NRM rebranding - Railway Museum

[wagonman]

It's quite clear to me.

 

The strategic aim is to standardise the infrastructures to drive down operating costs through supply based consolidation and leveraging group spend as well as exploiting best-in-class technologies and practices to provide robust, scaleable and agile services with excellent customer experience.

 

Marketing professional with experience of implementing integrated marketing communications to deliver a range of targeted campaigns. Brand development, delivery of direct marketing campaigns using online and offline channels, website content management, event management and developing relationships with external marketing and design agencies

 

Simple really. What bit of the above do you not understand ?

 

Brit15

 

 

The sesquipedalian obfuscations of the over-remunerated panjandrums...

[darrel]

They have spent £100,000 on the rebranding. To put that in context the preservation group I'm involved in needs that same amount to restore two coaches.

[Coryton]

They have spent £100,000 on the rebranding. To put that in context the preservation group I'm involved in needs that same amount to restore two coaches.

 

The justification is that the rebranding will pay for itself in increased visitor numbers and therefore people spending more in the cafe, shop etc.

 

I presume.

 

Or else why do it?

[Steamport Southport]

That's probably just the consultancy fees.

 

I would expect the total cost to be much higher in the long run.

 

 

But hey, isn't that what civil servants do?

 

 

 

Jason

[MarkC]

The sesquipedalian obfuscations of the over-remunerated panjandrums...

Otherwise known as Bu**$h1t baffles brains...

[papagolfjuliet]

There goes that one then. https://www.heritagerailway.co.uk/lottery-rejects-nrm-bid-for-13-4-million/

[TheSignalEngineer]

Perhaps the HLF has rumbled that the NRM seems to want to forget about 'Heritage' and play Spacemen. That should be the job of South Kensington unless you want to morph all of the branches onto the same thing. MOSI has a wide range of science, industry and transport but with a leaning towards Manchester and the Northwest.

[APOLLO]

Just read this.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10174983/National-Railway-Museum-investigate-STEAM-TRAINS-links-slavery.html

 

Shake of head.

 

Brit15

[pete_mcfarlane]

3 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

Just read this.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10174983/National-Railway-Museum-investigate-STEAM-TRAINS-links-slavery.html

 

Shake of head.

 

Brit15

"It will consider whether steam power aided imperial expansion"

 

Well yes. That's pretty much why we built all those railways in India and Africa. Anyone with the vaguest understanding of history knows that. 

[Phil Parker]

7 minutes ago, APOLLO said:

Just read this.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10174983/National-Railway-Museum-investigate-STEAM-TRAINS-links-slavery.html

 

Shake of head.

 

Brit15

 

Why? It's a research project - I imagine they do lots of such projects, and links to slavery (there will be some) are a hot topic right now, it's just the Daily Mail doesn't know, or disapprove of those. Understanding history is essential if we aren't to repeat it.

[Nearholmer]

47 minutes ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

Anyone with the vaguest understanding of history knows that. 

Like so much that museums do, I guess this is intended to raise the awareness of people who don’t have the vaguest understanding of the relevant bits of history to the point where they do.

 

 

[slilley]

1 hour ago, APOLLO said:

Just read this.

 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10174983/National-Railway-Museum-investigate-STEAM-TRAINS-links-slavery.html

 

Shake of head.

 

Brit15

It is worth looking at. It is an aspect of railway history, therefore is should be studied. Unfortunately history is not something where you can pick and choose the facts if you want to do the job properly. In the pieces I write,I make sure to the best of my ability that all aspects are covered, good and bad. That way the reader gets the full picture of the life of a locomotive class. It would be doing the reader who has shelled out their hard earnt cash if I just wrote a hagiography of say Class 47s where everything they did was brilliant and left out the less brilliant bits.

 

If the building of railway lines facilitated the slave trade we should be mature enough as railway people to be able  to at least acknowledge that went on. After all we dont hide the fact that railways transported many people to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the occupied territories during WW2. 

 

Simon

[dave750t]

1 hour ago, Phil Parker said:

 

 the Daily Mail doesn't know, or disapprove of those. Understanding history is essential if we aren't to repeat it.

The Daily 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' Mail. I wouldn't house-train a puppy on it.

[pete_mcfarlane]

1 hour ago, slilley said:

If the building of railway lines facilitated the slave trade we should be mature enough as railway people to be able  to at least acknowledge that went on. After all we dont hide the fact that railways transported many people to concentration camps in Nazi Germany and the occupied territories during WW2. 

From a British perspective, the link with the African slave trade is likely to be the other way around - money from businesses and people associated with it (or who used slave labour) paid for the early railways. Certainly the Liverpool and Manchester must have been funded by such people, given how Manchester and Liverpool were involved in the trade in cotton from the Southern United States. 

 

That said, there must have been a period in the history of Scottish coal mining where waggonways and early wooden railways existed alongside serfs. The battle of Prestonpans in 1745 took place alongside a waggonway, and serfdom didn't end in Scottish coal mines until 1799. 

 

 

[Davey]

It's a pity they don't spend the money on something useful. YOU MAY WANT TO, BUT YOU CANT CHANGE HISTORY!!!!

 

Davey

Edited November 9, 2021 by Davey

[Phil Parker]

9 minutes ago, Davey said:

It's a pity they don't spend the money o0n something useful. YOU MAY WANT TO BUT YOU CANT CHANGE HISTORY!!!!

