Canadian Heritage Committee on Oct. 25th, 2006

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Keeper, I apologize. I put Charlie ahead of you. I got a little out of line here, so I'll give you--

[Tina Keeper, Liberal, Churchill, MB]

Do I get extra minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

I'll give you an extra minute.

[Tina Keeper, Liberal, Churchill, MB]

I'd like to thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the gentlemen for being here today. It's been a fascinating presentation--absolutely fascinating. I know very little about railway museums, but I am really captivated by the aspect of the railway museums that you speak about in terms of the designation of the railway cars or stock as artifacts. Mr. Heard mentioned the worth of some of the artifacts is very substantial and can be substantial.

I'd like to ask you, in terms of the historical association, we've talked about the national story, but is there a process in which you, as an association, in terms of how this national story is unfolding...how you look at what the acquisitions will be, what are the primary acquisitions, and how do you prioritize how you're going to do this work, which is very challenging in terms of the cost?

[David W. Johnson]

In response, yes, there's a very specific process we're going through. Each institution that is at a truly professional level has its mandate clearly defined. Within that mandate, it tells exactly the story it's going to tell. We're telling the story of the Canadian Pacific Railway in its fight through the mountains, in its ability to move goods through the mountains, and the completion of the railway across Canada—that sort of storyline.

Garry in Cranbrook, for instance, is telling the story of luxury passenger rail travel, and he's doing a great job down there.

Exporail is looking at a broader aspect of the railways of Canada, and as I say, they were there at the time the railways were deaccessioning, to use the museum term, or scrapping, to use the railway term, the significant pieces as they changed from steam to diesel and from diesel to second- and third-generation diesel.

Have a clear mandate; have a clear policy on collections. You identify those items that fit within the collections policy and reflect the mandate. Then you look at whether you're going to be able to actually house and care for the artifact on the one hand. On the other hand, you say, are we getting near the end of that particular kind of artifact and if we don't take it now there will be no more? That's one way.

Another way to look at an artifact is if it's of particular technological significance. Exporail just received the first Green Goat prototype. I don't know if you've heard of the Green Goat. It's a Canadian Railpower Technologies Corp. development that uses a small diesel generator set to charge batteries, and it then uses the power from the batteries to power the traction motors to move the locomotive and the cars. This technology is much less polluting and much more fuel efficient. So here's a substantial increase in both pollution reduction and efficiency. The prototype is only one. Do you preserve it or not? They were able to do so. This sort of argument goes back and forth within the museum, within the institution, with the railways all the time.

So, yes, we are aware and have policies, which I think Garry can confirm.

[Garry Anderson]

I want to point out quickly that the policies we have deal with these great transcontinental hotels on wheels, which are not being made any more, and they're quite different. So our collections policy, as far as the sets of trains is concerned...the 1929 Trans-Canada Limited is complete. The 1936 Chinook is all there. This 1907 Soo-Spokane Train Deluxe is almost all there. And then there are the royal cars and cars of state. So our collection is almost completed. Now there is the whole question of what parts of those cars we're missing that we need.

We're into the whole sphere of the art of the railway, not the technology. The technology is there, but we concentrate on the design arts of these cars—the textiles, the china, and the silver—and on everything that adds to a story about what these trains meant to this country and all of the objects that now go into them: the paperwork, the documentation, the promotions, the advertising, and so on. The recreation of original carpets and fabrics is very costly when you want to bring them back to the way they were.

We do have a very clear policy. If you want to find out how to do a very clear policy, stay at it long enough and make sure you don't deviate. That's how we've done it, and more museums are doing this. So there's less duplication and more refinement of resources.

[Tina Keeper, Liberal, Churchill, MB]

It's truly a preservation of our history or heritage.

I would like to ask one more question.

Mr. Johnson, you mentioned that you have an archive collection as well. Can I ask you, or either of you, about the archives you have and what kind of effort it takes to assist those archives?

