be just one of the two
and we should encourage the proposer to make the choice.
This is the stage we have now reached. We believe this can provide the
grant giving bodies with a good sound steer from practitioners on the ground:
and it will at last answer that question about “what of significance is out
there in the world of railway preservation”. There is of course no reason why
this scheme should be confined to railway carriages. It can apply equally well
to railway wagons or to railway infrastructure items. So: why not consider your
own personal preservation project against this outline structure – could it be
of help to you, when making your
funding application?
19th June 2003