~~ PRHS UPDATE ~~
Good morning everyone,
Been a while since I did one of these, actually I am not even sure I ever have. :-)
The society continues to slowly grow. It was never expected to be a fast thing and as such we are just happy to see growing interest.
We recently recieved our first member from outside Australia - thanks Jeffrey.
Thank you to everyone for their continued, and much appreciated, support.
The newsletter has changed from its small size to A4, while lessons are being learn't, and improvements made, with each issue.
Sometimes I have trouble fitting in everything.
The one thing we are very short of is small historical articles, or scans of historical items etc. We would like to eventually have a histrorical section regularly, but the editors main interest is 80s until today.
The society has ben recieving good coverage in the railfan and other press. This is slowly also proving to show dividends in membership. This sort of promotion shall continue, while I am hoping one of our local Sydney members will take on the important role of approaching local Filipino businesses here for possible support.
Possibly the biggest cause for confusion of late is the recent change of name from the RIHSPI-ANZ.
I shall try to rectify some of this below:
We are, as with the ANZ, basically a support group.
We have a slowly growing (but it is growing) membership and our primary goal is to raise money to donate to railway preservation groups in the Philippines.
The only change is that we can now donate to any railway preservation project in the Philippines that is an official project, this includes Mr Tiongson's RIHSPI.
I have made a number of approaches to the RIHSPI about their interest in continued financial support, but to date only the Vice-President has replied.
So why bother with the name change?
There seemed to be significant confusion over our use of the RIHSPI name.
PNR especially seemed to continually link our group, which was autonomous, and the Philippine based one.
Due to cultural differences, this caused a bit of trouble for the Manila group.
At a board meeting here it was voted to enforce the idea that we were seperate by utilizing a new name. We would still support Philippine preservation as before, but we would technically call them grants so as to appear a different society.
At the current time we are investigating a number of proposals, but to date we have no plans to preserve our own rollingstock. As this would be difficult from Australia, I am unsure where the idea has risen from.
This is not to say we wont in the future.
Indeed the idea of RIHSPIs proposal of preserving Abad Santos signalbox still appeals to many within the PRHS, as does the restoration of all rollingstock the society recently earmarked for preservation.
First and foremost, my love of Philippine railways means that I will do whatever it takes to help the preservation of it along, preservation of items the 'CORRECT' way.
The PRHS will ALWAYS support ANY railway society in the Philippines and look forward to one day being allowed to support the RIHSPI financially, historically and technically again.
Clearing up some of the strange myths going around:
1) We have dumped the RIHSPI to fend for themselves.
Absolutely not. The RIHSPI would always remain our main priority should they request help in restoring items.
They are a very important society with a big job ahead, they should always be supported 100%. The PRHS, regardless of name, will always be here to support them.
2) Changes were made due to disagreement in the Philippines.
Again, absolutely not. The RIHSPI people are great people in person and I have nothing but fond memories of my time there with them.
The work done on the first BUDA car was fantastic, virtually beyond belief for those of us who saw her at Caloocan.
We may have some concerns about their ideas, but this does not prevent us from donating to those projects considered right.
3) We wish to set up a rival museum.
Yeah right, that would be feasable from Australia :-)
No, Manila does not need two museums, it needs one museum and that is the RIHSPI one. Locals should aim to support this one and help where possible.
If anyone else has questions, or have heard some myths surrounding the recent changes, please feel free to email me and I shall answer here, in public, on the website. These can be sent to PRHS.Soci ety @ gmail . com (remove spaces)
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