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Museum Conservation policy

Middleton Railway Trust Ltd. (MRT) Policy Directive

Reference: MUS/3 (11/14)

Subject: Museum Conservation policy.

For the attention of: All Council members, All museum officers, The MRT’s Museum Mentor. For the information of: officers of the Arts Council concerned with museum accreditation.

This Directive does not form part of the Safety Management System.

Revision History

Previous versions of this Directive were as follows. Reference 11/14/3 was the initial version.

This version implemented the revised numbering scheme for directives, but made no other changes to the content.

Content Summary

This Directive contains the following sections: Introduction

Items of Railway Rolling Stock and Components of Them Patterns for Castings

Audio-Visual Material and Archive Documents, including “The Old Run” Other Kinds of Physical Objects

Introduction

  1. A key part of the museum activities of the MRT is the care and conservation of the objects that form its collection. As such, the MRT needs to have a policy to guide these care and conservation activities, and such a policy is needed in order to meet the requirements for the accreditation of a museum, which are set out in the Arts Council’s Accreditation Standard for museums and galleries in the United Kingdom. This is available online at

<http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/media/uploads/pdf/Accreditation_standard_print_friendly.pdf>, was published in October 2011, and is referred to from now on as the Museum Accreditation Standard. This Directive has therefore been created for this purpose.

  • To provide a basis for the implementation of this policy, this Directive places various responsibilities on the MRT’s Council, which is what the Museum Accreditation Standard refers to as the MRT’s “governing body”.
  • In particular, in order to meet the requirements of the Museum Accreditation Standard it is important that any plans which are created for the care and conservation of particular objects or categories of objects in the MRT’s museum collection must be consistent with this policy. These plans will be contained in separate documents from this Directive, and all Museum Officers and members of the Council are responsible for ensuring that any such plans are consistent with the policy specified in this Directive.
  • This Directive will be published in accordance with the MRT’s normal procedures for publishing policy directives, as set out in its policy directive GEN/1. In accordance with the procedures in that Directive it will be reviewed at least once every five years. This Directive and the policy specified in it are therefore next due for review in 2019, unless circumstances should arise that make it appropriate to review it earlier than that.

Policy Directive MUS/3 (11/14) continued

  • The MRT’s museum collection consists of a number of different categories of objects, as described in clause 9 of policy directive MUS/2 (9/14), which identifies these categories as follows:
    • items of railway rolling stock;
    • components of items of railway rolling stock (for instance, ones that have been removed from these items of rolling stock in the course of maintenance or restoration), or other physical objects that are directly related to items of rolling stock, except for any patterns for making castings;
    • patterns for castings, whether those castings would be components of items of railway rolling stock or for some other railway use;
    • audio-visual material, such as photographs, sets of photographs or other images, film or video images, or sound recordings;
    • documents or sets of documents that are to be treated as a part of an archive, with the exception of any archive copies of the “Old Run” or related newsletters, since the photographs in these overlap with objects in the audio-visual category;
    • archive copies of the “Old Run” or related newsletters;
    • physical objects of any other kind.
  • The natures of these different categories of objects mean that different requirements apply to their care and conservation, and so the rest of this Directive is organised in terms of these categories.

