All,

I respect your points and counterpoints and the great discussion on the past, present, and future of RR preservation and the role that RYPN plays.

The discussion has generated some great ideas and I think it helps keep us (RYPNers) grounded.

As I said,"maybe its just me, but I am sticking to my original post and feel that RYPN is drifting. Sorry, but I am a purist.

One thing though, Brother Mitchell's comment,

Not sure who Beebe & Clegg are but anyone is welcome at anytime to come and help and share in my preservation efforts. Even if you just want come and look or take pictures, I always take time out to give the nickel tour. To that end, I have spoken with and have had e-mails with folks who both publicly and privately have expressed interest in helping with LV 112, but I have not seen a one.

I am very grateful to the core group of 4 individuals who have been there almost the whole time during 112 restoration. Heck, the great people at OERM, as they restore sister EMC SW1, SP 1006, have proved more valuable as a resource -- with parts and technical advice -- than some of the local BS artists. And those OERM folks are 3000 miles away!

Scott

^^that. Your here because your interested/promoting/hobby/discussing railroad preservation, if your tired of it, discussed it to death, break off and re-energize.
I talk the hobby and will repeat-o-repeat for whomever wants to know, spreading the word, direct to another link if I know or search it out if someone couldnt do it.
If you are helpful, you do that, if you are "done-to-death" I don't think we are about that here.

Regarding new articles - I made an offer via email a couple months ago and got no response. Unlike "interchange" there isn't any specified method for contacting or getting an article posted.

R. Jahn

A couple of points:

News articles: can and should be posted in the "Flimsies" area but many, including myself, post news items here from time to time. The reason they don't get deleted or the reason I might post here vs. Flimsies is because it is something that members here can and do add insight. There are dozens upon dozens of news stories that never show up in either place.

Foamer stuff: Each moderator does this on his own time. Every message is not read by any one moderator. If you see something you don't like hit the little exclamation point at the bottom right (Report this Post) and it will get looked at sooner. I think I can speak for the other moderators in saying I think we all prefer to contact people who go outside of the guidelines (foamer stuff) via private message with a gentle reminder. Even people with the notorious multiple web personality disorder are treated kindly but firmly.

Other stuff: Your moderators do the best we can and if something you have emailed us about falls through the cracks give a gentle reminder. I split my fun time between real trains, roller derby, and model trains. The time I put into RYPN will vary according to the balance in my life on any given day.

Report this Post: I'll say it again. Not every single post is read by a moderator as they appear. Many of you see posts before we do. There is a little exclamation point at bottom right. If you think something is outside of our guidelines hit that button. It will bring it to the top of the to-do list when I sign on.

I couldn't let that pass without a comment! It is interesting to see the generational shift in our hobby. Anyone who is older, or who started this hobby at a very young age, probably knows who Beebe & Clegg were, but since they died decades ago and haven't published in 50 years, many of you may not know of them.

Luscius Beebe was a highly educated (Harvard/Yale) and successful writer who made bank writing for the leading newspapers and magazines of the time. Charles Clegg was a photographer, with "old money", and Beebe's romantic partner. They both were railfans and had the money, time, and skill to document many railroads in the 1940's and 1950's. Their books were the leading standard for the time. Many have found errors in their texts, but again they were exceptional relative to what else was published.

If I was to change anything on RyPN, it would be to reduce the negative posts. There's never a shortage of people waiting to shoot down an idea or a discussion. Anyone visiting RyPN for the first time who is actively involved in a serious preservation effort may be turned off rather quickly.

Along those lines, I dread the upcoming April 1st postings.

I enjoy the postings of misc articles. Yes, I'd probably check them if in Flimsies, but are just fine in the Interchange area.

As to NYC Hudsons, operable GG1's, etc I see RyPN as the ideal location to discuss such concepts and to receive serious input from knowledgeable people. If you have nothing to add to the conversation other than trying to shoot down such an idea, then just move on to the next topic. And from my perspective, there's no reason a Hudson couldn't be built in this country if one really wanted to, keeping in mind this is the country that put a man on the moon using slide rules.

I'm looking at a project that I am simply afraid to even mention on RyPN for fear of being shot at from all directions. Yet, I feel its an important effort and there are folks on this board that I would like to hear from in support of it.

To summarize, to get back to where we were so many years ago, lets keep things positive. That's all. Its very simple.

J.R. May

Make up your mind. <:-)

Seriously, the problem is that one one person calls "negativity" is usually another's "blithering reality."

