Monday, October 26, 2020

An orange by any other name...

 

A while back Chris Baldwin pointed out to me that the Orange Empire Railway Museum, which for several years has been slowly transitioning to a new name, had officially "switched over." It took me a while but I finally updated the PNAERC roster. So you'll no longer see Orange Empire listed among owners. It will now be the Southern California Railway Museum.

I've decided just to change the name of the organization (though OERM will still be listed under the "also known as" category in the organization's description). This means that searches for historical information may be slightly confusing. For instance, searching for equipment that is or was owned by SCRM brings up BCER 1225, which is listed as having belonged to SCRM from 1958 to 2005 despite the fact that the organization was known as OERM until the late 2010s and never owned car 1225 while it bore the SCRM name. But then again, OERM was actually known as the Orange Empire Trolley Museum until 1975 and I haven't listed the organization's equipment as all having changed hands at that time either.

When it comes to preservation organizations, I tend to just adopt "dba" name changes rather than creating new owners. Other examples of this are the Rockhill Trolley Museum, which used to be known as Railways to Yesterday, and the Pennsylvania Trolley Museum, which used to be the Arden Trolley Museum. Both have just been carried forward with their new names - you can't run a search for equipment formerly owned by the Arden Trolley Museum. One exception to this is the Fox River Trolley Museum, which was known as RELIC until 1984. In that case I've listed those as two separate owners, the reason being that the transition from RELIC (Railway Equipment Leasing and Investment Corporation) to FRTM wasn't just a name change, it was a major organization shift from the for-profit, privately-held RELIC to the nonprofit museum FRTM.

No comments:

Post a Comment