 

Davey

 

"Useful" in NRM terms varies from person to person. I know there are plenty who said they shouldn't spend a penny on Flying Scotsman.

 

Anyway, they are a museum, historical research is what they are supposed to do. It's a very different setup from a preserved railway.

 

[dave750t]

27 minutes ago, Davey said:

YOU CANT CHANGE HISTORY!!!!

I don't think anybody is trying to do that. I find it strange that some people seem to get so upset when shameful events from the past are investigated. Surely the point is to learn from them and not make the same mistakes again. That isn't unpatriotic or disrespectful. Quite the opposite really.

[Nearholmer]

25 minutes ago, Davey said:

YOU MAY WANT TO, BUT YOU CANT CHANGE HISTORY!!!!

Er, yes you can.

 

People have been doing it since the dawn of history.

 

You certainly can’t change the objective facts of what happened in the past, but you sure as heck can change which of those facts are obscured, and which are given prominence, and you can sure as heck change the interpretation of facts.

 

The clue to history is in the second syllable: story. History is the tales we tell ourselves about what happened in the past.

 

 

[Davey]

45 minutes ago, Nearholmer said:

Er, yes you can.

 

People have been doing it since the dawn of history.

 

You certainly can’t change the objective facts of what happened in the past, but you sure as heck can change which of those facts are obscured, and which are given prominence, and you can sure as heck change the interpretation of facts.

 

The clue to history is in the second syllable: story. History is the tales we tell ourselves about what happened in the past.

 

 

With all respect no you can't. You can interpret history, put your own slant on it, but you can't change the facts of what actually happened, especially when the facts are not known, however much you might want to.

 

Davey

[Nearholmer]

“History” isn’t and never has been “the facts”, it’s the tale you tell with the facts.

 

Why do you think Churchill is supposed to have said: “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”?

 

The project in question looks to be a classic case of taking the same objective facts that have always existed, and using them to tell a tale that hasn’t been told, or at least hasn’t been emphasised, before.

 

Just out of interest, why the passionate capital letters in your first posting about this? Do you fear that someone is about to invent some things and pass them off as objective facts?

 

 

Edited November 9, 2021 by Nearholmer

[Andy Kirkham]

14 minutes ago, Davey said:

With all respect no you can't. You can interpret history, put your own slant on it, but you can't change the facts of what actually happened, especially when the facts are not known, however much you might want to.

 

Davey

 

I think Davey's point of view is that history is what actually happened; but he acknowledges that it is amenable to various interpretations. Nearholmer considers that history IS the interpretation of past events - not the events themselves. <Edit>  as he himself simultaneously pointed out.

 

Edited November 9, 2021 by Andy Kirkham

[woodenhead]

As the famous lyricist Flavor Flav once remarked 'his story, not history.

 

History is a written documentation of past events, written from the biased postulations of people who remembered the event, it tends to be the victors as the losers don't always get a voice.

[Andy Kirkham]

3 hours ago, dave750t said:

The Daily 'Hurrah for the Blackshirts' Mail. I wouldn't house-train a puppy on it.

Interestingly the Mail appears to present this story quite objectively with no overt outrage or mockery except perhaps in rendering STEAM TRAINS (shock, horror!) in capitals and mentioning the £9000 funding in the headline (as if that was a lot of money for a research project).

However the comments elicited by the article are (predictably) 100% hostile. I guess this is a classic example of a "dog whistle" - they don't have to express outrage themselves because thy know they can depend on their readers to supply that.

Edited November 9, 2021 by Andy Kirkham

[Nearholmer]

3 minutes ago, Andy Kirkham said:

classic example of a "dog whistle"

Spot on.

[DK123GWR]

19 minutes ago, woodenhead said:

As the famous lyricist Flavor Flav once remarked 'his story, not history.

 

History is a written documentation of past events, written from the biased postulations of people who remembered the event, it tends to be the victors as the losers don't always get a voice.

Which is exactly why people are now looking back at history and rexamining it in a way which reflects modern society. The fact that the British Empire was built on the exploitation of huge numbers of people did not, unfortunately, concern many people in previous generations. This has changed (in my view for the better) but this means that the old histories written from a very narrow 'Rule Brittania' mindset no longer satisfy most people. There's no doubt that in another couple of hundred years views will be very different again - there might be increased discussion of the role that the British Empire played in spreading industry and capitalism, and how this contributed to climate change. At the other end of the scale there could be a fascist governent in power in the future, and in that society history would be almost unrecogniseable from what we know today.

For another example, consider Shakespeare. Large parts of his histories are complete and utter rubbish written to please the monarch of the day. We know (or perhaps more correctly, have a probable opinion) today that real events did not occur as Shakespeare described them - and yet we still refer to his 'histories' and to those written by medieval monks, which are at least similarly dubious. We might criticise these accounts for lacking 'historical accuracy' but this is a term which takes our history (that is, the current consensus about what happened in the past) to be the closest approximation of the truth available to us, just as these texts were seen in their day. Any wise person who talks about 'historical accuracy' ought to be keenly aware of this limitation - it would be both arrogant and foolish to assume that our current history is infallible, and it is almost certainly quite wrong about some things - we just don't know what yet. This is, always has been, and very probably almost will be the case in every intellectual discipline, from philosophy to physics. The point of research, when conducted in good faith, is to constantly question our beliefs and to re-write our understanding, and this is just one step towards enhancing our understanding of one small, but important, area of history.