It's therefore rather fitting that the ES No.1 should have a place in the national collection housed at the Shildon Locomotion museum. It's actually one of my favourite engines, manufactured in 1903 by British Thomson-Houston and Brush, based on a design by the US General Electric company.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a beast that's more than a century old, it shows some signs of wear -- and the wooden buffer beam has suffered heavy cracking for as long as I can remember.
That image (above) was from 1982 (no, that's not me and I have no idea who it is), while this below is from three years later:
The cracking can clearly be seen in those images, but by the beginning of this year the locomotive was beginning to suffer from a pronounced drooping of its buffers:
This buffer droop was a result of the cracks getting out of control.
It couldn't be put off any longer and the wooden bufferbeam was removed:
The bare metal frame on which it was fitted was then exposed:
A new pair of buffer beams (one for each end, obviously) was then carefully crafted:
The metal fixings were restored:
And, finally, after the reattachment of assorted metalwork, the painter came in to do a bang-up job of recreating the original finish:
I guess the only question is the old philosophical one, of how many parts of an object can you replace before it ceases to be a "historical" artifact in any meaningful sense?
2 comments:
As usual, you bring up an excellent point.
Here, replacing sections representing a fraction of a percent of the whole which had clearly degenerated over time, there isn't much of a question about it. How many times might similar chunks of it have been replaced while it was still in active use before being consigned to being a museum exhibit? Those replacements in the line of duty wouldn't affect its historic worth (and, if properly documented, would add information on the serviceability aspects of the item in question to the historical record). Thus, as long as they are duly noted, I don't think that some properly documented replacements of clearly degraded components after exhibithood should count against its historical value.
We're not talking about "my toy is still in the original shrinkwrapped box" geekiness here, but the history of an artifact which actually carried out real work over a long lifetime.
Of course, each instance of such replacement has to be weighed on its own merits, and there is bound to be a different dividing line between "do it" and "leave it alone" for each individual observer.
I completely agree with you.
There is no question in my mind that replacing the buffer beams was the right thing to do.
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