I'd love nothing better than to stage a three-way race between N&W 611, a replica PRR T1, and a restored GG1 on the Northeast Corridor, or have a UP Big Boy or N&W Y6 on a photo freight side by side with Alco PA's on the Burlington "racetrack", ending with a cold beer at the Aurora roundhouse brewpub. But I am fully aware of the MULTIPLE layers of obstacles--mechanical, financial, legal, metallurgical, logistical, and managerial--that stand in the way of just even getting ANY PRR steamer besides 0-6-0 643 under steam ever again.

And there's no way I can find to realistically present the multiple layers of such obstacles facing any such proposal in North America in 2011 without coming off as "negative." Seriously--VERY seriously--the first step in any such proposal should be stated as "Become a millionaire/multi-millionaire and buy/build your own railroad company." [Cite: Buffet, Warren; Waterman, Pete; Anschutz, Phillip; Jacobson, Jerry; Muller, Andrew; Posner, Henry....]

People seem to think that Britain's A1 Tornado project "demonstrates" that "if you build it, they will come." Let me point out that, at the time the A1 Project was first started, there was still a British Rail (no more), and the typical spring-to-fall weekend in Britain offered the rail enthusiast at least one mainline steam excursion a weekend, sometimes as many as four or more. I had friends that had to pick and choose which trips to ride or chase, or the considerable luxury of being able to say, "nope, already rode that route behind that engine." The A1 wasn't built because no one was letting "big steam" on the main lines; rather, it was a strategic exercise to, among other things, prepare for the inevitable day when "original" boilers would have to be condemned as simply life-expired (as happened with PRR "7002" and 1223 at Strasburg). The British rail scene had the "luxury" of having a couple owners in the position to be able to "mothball" their operable "big steam" for a future day when the older power would get "clapped out"--among the locos stored were an LNER A4 and a LNER/BR A2 Pacific. (They're now out and about.)

Right now, functionally speaking, we can't even get "big steam" on the main lines. And if we did, we couldn't find the cars for them to pull, either. (Rare exceptions such as MILW 261 and ATSF 3751 are noted as just that: exceptions.) We need to solve that problem before we start fundraising for a replica.

I think a lot of us have a group of people who we can brainstorm ideas with by email rather than on a public forum. I've emailed people I never met from this forum when I have read a posting that shows a particular knowledge base I want to put to use vetting another of my crazy theories. Nobody so far has told me to f$#k off for daring to ask for an opinion or some advice, and i'm fairly unpolular on the whole, so you will doubtless come off even better if you try the same thing.

dave

Hi there. I agree a master presevation resource site is necessary and posted about it earlier this year. The idea seems to excite many folks, so we continue to work in earnest to make it happen. We've built an outline as to what such a site should offer, and I'd love to hear more ideas about what would be helpful to those actively involved with--or interested in becoming actively involved with--railroad preservation. I have gotten quite a few emails re: how and why all efforts aimed at any end whatsoever are fruitless, so feel free to not worry about addressing that need! Optimists welcome!

To the OP; I understand where you're coming from, but I think your focus is much too narrow. I appreciate that the primary focus of this group is toward preservation, but seriously, how would you define "preservation"? Is the discussion to be limited only to those who have a direct hands-on association with a museum? How about those who have been actively involved in preservation but are no longer physically capable of spending weekends scraping paint or turning nuts? How about historians and writers who only deal in the past....with abandoned rights-of-way or long-vanished equipment? Authors like Prof. Geo W. Hilton who has focused on the economic history of railroads could hardly be said to be actively involved in museums or direct preservation, but their work has certainly played an important role in documenting what the rest of us wish to preserve. (As did that of Beebe & Clegg, I might add).

Maybe it's my own bias, but in the ten years or so that I've been reading and occasionally posting to this board I really haven't seen any evidence of serious "mission creep". Participants come & go to be sure, but I appreciate the generally broad range of subjects we cover here. Every preservationist I know is a railfan to some degree. Some are even outright foamers. How do you seperate the two?

And to Mr. Ed.....
This kind of statement dismays me....are you seriously suggesting that the owners of this board should ban anyone who does not measure up to your standards of "preservationist"? I seem to recall that within the last year or so you started a thread here insisting that everyone declare their involvement in "preservation" and whether they were active in a museum group or merely "foamers". As I recall, the thread ran to several pages and the vast majority of responders were in fact actively involved with a railroad museum or some other form of preservation. Now suddenly there are "way too many" that only want to foam?

