New blog posting area

Welcome to the new Friends of Kingston Station blog posting area.
We think that kingstonstation.blogspot.com is nicer than the old FOKS,
and we also hope it is easier for everyone to remember.
Please bookmark this for updates and information, notices for meetings.

Thanks
Frank Heppner, Chairman
Jack McCabe rec/sec for the Friends of KS Board

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"About Me" continued from Profiles

Previous Projects ( cont.)

In recent years, Operation Lifesaver activities occupy many of our members on a regular basis. We sponsored a community Old Fashioned Railroad Family Picnic Days in 2002 to mark the opening of the museum, which drew over 1,500 people. We have traveling historic and safety displays that we bring to model railroad shows. We regularly have educational presentations at the station for school groups on field trips. We have had railroad history displays at the South County Historical Museum.

The late Senator John Chafee (RI) once said, Without the Friends of the Kingston Station, there would be no Kingston Station today. Without our efforts, the $3.5 million station restoration would not have been done, and we campaigned equally vigorously for the construction of the pedestrian overpass (currently under construction) that will cost approximately $2.5 million. Both of these major projects were union/Davis-Bacon projects, and our organization is familiar with, and accepts the Davis-Bacon concept of union equivalency if union labor is not available.


Proposed Project

Goals
We started our museum in 2002 with a fairly extensive collection of local railroad artifacts, including old photographs, postcards, timetables, books, locomotive bells, etc., that had been donated by members over the years. Our ìthemeî was largely shaped by the objects in our collection, the primary focus being railroading in southern Rhode Island. One problem we immediately faced was that we did not have a fraction of the secure display cases we needed to be able to display our items without a docent present, and as we are a small organization, our opening hours were very limited. This is a severe handicap, as over 90,000 passengers use Kingston station every year, and every passenger is a potential museum visitor. This kind of visitor potential is presented by very few small railroad museums.

We also early realized that cases full of old track spikes might be of great interest to someone already interested in railroad history, but our displays lacked the kind of cohesion and punch that would demonstrate to non railroad buffs why trains were interesting in the past, and are interesting (and worthy of support) today.

Our proposal is thus twofold:

Goal 1. We would like to have enough secure display and storage space so that the museum could be open to the public essentially unattended by any of our members. This is important for two reasons: A) the museum could thus be open 16 hours a day, rather than a few hours every weekend, and B) our displays could be properly preserved and curated, as is important for any museum collection.

This portion of the request would largely be composed of the purchase of 4 wall-type, and 3 jewelry-display lockable illuminated cases for the physical objects in our collection, and cabinets for the safe storage of materials not currently on display.


Goal 2. We would like to be able to present more cohesive stories to our visitors, through use of attractive, modern types of displays, prepared to professional standards. These might include interactive computer displays, but might simply be professionally prepared poster displays, with modern graphics.

We have already prepared some displays we are very proud of. We have a diorama, showing Kingston Station today, and as it might eventually look with a standalone railroad museum (Figure 1). We have an outstanding screen display showing the geographic development of railroads in Rhode Island (Figure 2). We also have a screen display showing the development of passenger train safety appliances (Figure 3).

On the other hand, we have a collection of beautiful HO models of Kingston Station and its surrounding buildings, but no way of securely displaying them in a historical context. Over the years, we have developed a number of conceptual displays that would be both cohesive and educational, but have lacked the time, resources or personnel to bring them about. These have included:

Intermodal Transportation: It Started in Rhode Island
The American Passenger Train: 175 Years of Progress
American Railroad Unions
How Railroads Shaped New England
The American Passenger Train: A Cavalcade of Trains (computer operated model railroad)
The Railroads of Rhode Island.
Railroads and Modern Communications
Railroads: One of the First Computer Industries

As the museum space available is small (900 sq ft), rotation of displays is both necessary and beneficial. Fortunately, we have the use of the basement of the station for storage of rotating displays.

We have a large supply of computers available to us, which we now use for Operation Lifesaver presentations, that could be used to supplement the computer kiosks we are requesting.

Some of these displays would be screen displays, requiring only graphic arts services and materials. Others might be Power Point displays, requiring writing, illustration, and setting up the program.

As we have found, movement is irresistible to children, and we have found that the crude, temporary model railroads we have set up from time to time have been guaranteed attention getters, rivaling the existing Operation Lifesaver computer displays. We would like to have at least one model railroad that would be built in the opposite way such displays are usually built for museums. Instead of having a group of model railroaders design a model railroad to display their favorite locomotives, locale, craftsmanship, etc., and then figure out what the public was supposed to learn by viewing the railroad, we would determine what information about railroads we wanted the public to have, and design the model to best illustrate it. We come to this approach naturally, because many of our members are interested in history, and are teachers.

We would expect to work closely with the NARF in the selection of which topics to give priority.
Targeted Beneficiaries

As our museum is located in an active railroad station, if we were able to keep the museum open during all of the station hours, we would have a potential 90,000 visitors a year. This would be one of the largest museum attendances in the state of Rhode Island, and would be far larger than most small railroad museums. Our Operation Lifesaver presentations typically reach over 3,000 people a year, distributed around the entire southern Rhode Island area.

Budget

Display cases