Thru my own adventures and many of my friends in this industry,I have an Idea. After asking most of my friends opinios I now ask you all`s.
I perpose a website made up to help those of us in the rail-tourist/preservation industry,to help use a well of help I think yet untapped.
For those railroads or rail oriented entity that have a big event up coming up,weather it be a labor intensive restoration or celibration. You can enter this info to a website and have access to regesterd members whose abilities will be noted.
If the person and event in question can come together on the same day both win.
Now there is alot more to this than I can put into the space I have. I`m looking for feed back and will give as many answers as possible (this is a work in progress) with any luck if it seems like it will work I`ll take it to some of the tourist railroads in Nov.
I got this idea from my own travels in helping where I could staying close by in my R/V and motels. I have travled over 600 miles to help those in the Steam Locomotive buisness,my friends more than that, these are well quilified people who just want to help keep the industry going. Let me know what you think,I`ll keep working til the masses show me it wont work.
Thanks

Maybe starting a volunteer to opportunity matching service for the rail preservation and tourist field is something the ARM and/or TRAIN can tackle. Generically speaking, there are already several sites for volunteer matching, volunteermatch.org being one example.

I am a fried of dilon's, and am working with him on this. I went to volunteermatch.org. I agree that they are already doing what we are proposing, but our angle is from one of a site that would be just for volunteers in railroad preservation. Volunteermatch.org looked like it worked with organizations from many different fields. Do you of any other site that we could possibly look at? Thank you very much for your interst.

Dillon,

Welcome to RYPN. This is the place where people involved in many aspects of rail preservation talk shop. Perhaps you and your friend could introduce yourselves here. While it is permitted to remain anonymous, and some members do for good reason, posts get better response when we have a little background on a new member.

My name is Chris, and I have been a volunteer with the NC Transportation Museum for 10 years. I volunteer on both the Interpretive side interacting with the general public, and on the Rail Operations side helping with various restoration projects. I met Dillon who was already a volunteer at the museum when I started in 2001. Dillon approached me with this idea several weeks ago, and I think it is a wonderful idea. We both see this as an opportunity for railroad museums, and tourist railroads, to share skilled personnel to help get projects done, and to possibly help with major events where an organization's current volunteer base may be stretched to the limit. We are currently gathering input from folks to gauge this idea's interest and feasibility. We look forward to, and appreciate, any input you may have. Thank you.

Thank you for reading so far,as sujested I will introduce myself.
My name is Ken Dillon I am a member of the North Carolina Trans Museum. I have been there for around 13 years I think,and have been involved with the management of the steam dept for a good part of that.
I plan to contact TVRM about the TRAIN/ARM this Nov. if this stirs enough interest I`m working on by laws and etc. just want to see if anyone else is interested.

So far the only organization I have seen do anything like this on a national basis is the NMRA (National Model Railroad Association), they keep a pretty comprehensive listing of members and non-members who are clinic and technical program presenters, and they request assistance in advance of their national conventions. I understand this has primarily been an effort of their programs chairman with some assistance from others, but it has been very well done and quite effective.

I have frankly been surprised that in all their years of operation the NRHS and RLHS have not kept similar lists of volunteers and program presenters, but chapter program chairmen tell me they often have to manually search the meeting notices of other chapters to find out what they are doing and what programs they are showing.

PC