Items of Railway Rolling Stock and Components of Them

  • The care and conservation of items of railway rolling stock and components of them (and particularly those items that have been formally accessioned into the collection) forms one part of the more general activity of maintaining the MRT’s operational rolling stock, irrespective of whether or not the items in question are operational (and so needing maintenance), or are being overhauled so as to restore them to operational condition, or are being conserved as non-operational items that are to be put on display (often referred to as “cosmetic restoration”). Such conservation activities require significant resources, and when those items that have not been formally accessioned into the collection are considered as well, the MRT has more objects needing such work than it can realistically schedule at any one time. The MRT’s Mechanical Engineer will be responsible for formulating periodically a schedule for such activities, reporting this to the Council, and then reporting to the Council on progress with carrying out the scheduled activities. The Council will be responsible for ensuring that any such schedule achieves a satisfactory balance between the various needs for keeping the railway operational and for improving the condition of those objects that are not operational.
  • The life of items of railway rolling stock in the MRT’s collection, prior to them being acquired by the MRT, was typically characterised by a steady deterioration from original condition to an acceptable working condition, and then at the end of their working life by further deterioration. Conservation work will therefore typically involve reversing this deterioration of condition. Since the MRT is essentially an operating railway, its aim in this conservation work is to restore such items and components of them to operating condition as far as possible, or where this is not possible to restore them to a suitable condition for being put on display. For objects that are to be put on display this suitable condition may be anywhere between that which was typical of its working life and its original condition, and while the MRT recognises that in principle it would be desirable to try to get as close as possible to the original condition, in practice an appropriate choice between these two possibilities will need to be made for each object, where in general the most realistic choice is likely to be nearer to the condition in which that object was during its last period of use. On the other hand, in those cases where the MRT has several similar objects in its collection, then it may well be appropriate to restore different objects to different conditions, so as to illustrate the range of possibilities that occurred for those objects during their working lives.
  • In all cases, the aim throughout any such conservation or restoration work will be to maintain as far as possible for each item of railway rolling stock or component its original design features, the materials used in its construction and its methods of construction. Where necessary, appropriate historical research will be conducted to determine what these features, material and methods were, but if the results of such research are not conclusive then appropriate choices will be made to get as close as is realistic to one of the possibilities that appear from the research to be most likely. Where it then turns out to not be practical to maintain exactly a particular design feature, use of material or method of construction, the conservation or restoration will aim to achieve the nearest possible equivalent to this.
  1. A particular aspect of the condition of items of railway rolling stock which is often contentious is that of livery and paintwork, because it is common that any such object may have carried a number of different liveries during its working life. Where this is the case then historical research will be conducted to establish as far as possible the exact details of the liveries that were carried during various periods. Thereafter the decision as to which livery is most appropriate to be applied during restoration will be made by selecting from the alternatives that have been identified by that research, having regard to which alternative can most accurately be recreated, and without necessarily selecting the one carried during the earliest period of the object’s working life.
  1. Exceptions to the requirements of clause 9 above may be made for those special cases where the need to maintain an original feature of the item is in conflict with the need for it to meet modern standards in some important respect. Such needs may, for example, arise either from operational requirements (such as, for example, in the choice of materials and the designs of pressure vessels and related components, or of braking systems) or from requirements related to health and safety (such as, for example, where asbestos-related materials were used originally without being encapsulated), or other similar situations. Here these examples are all illustrative, and are certainly not intended to provide exhaustive lists of the possibilities that may need to be considered.
  1. Any significant work that is done on any item of rolling stock or component, apart from minor running repairs, must be recorded in the logbook for that item, in accordance with the instructions issued from time to time by the MRT’s mechanical engineer.
  1. For the ongoing servicing, maintenance and restoration of items of railway rolling stock, the MRT has many years of experience amongst its volunteer staff, and its training procedures are intended to ensure that this experience is passed on as such work is carried out. For any such work where the MRT’s volunteer staff have adequate knowledge and experience, there is therefore no general need for the MRT to routinely seek external advice before carrying out the work.
  1. If particular issues arise with any such conservation work where the MRT considers that it may need specialist advice, then it has access to sources for this, from other museums within the heritage railway sector (eg the National Railway Museum and the Vintage Carriages Trust), from engineering companies associated with the heritage railway sector, and from more general engineering companies.
  1. Similarly, much preventative conservation, particularly of smaller items, is undertaken by MRT staff who have been appropriately trained in the correct procedures to be used. For other items, or for any remedial conservation work which might be outside the scope of the training that MRT staff members have received, the MRT will seek conservation advice from ICON-registered conservators as appropriate, and if necessary will contract the work out to such specialists.

Patterns for Castings

  1. In principle patterns for castings may need to be treated as operational items, since situations may arise where it is appropriate to use them for actually making castings. In practice, however, such situations will be fairly rare, except for those patterns which the MRT has itself produced in order to make castings from them, and which it has then added to its museum collection. Furthermore, the process of using a pattern to make some castings may cause some deterioration in the condition of that pattern, as a consequence of the moulding process.
  1. In general, conservation work on patterns will therefore normally be restricted to periodic cleaning, in accordance with the procedures issued by the MRT’s Council for the management of the condition of the objects in its museum collection, and in particular for the inspection and cleaning of such objects.
  1. In any case where a pattern is found to have suffered damage which requires conservation work to rectify it, for instance if it has been used to make castings and so has suffered deterioration as described in clause 16 above, then the MRT will first seek advice from the sources listed in clause 14 above. If this advice identifies that more specialised input is needed for the planning or carrying out of this conservation work then the MRT will seek it from ICON-registered conservators as appropriate, and if necessary will contract the work out to such specialists.

Policy Directive MUS/3 (11/14) continued

Audio-Visual Material and Archive Documents, including “The Old Run”

  1. As specified in clause 39 of the MRT’s Policy Directive MUS/1 (9/14), which defines its Museum Collection Development Policy, the MRT has limited facilities for the proper long-term storage of archive material, and so it will in general arrange for audio-visual material or archive material of any form to be digitised so that access to it can be provided readily, and it will then arrange for the original material to be deposited with the appropriate local government archives. Hence, once such material has been digitised there will in general be little or no need for the MRT to carry out any conservation work on it. The MRT will, of course, need to ensure that proper arrangements are in place for the long-term security of the digitised copies, but the nature of such arrangements is outside the scope of this Directive.
  1. In any situation where a need may arise for the MRT to carry out any conservation work on the originals of audio-visual material or archive documents then the MRT will seek advice from ICON-registered conservators as appropriate, and would then expect to contract the work out to such specialists.

Other Kinds of Physical Objects

  • Most of the other physical objects that the MRT has in its museum collection are items of railway equipment, and these share many characteristics with items of railway rolling stock. Hence, for these other physical objects the policies in clauses 7 to 15 will apply as appropriate.

Drafted by A. J. Cowling (Company Secretary), S. J. Roberts (Mechanical Engineer) and D. Martin (MRT’s Museum Mentor), and approved on 25th November 2014.