[David W. Johnson]

Archives are a particular challenge for railway museums, and a lot of the archival material is also large. For instance, some of the drawings that either go into the construction of the locomotives, railway cars, buildings, and railway structures, which are like bridges, or the profile of the railway across the country, are very large documents. They're very expensive to reproduce, microfilm, or whatever way we wish to preserve them.

The objective is to try to collect and preserve that information before it is lost—because again, a dumpster is the usual enemy of this sort of documentation—and then document it in such a way that it can be made available to the public through CHIN or through whichever other way is appropriate. Some of them we're not going to put on CHIN; they're simply too large. We'll keep them on CDs and make them available to people when needed.

Garry.

[Garry Anderson]

The archives, in our case, are both an archives and a reference library, and they support the collection and give all the details that the cars and the artifacts won't tell themselves. It's substantial. It's not necessarily large, but it is voluminous. Again, it's another thing we have to do. As well as preserving these large objects, there are the papers and the photographs. Yes, it's a big job.

[Tina Keeper, Liberal, Churchill, MB]

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

Thank you very much for the answer.

Mr. Abbott.

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

For the benefit of the other members of the committee, I'd just like to walk through the pictures. Garry has referred a couple of times to the Royal Alexandra. Basically, what happened was there was the veneer, the inside of a coffee shop, although you'd never believe it was a coffee shop. It's absolutely elegant, and if you go to the web page, when you don't have anything better to do, press the button, and you'll get an idea from the pictures of the inside of this very large room, which easily sits--not sits for dinner--two to three hundred people. It's absolutely elegant, and it was a building that was created from... Was it the Fort Garry Hotel?

[Garry Anderson]

It was the Royal Alexandra Hotel in Winnipeg. It was a Canadian Pacific hotel. They called it their grand café, which was the European Dining Room, which was different from their formal dining room. That's the railway hotel part of our collection that I haven't gone into because I'm concentrating on—

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

As a commercial, I would say, and to give Garry full marks, he had this built, and then he basically put all the veneer in. There was some recreation of just a very few missing parts. Basically, it was just a brand new hardwood floor that had to be created.

[Garry Anderson]

It's almost identical to the Rideau Street Convent Chapel that's recreated inside the National Gallery. It's the same size and—

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

I'd really recommend that you take a look at its web page.

I want to ask a question. When you restore a car, approximately how much a year are you looking at in terms of cost? I'll come back to that.

I just want to quickly walk through the pictures, both of the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel and the railway museum, and I'll ask our witnesses some questions.

If you take a look at page 1, you can see the buildup of snow on the outside. On page 2 of the pictures from the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel you see the challenge with the weathering on the outer shell. The page 3 pictures are basically before the work. If you flip over to page 5, you start to get an idea of the work that my friend Mr. Warkentin was talking about, actually stripping the paint and the unbelievable art work that is underneath.

Now take a look at page 6. That is exactly the way it is. As Garry mentioned, in many instances they had to recreate the carpet and the upholstery, and they had to refinish the furniture. You get an idea of the before and after from those pictures.

Carry on to page 7. If you take a look in the upper left-hand corner and then the lower right-hand corner, you see the difference between what was then and what is now. These are absolutely unbelievable works of art. I'd recommend that you come to Cranbrook any time. This is really unbelievable stuff.

Take a look as well at page 9, where you have the Curzon car that was a lakeside cabin. You can imagine what the inside of the Curzon looked like. Take a look at what was actually underneath all of the paint.

I'll go through Mr. Johnson's pictures in just a second. But my question to Mr. Anderson is that without doing anything more, to maintain the heat and the protection from the weather on an ongoing basis, approximately how much does it cost per car?

Before you answer that, I'll also ask Mr. Johnson a question. On page 2 of Mr. Johnson's pictures, if you identify the yellow caboose in the three main pictures on that page, you get an idea of what relates to what. My question for Mr. Johnson is whether it would be desirable to put those cars into some kind of a shelter, and if so, would you not also be looking at the possibility of additional cars? What approximately is the cost for just your fundamental maintenance?

