Over the weekend, I had occasion to discuss with a colleague a point that as of late, seems to have infiltrated many, many RyPN threads. That is-part of the motivation behind railroad restoration is for future generations to study the restored artifacts. Huh ? Some of us beg to differ...As an aside, on the same day-I found myself standing next to a pretty good percentage of our groups' nucleus-that is, folks with seniority dates of 20 years or more. Kind of shocking to see the amount of gray hair present... another.With that in mind-I think it is safe to say that gearing our activities towards future generations of academic types is the last thing from our collective mindset. I believe that most of us are more concerned with influencing events over the next five to ten years. The motivation (and reward structure) for so many of us tends to be (by nature of necessity) completely internal for most of the time. Of course, every now and again-there are the eureka moments-for example, a trio of RS-3's pulling a freight train in the here and nowIn depth documentation for the future would be nice to have-but all too often, we are limited to what is required for the near future,i.e, completion of the piece.

I had a great time Sunday riding the Western Maryland Scenic with TJ Gaffney and his family. Anyone who saw TJ's son and daugher and my son admiring 734 would have rested easier about where our future population of customers (and maybe volunteers and staff if they choose) will come from.TJ and I talked about many things, but one thing we talked about is the way we (meaning the railway preservation field) sometimes set ideas in opposition to each other that don't have to be in opposition. Forgive me if I misinterpreted your thoughts or hijacked them into a different direction, but this got me going down that direction of thought again.Take operational restoration vs. static preservation (and yes the swear words "conserving original fabric"). You can't do both with the same object but you can do both within the same collection. Of, if you are a volunteer that strongly prefers one style of preservation over the other, you can affiliate with groups that share your values and not the other kind. But in my mind there is an obvious good case for both kinds of preservation, and we should be happy to let a thousand flowers bloom.Same with justification. Wanting to see cool things run is a fine justification, so is preserving priceless things for future scholars. They're not mutually exclusive in my mind. And its perfectly possible for the motives of workers to be different from one another and different again from the justification of institutions as a whole, yet still have everyone working toward agreed-upon productive ends. So the guys in the shop can just like to work with cool machinery, the gal on track crew can be into outdoor execise and not care a hoot about operation, and the library volunteer can love academic history and rivet counting and never care to pick up an alemite gun. It's all good.

Bravo! Well said sir.