Ted Cooper sent out an email request on this topic earlier this month. It is repeated in qn for those who do not have email access so that we can get the widest response possible for this important piece of work.

Over the last few months Tony Lyster and I have been preparing the ground for a formal assessment of the relative importance of individual items of rolling stock within the Quainton Railway Society Collection.

The Executive Committee has now agreed the way forward with this and we are moving on to apply an initial set of draft criteria to evaluate the ranking of each piece of rolling stock. Attached is a Word document, which outlines the current thinking on the Criteria to be used. Please note that this is by no means finalised and if you have any observations to make then please take this opportunity to give us your thoughts.

We also need your help to ensure that we have as much information as possible on each vehicle in the Collection, so that the evaluation process can be fairly applied in all cases. Therefore we would ask you to forward to us copies of any background information which you think might be relevant and/or point us to specific reference material which we can look up.

I personally will be unavailable for the next two weeks, but hope to make some inroads on this matter when I return. Tony Lyster is also heavily committed elsewhere in the short term.

But please use this time to pass on the request to as many other members as possible and also to put together any data that you can offer. Can you please (as far as possible) forward such data to me by email and advise any recommended websites or other relevant data sources. If you would like to offer reference material (on loan) or send hard copy material then please forward this to the Rewley Road office.

As well as reviewing any comments you may have on the process, we will start the initial round of assessment, which together no doubt will lead us to make some adjustments to the criteria.

If there is sufficient interest in this subject we will try and schedule a meeting, possibly in May, to review progress.

Thank you in anticipation of your support.

QRS ROLLING STOCK RANKING CRITERIA

The following table has been developed from the paper of June 2003 by R Gibbon on Railway Carriage Significance and the Leighton Buzzard Narrow Gauge Railway's recently adopted criteria for ranking their rolling stock. The rankings attributed by the Vintage Carriages Trust (VCT) for historical significance and technical significance are used where available, transposing to a numeric scale as noted below.

The table sets out several factors to allow QRS to judge the relative merits of its rolling stock for ongoing retention, preservation or restoration. It currently includes comments from Tony Lyster and Ted Cooper, who were asked by the Executive Committee to initiate this work.

For each criterion (1 to 5) a score is allocated for each vehicle. A score of 10 indicates that the vehicle scores the maximum possible on the criterion concerned.

NOTES:

1. Gibbon refers to a process of designating artefacts that have a special significance and they are then "protected from destruction". He proposed a "logarithmic" scale with possible scores limited to 0, 1, 2, 6 or 10 only. This separated vehicles more clearly than earlier use of a simple numeric scale. In order to be designated a vehicle needed to score at least 25 (out of 70) and have some recognition under "local, regional or national importance" criteria. Scoring was said to be best done as a group activity in order to dilute the effects of any extreme personal bias.

Note also that Gibbon assessed the QRS owned Sentinel Railcar score as 38, putting it at number 8 in a sample list of 38 (essentially UK operated) vehicles. Two BR Mark 1 carriages were ranked at numbers 36 and 38 with scores of 12 and zero respectively.

2. The QRS Management, Acquisition and Disposal Policy for the Museum Collection states that a speciality will continue to be made of collecting material relating to:
Metropolitan Railway.
Great Central Railway.
London & North Western Railway.
Brill Tramway.
Metropolitan & Great Central Joint Committee.
Metropolitan (Great Central?) & Great Western Joint Committee.

It also states that care will be taken not to conflict with the collecting policies of other local railway centres, such as the Great Western Society at Didcot.

Notes:
The text in this Quainton Railway Society publication was written in 2008 and so does not reflect events in the 6+ years since publication. The text and photographs are repeated verbatim from the original publication, with only a few minor grammar changes but some clarifying notes are added if deemed necessary. The photos from the original publication are provided as scans in this internet version of this long out of print publication.

Reference:
Rolling Stock Review - Ted Cooper - Quainton News No. 99 - April 2008