Bryan Larrabee, President, Transit Museum Society
In September of 2022 our former warehouse agreement had expired and the landlord wanted to demolish the building, so we had to move. TransLink signed a lease agreement on a warehouse in Langley that they have kindly allowed us to use for storing and maintaining our vintage fleet as well as our artefact collection, library and bus parts.
We moved into a warehouse 4,000 sq/ft smaller than our former Burnaby location because leases had almost doubled. We had to figure out how to adapt to a reduced home base. We have spent all our time trying to fit into our warehouse and to organize, set priorities and deal with inventory. To be honest, we were just reacting to the problems and issues as they arose. We needed a formal Strategic Plan to lead us into the future.
In May of 2024 we conducted our first strategic planning meeting with our 8 directors and some key TMS members. Topics chosen were:
- Volunteer Management
- Transit Museum “brand”
- Relationship with TransLink
- Future of the vintage fleet
We quickly discovered that the limitations we face greatly impact on our ability to plan for the future. Our location is a longer commute for volunteers and the smaller space limits our ability to do much in the way of restoring or repairing and maintenance of buses. As an example, there is only enough room for 8 of our 16 vintage buses. We simply can’t do many things that we would like to do. We needed to do a follow-up Strategic Planning Workshop, so we did that in July 2025.
The first workshop raised a lot of questions and produced some goals and objectives that we wanted to tackle, but we still had to decide if those goals were achievable considering the limitations that we identified. Our topics were not far from the issues that we tried to address in 2024:
- Volunteer Management
- Fundraising
- Vintage Fleet
We talked about engaging our volunteers more and conducting a membership drive as well as a new process for welcoming new volunteers.
Do you have a particular bus in our vintage fleet that you would like to support? It might be in the form of starting a fundraiser or merely donating funds that we can allocate to that bus.
Many good ideas for raising funds came up including the need to reach beyond our bus fan community to raise more money on our bus excursions. We need fresh ideas and are open to suggestions.
We came up with some tasks regarding better preservation of our vintage fleet. A discussion about the 90th birthday of the 1937 Hayes Teardrop has started. We are looking for someone who would be willing to volunteer to be a “project manager” for this.
We want to bring a bus out of storage in the Fraser Valley so that we can supplement our charters and excursions. We have nowhere to safely park it. We are willing to pay. Does anyone want to research this?
There are still pending tasks that were identified in all areas at the workshop, and our Board of Directors has already started on the new Plan. Many of our initiatives will be written up as future blogs this year, especially with respect to preserving our vintage fleet. We may be looking beyond our eight Directors for help to move us forward. So, stay tuned. There might be a role for you in our future!
The group split into two to discuss ideas. From Top, left to right, we see Jason Sharpe (Director), Austin O’Keefe (IT/Webmaster), Ewan Streit and Angus McIntyre (Director) presenting results of the discussions. In addition, Lawrence Walker, Rob Chew (Director), Aden Wong, Evan Russell (Director), Michael Taylor-Noonan (Director), Milan Streit (Director) and Sue Walker also attended. Rhonda Larrabee took the photos and helped organize the meeting.
