March 2006 President’s Report
By Ira Pollack
In this month's newsletter I would like to let you know about some of the new appointments that I have made for our organization. There are many different jobs or tasks that are required to run our operation, some that you might not even notice or ever know exist. As our Museum grows, the workload increases for us all. I have been asking for your help all along and now will report on some new changes and additions to our operations.
To start off with, I have appointed Dan Foley to run and maintain our Wednesday night program of presentations. Dan will be responsible for organizing the new schedules, contacting current and new speakers and keeping our membership aware of this program through the newsletter and whatever media is available to us. This has been very successful through the years and continues to grow. If you have any interest in participating in these programs, please contact Dan for future bookings. I wish Dan well in this new endeavor and look forward to new programs coming up in the future.
I have also appointed Wade Roese as Exhibits Director for the Museum. Wade will be responsible for generating new displays and exhibits, working and collaborating with our library archive group and exploring new interactive displays. Incidentally, Wade and the Tuesday night group have been influential in building our new HO layout and setting up the recently donated G scale layout. I am excited about working with Wade, continuing and expanding the displays we already have in the building.
The Museum has many different projects that are going on at the same time. We receive many monetary donations toward these projects, anything from the RPO, the NYC caboose, or the tie replacement project, to name a few. I have wanted to centralize all of these donations through one person to simplify and standardize the paperwork and, of course, the legwork required. I have approached Mike Salata to fill this need. Mike will be responsible for receiving and forwarding copies of these donations to the appropriate parties involved, and then responding to the donors with thank you letters as needed. I would also like to see these donations acknowledged in our newsletter. This has long been a need of the Museum and I wish Mike well with this new challenge.
Finally, I
talked about the need for an Adver-tising Director and an Operations Director
in last month's newsletter. To date no one has come forward to fill these
important positions. I will again list these requirements in our Help Wanted
section and still hope for a positive response from our membership. Please call
me at
In closing we have a very busy schedule in front of us this year with new events and much track work. As President I ask for your help and support in these endeavors and need your commitments to keep our Museum growing and moving forward.
Help Wanted
Advertising Director - Requirements of Position
1. Produce budget for upcoming year (possibly using past year as a guideline)
2. Advertise upcoming events at Museum (Santa, Jeep Show, etc.)
3. Inform public of happenings at Museum (turntable, semaphore, NYC caboose, yard, new equipment)
4. Marketing our product - regionally, locally
5. Create contacts with newspapers, TV, and radio. Find agencies interested in informational stories about the Museum.
6. Make sure press releases are accurate and on time.
7. Generate flyers for events; collaborate with the Webmaster.
8. Report monthly to the President
Operations Director- Requirements of Position
1. Schedule train crews for weekend operations and special events
2. Maintain time log of all operating volunteers on crew
3. Maintain training program for existing crews and new volunteers - engineers, conductors, brakemen
4. Collaborate with mechanical crew on maintenance, service issues, and schedules
5. Report monthly to the President