Now, I personally have very little interest in model railroading, and I'm glad we don't get a lot of modeling threads going here. But by coincidence, just the other day I was looking through some my old back issues of Trains magazine, and ran across an op-ed piece by Railroad author and historian Robert A. Le Massena pointing out the value of modelers to the railfan world.

"The two-dimensional archival material of the railfan is converted by the modeler into a miniature reality of three dimensions, resulting in the recreation of something which perhaps no living mortal has ever beheld in real life. By practicing mechanical resurrection, the model-maker contributes to the railfan's store of knowledge. How did a cab-foreward SP articulated appear while negotiating an ogee crossover? Is the New York Central's centipede tender really almost as long as the 4-6-4 to which it was coupled? What did a Kansas City Southern 2-8-8-0 look like from above? Modelers recreate for the railfan a world he never knew....If a railfan considers his photos equivalent to 10,000 words each, what would be his evaluation of a model? A million, maybe?"*

Anyone who is interested in railroading probably has something to say that is useful to the preservationist. This forum would be diminished if it did not offer them a platform.
J

*More than just photos and Models by Robert A. Le Massena,
"Trains Turntable"
December 1981

At the risk of getting too far off topic (well, we are talking about the website itself, not the trains), this just came across my wires:

http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/busine ... ctions-ne/



This certainly isn't rationale or excuse to repost news media content willy-nilly, but it shows that the likes of this website may have less to fear from litigation than fervent imaginations would have us believe. And posting relevant quotes or passages along with the link URL as "fair-use commentary"--as I have just done above--remains defensible.

Oh, really? Would you care to guess how many negative comments NMSL&RHS received from just the locals when our organization first started circulating the idea of restoring 2926, or just how many restoration "experts" looked down upon us and said "we'd never accomplish anything"? Trust me, anyone who is actively involved in "a serious restoration effort" will have heard far worse (and far more of it!) than what most folks here can dish out and aren't gonna pay any attention to the naysayers and armchair experts since he or she knows what that organization can do far better than somebody on a forum who's never come out in person to see what's really going on, much less never actually worked on one of these projects.

Keep in mind, too, that some of those posts actually are coming from folks who have been (or still are) involved in actual preservation efforts and who know what it's really like. They may not always be right (after all, no two situations are exactly alike and what works in one case may not work in another and vice versa), but it might be a good idea to consider what they say or suggest since they've "been there and done that".

Think of those "negative posts" as a reality check rather than an attack on you or your ideas, and don't let them keep you from posting your ideas here. Keep in mind that not everyone here is a true "subject matter expert" and that some folks have rather set ideas on what the "right" or "correct" way of doing things is; that's going to be the case no matter which forum you're on. (Do keep the foaming down if you can, though; it's not too good for the cylinder heads!)

True perhaps, but using "fair use" as a defense still requires time and money if legal action is brought against a site owner. Some moderators and forum owners have chosen to avoid potential litigation simply by banning the posting of news articles from external sources. I'm not suggesting a recommendation on this one way or the other. I'm simply reporting how some other sites are handling the issue.

Just like railroading, there is an established "Industry Practice" in web design as well.

Posting the entire article, even with attribution, will usually get you "cease and desist" letters, or worse, from large teams of high priced lawyers. Sure, you can argue fair use, if you've got time and deep pockets and a valid claim. But it's not worth it.

Posting an excerpt is a different matter. That is the accepted practice. It's like the "pull quotes" you see in magazines where they include an exceprt in large print to catch your interest.

It's accepted practice in the web industry for the same reason. It's a "tease" that gets you to go their website, while not providing so much info you don't have to bother clicking the link.

I think that's all most folks asking for here. Just one or two sentences to tell if we're going to go to the newspaper website, have a popup ad show up, be told "sorry, you have to register first" and then when we finally get to the article we find out that was nothing of interest there to begin with.

Every time the GG1 discussion has recurred, I've learned at least one new fact about the GG1. You may already be a GG1 expert, but I will be happy to go on learning, even if most of the discussion is repetitive.

The 1361 restoration discussions have been repetitive and even contentious, but didn't it take until the sixth or seventh round on RYPN before the facts of the roof sheet thickness became public knowledge? Actually, I think this subject needs a neutrally written summary of all the facts and pitfalls so that others can learn from the mistakes that were made. I don't think that all the facts have ever been collected in one place and dispassionately communicated.

-Mark