Finally, I presume your financial documents are public information, so would you make them available to the committee? If we're talking dollars and cents, what are we talking about in terms of dollars and cents for this? What does it actually cost now that we have the picture of what you're about?

Those are my questions, Mr. Chair.

[Garry Anderson]

In Cranbrook's case, obviously if we had a building, the price per car, just for the heating and air conditioning would plummet, because the outside temperatures around the car would be modified greatly. A big capital expenditure would pay for those increases in hydro and/or gas over time.

It's about $2,500 to $3,000 per car now. We keep adding cars, because we need to preserve them. That doesn't take into account the costs of any staff, because we don't have any conservators; we don't even have a maintenance person at the moment. I have to do that myself. Whether we have job creation program people or not, it's up to me.

That sounds like a small amount, but when you take this into account for every car, you can see where it's heading. We've got to get these under control. They can't be separated or you've reduced the sets of cars to individual cars. We have our work cut out for us.

I brought the documents I have for the museums budget with me, so I have them all there for you.

[David W. Johnson]

At Revelstoke, the utilities for the building, which houses just two of the artifacts, run in the range of $16,000 a year. Given the price of gas and so on, it's only going to go up.

As for the outside equipment, if you're going to maintain metal equipment to any standard of display, you're going to be painting it at least once every five years. Something simple like a caboose, which is straightforward in its lettering style and paint scheme, would probably cost $8,000 to $10,000. On some equipment, there is a considerable amount of woodwork that has to be restored. This raises costs. Painting a full-size locomotive will run about $35,000. Woodwork on a car that needs a lot of expensive metalwork replaced can run even more. This is not preservation or restoration. This is maintenance—what has to be done just to keep it from falling apart.

I have financial statements from last year that I can leave with the committee.

[Jim Abbott, Conservative, Kootenay—Columbia, BC]

In British Columbia, I see that there is a listing of seventeen locations devoted to railways. Could you provide this committee with an idea of how we would sort through them? What criteria should the national government adopt to choose between those seventeen locations? How do we choose between the Canadian Museum of Rail Travel in Cranbrook, the Revelstoke Railway Museum, or the Kaatza Station Museum in Lake Cowichan? How do we do that?

[Garry Anderson]

I don't think we're saying to choose one over another. We're saying you need to put a process in place to determine what has national significance and what doesn't. There are some beginning drafts of how this might be approached. I think it's something that will take time, if you want to do it well.

[David W. Johnson]

Agreed.

[The Chair, Conservative, Gary Schellenberger]

I have to tell you, echoing Ms. Keeper's words, how much I have enjoyed this meeting. I thought B.C. was the only province that had a railroad policy when it joined Canada. Thanks for letting me know that there were nine.

As the chair, I'm just going to sneak in a couple of comments. I'm very intrigued. I'm a collector with a couple of old cars. I know what it costs to restore an automobile, and I have a great amount of respect for how much it costs to keep these things relevant. I have mine in pretty good condition—they're heated and everything.

As you've explained, you don't all have one lounge car, a caboose, and one engine. Your expertise is in these special cars that are gems, and you've had to find them and restore them. I think it's great when it comes to rail, because it takes a certain expertise to do some of these things.

In my former life I was a painter. I was interior decorating—finishing and refinishing wood. I know the hard work it takes, the hours you have to spend. You can't just go at it with a hammer and chisel to get that paint off. It's got to be done in a delicate way. The way some of these things are finished is spectacular. I can imagine the cost, because I used to have to price these things myself.

I thank you again for the great presentations today. I only hope we can do something to preserve our railroad history. Mr. Heard, Mr. Anderson, and Mr. Johnson, I hope that we as a committee can take your comments under advisement.

The meeting is adjourned.