Hear me out.

I have no problem with asking you to cover only my reasonable expenses, if your need for restoration purposes just happens to be sitting on my shelf (or, for that matter, the shelf of someone with which I work, provided you meet their demands).

You need a wiring diagram for a U25B or a C630? I have it? It's yours, just cover my copying expenses and postage.

You need a gauge-changing manual for a BLW RS4TC? I can find that, but I ask you to cover my time off to hunt it down. (Actually, the guy who was my best man at my wedding has it......)

Is there ANYONE getting rich in this obsessive illness? I doubt it.

Sure there is...

Remember the adage of "How to make a small fortune in the railroad business?"

The answer is to start with a large fortune...

Keep on Truckin' [ah - bad word, but different context]

Hmm, do you think collectors should be guaranteed an income copying manuals for museums? Heehee :) That's probably not what people mean. Like Alexander says nobody's getting rich at this. Copying manuals is not worth doing for the cash, it's a labor of love.

Bingo. The feeling of "making a difference". That golly, this copying will help a particular project, this collecting really does support preservation. That somewhere, in a museum, a restored piece will RUN because of your direct efforts. THAT is the payoff for a collector.

How does my "digitize them for public use" idea beat that? Well, it doesn't. I can't promise you'll get warm fuzzies from scanning manuals for all to use. I can promise your phone will stop ringing, because anyone who needs the manual will just download it. And even if 1000 people do, you'll never know if ANY lead to a real restoration, because you won't have that copying fee to separate the serious from the curious.

On the other hand... long after the welding fire in your museum shop has consumed the documents in the shop office, long after your estate has hired some illiterate laborers to heave your collection into a dumpster... those scans will be out there at least informing and possibly helping. And frankly, the capabilities of the preservation movement tend to improve year by year. "Our sons and grandsons are going to do things which would stagger us." (who said that?)

At WRM, a big part of the decision of "which car to restore next" is documentation. If we don't have documentation of how a car went together, that hurts its chances of being restored. Documentation freely available is more likely to count toward that.

I realize this is hard to buy into... but think about it. Think of the power.