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Plans for Oak Ridge rail museum canceled
Why don’t they just scale back their plans a little. A Cadillac might be nice but a Chevy might get you going. Build as much as you can for $860,000 and then add on as you go. Sounds like these folks aren’t as committed as they would like you to believe…OR…it’s all a ploy to encourage someone to step in a fill the void.
We shall see…you don’t just give back that kind of money when you are only a few hundred thousand from your goal!
Your first mistake is believing the details from a newspaper article. The article does not address all of the costs involved nor does it address the hassle of dealing with Federal Grants and entrenched bureaucrats. The project that was bid was a scaled down version by some 25% and we had raised an additional $350K from the private sector. Neither proved adequate to salvage the grant. In the end, we will in fact build a facility to house the museum’s collection and serve as a boarding location for our excursions on the property we own.
Unfortunately 99% of the conventional methods to make a project fit a budget can’t be done with Federal Grant funds. Further, some combination of TDOT and FHWA won’t afford any additional time to further scale it down and at some point it becomes so scaled down that the hassle of dealing with them is not worth what we would get.
The insinuation that there will be no railroad museum in Oak Ridge is just flat wrong. What there won’t be is Federally funded museum building.
Thats close enough if you factor in “value engineering” and negotiating with the lowest bidder. The bid is 14% over budget and that by no means is reason to quit.
Exactly. It’s called value engineering. That difference should be pretty easy to make up.
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