Really stupid to be talking about preserving older railroad equipment in a forum such as this.
The criticism in this thread may be the dumbest thing to come down the pike in a long time. And people got bent out of shape because somebody innocently inquired about 643?

The Oracle of Baltimore dominates every single discussion on this forum and on all topics he makes sure to inform us that no matter what we are doing, he has done it before and done it better than any of us could conceive of. So of course if he states that the Internet is of no use in the rail preservation field, who are we to object. Even if we combined all of our experience and wisdom we could never match the Oracle.

I will have to check out our Kling car and make sure that it still is an 80 ton piece of rolling stock and not made of paper, as the Oracle of Baltimore has implied.

I'm confused.

Some of you want "actual discussion." I'm all for that.

Some of you DON'T want the umpteenth "beat a dead horse" discussion about [fill in your favorite "dead horse"].

I don't think we can have it both ways.

When I interject a "it's been discussed before" on a topic, my intention is to give the original poster a chance to familiarize himself/herself with previous material already available before launching into a "20 Questions" game, NOT to "cut off discussion." However, if the response is "OK jes curious", well, there really isn't more to discuss. If that provokes a "how much is the guy asking for it before I go to my Museum board?" kind of response, then that could be new, and involve actual discussion.

When someone comes here to propose saving a GE B40-8 (made-up example), do they want a whole bunch of folks saying "yes!" and "you da man!" (which is what you get on Facebook and elsewhere), or do they want serious advice from the people who have been there and done that (some of the guys here)? If someone thinks they're going to buy it and put it in their back yard, do we cheer them, look the other way and walk off whistling, or politely but firmly tell them why it's probably a bad idea, long term? And can we give the serious and well-meant advice and suggestions without being decried as "naysaying" and other insults?

My problem is that as occasionally off-topic, silly or time-wasting a topic may get, I'd probably refuse to lock or kill a thread unless/until it involved libel, slander, exceedingly polite Nigerian royalty, making $XXX an hour from home, designer handbags cheap, or the enlargement of certain body parts. (And I put up with having to kill that stuff at other online places.)

And finally to RJD: You are once again guilty of absolutism. It's not "Of course nothing has been saved..." It's that the role of the Internet is still fairly tiny in the grand scheme of things in rail preservation. The internet is simply one tool in the arsenal. One of the biggest "movers and shakers" in the traction field in the East basically doesn't go online, and he's one of the ones engineering many of the recent swaps, trades, parts rescues, etc. It's still trucking, running a backhoe, burning up cell phone minutes, etc.

The rail preservation community, as a whole, IS NOT using the Internet to its best and fullest capability. It's not, on average, reaching out to young people online, or what outreach is occurring is because of young members, sometimes beyond official status. The few rail preservation databases and resources that are out there are individual projects scattered hither and yon, under no common support or framework for additional "wiki"-style contributions, and mostly not acknowledging one another's existence.

Since we're off topic now....a couple things about the internet: it's only useful to us as the uses to which we put it. We dont' do much cooperatively anyhow, no use expecting exploitation of the internet to be different. Garbage in, garbage out.

Internet has been very useful to me, but not in a scattershot kind of thing.....in a more targeted thing, communicating with an individual or a select group. the more I can focus on a single inquiry or idea, the more useful it is - although there's a notable tendency towards chaos, as the evolution of this thread perfectly demonstrates. It takes directness and sometimes outright rudeness tomaintain focus - but if you own the topic, you have to be willing to keep shoving it the way you need it to go. The broader the range of topics on any particular forum, the faster and wider the chaos spreads.

The usefulness is in speed and multiple targeted participants relative to phone and mail - I use email rather than forum internet for things when I know who the most likely expert is that could perhaps provide good information - and the smarter that person, the more focussed the response is likely to be there or here.

I'm in awe of the quality of many of the brains that are out there. I'm unimpressed by the quality of the lowest common denominator mass brain. So, I think it is more a matter of focus and group discipline than the quality of the medium itself.

I'm hoping to start an experiement in semiopensourcing - a forum postable only by select invited guests of high credibility and expertise, but open viewability - soon. I'm interested in not only the task we're going to explore (if it happens) but in how the internet works in that dynamic for real problem solving and innovation.

dave

There are some of us who are intrigued at finding/seeing where old rail equipment has wound up. In this case a salvage yard. I wonder how many adverage people think it's a bus sitting there?

(The 0401 is sitting safely tucked away until it's turn in the restoration que comes around. It is routinely checked on every few months to make sure the weather is staying out and evict any critters or birds who try to make residence in it. It is currently long term stored, but NOT neglected. Big things it needs is finish carbody work, rewiring and reassembly. Major components are installed in it, 244 prime mover, main gen, traction motors. It is a worthy project to finish.)

The Staten Island Alcos were saved after their availability was discovered via the internet...rolling stock, trucked, returned to operation, etc...many of AMD's requirements. Was a lot of nay-saying at the time that it wouldn't/couldn't happen.