To avoid further threadjack in the UP thread:

I think we agree that the time to gather steam knowledge is Now. If you were to write a manual for anyone contemplating a restoration, what would you put in Chapter One?

I'd think most people interested would already have Old 97 in mind, so should the first chapter be dedicated to selecting the restoration candidate? My thinking is that people might be so kennel-blind that any hint of "no, seriously, you're going to drive yourselves nuts trying to fix that and you don't have a tenth of the money you need" might send them away, to be taken in by that guy who says he knows how to get her right back in service for a buck ninety-eight. A sober recitation of what should be in place before the project starts might discourage some of the potentially dangerous or destructive ones. Flow charts might be a good way to present the range of choices.

"What if there's no time?" might cover how to get a relic out of a bad situation right freakin' now and what to do with it once it's on safe property. It might also cover a checklist of what needs to be gathered from the emergency removal site, to avoid accidents like leaving the tender behind because "we didn't know it needed that coal car thing." This would help when a hostile, aggressive city government decides to clean house and preservationists have to beg for a week, or even a day, for a rescue. (Saw it happen three times now, at the drop of a hat: "We hired a scrapper to cut ithat old caboose up this week'" "No, we don't need volunteers, that exhibit room is going to be the new snack bar" and "I know he worked on it for a year and we said it would be permanent, but it's been here six months so we're trashing it.") There can be other reasons for emergency rescues--family "helping" someone they perceive as disabled comes to mind--but often it's a local government issue. "How to get an injunction" might be useful, since in at least one case the threatened artifact didn't belong to the town bent on getting rid of it.

How to find and evaluate a mover should be there. What about dealing with state and federal regulations during a move, temporary storage, winter issues if it's an emergency and the facility isn't ready, securing the artifact against copper theft and other vandalism...

And that's just Chapter One...and not all of it. What say you all?

Good idea, Becky. Sounds like you will be writing "The History of Railway Preservation in North America, 1955-2015". How many volumes? (LOL)

Seriously, a darn good idea, and there have been written pieces to glean from: Dave Lathrop's RyPN articles about the work on the Gainesville Midland 2-10-0 in a Georgia town park, and J David's classic pamphlet about the care and restoration of park engines.

Howard P.

There are people who know a whole lot more about it than I do. I'm not even thinking of a history; I'm thinking of you all collecting, sifting and coming up with a how-to manual so that future groups aren't stuck with reinventing the wheel, or at least reinventing how to turn it. All I can do is help collect and organize the parts.

Overactive imagination time, a first paragraph:

"She's been sitting in the park since 1958. Generations of kids have climbed into her cab, pretended to ring her bell and blow her whistle, and taken her on millions of miles of adventures. Now the city wants her gone because she's a hazard, or they want to build a picnic shelter, or somebody wants to buy the land.
Can you save her? First of all, should you try? We can help..."

It might be good to aim some of it at preservationists who don't normally deal with big machinery, as well.

I would suggest that the biggest fault many of us have in this field is unrealistic expectations of imposition upon others. It's always easy to tell someone else what to do with someone else's money and things.

I would propose a mandatory overview of the "big picture," imposing the fact that saving the artifact is just the beginning. Compare and contrast the pros and cons of civic ownership versus private group ownership versus private individual ownership. There are good and bad examples to be had with all of these. Who gets the responsibility of the pole shed roof, or the next paint job(s)?

Another aspect of this is realistic expectations of costs versus the political processes of asking donations. It's prudent to, for example, go into a project with the presumption that the station, moving costs, track, etc. will cost $XXXX, BUT *if* you play your cards right, you *might* be able to get services or materials at cost or donated outright, or find a way to get expenses budgeted into another year's budget if you can stall.
If you go into a heavy mover's office with the assumption that they'll donate the move just because you once saw a train calendar on an office wall there, you're likely to be tossed out on your kiester. If, on the other hand, you go in meekly, asking for all the possible options, including deferred payment plans, and look at them with the classic big, sad kitten eyes, you may get a much more amenable approach.

Interesting idea.... technique is easy; picking the right technique for a specific situation and finding ways to pay, that's hard.

There's a point in every rescue or restoration when you have to stop being railfans and start being businesspeople. You need influential people who may not care about trains but love history, or have family who worked on the railroad to memorialize to be your BOD, and they need to raise money and not try to manage technical work. You need genuine craftspeople who may be railfans or not to do the work in the right ways under the existing circumstances, not operating from an unrealistic or inexperienced perspective based on how they want it to be or think it should be.

You work from aligning your own interest with the added value your project brings to the entire community, which means you have to be able to demonstrate why saving the old 97 and the new purpose / location / program centered around it is valuable and worthy of support - to people who care nothing about trains.

So, the issues are marketing and development primarily. Only when you have that covered is it time to find the right talent and work on the crafts involved.

dave

This is an excellent idea that will require a lot of work by a lot of people to be successful. It should be a living document that can be updated as circumstances evolve. I appreciate Becky starting this thread. I hope it grows with strong legs.

Chapters?

What comes to mind right away are the following:
INTRODUCTION - who should use this and why? What knowledge, skills and abilities will be needed?
CHAPTER ONE - should you even consider becoming responsible for a steam locomotive?
CHAPTER TWO - best practices in becoming responsible for a steam locomotive.
CHAPTER THREE - best practices in moving a non operational locomotive.
CHAPTER FOUR - best practices in a stabilization.
CHAPTER FIVE - best practices in a cosmetic restoration.
CHAPTER SIX - best practices in an operational restoration.
CHAPTER SEVEN - best practices in operating a steam locomotive.
CHAPTER EIGHT - best practices in sustaining an operational steam locomotive.
CHAPTER NINE - best practices for retirement of an operational steam locomotive.

I am sure there are other chapters to be added and perhaps some of these chapters should be deleted. I would not encourage us to try to determine a single best practice for doing something except where warranted by safety, legal restrictions. There are often several ways to do the right things.

Each chapter would likely contain a number of sub headings as this is a rather massive undertaking.

I don't have the right amount of time and effort to devote to this important topic now, but the systems and components of good best practices do deserve codification. That probably includes a 'methodological toolbox' of the different practical approaches to doing (and coordinating) different parts of a given effort. I see no reason why one system of management or motivation needs to apply to all aspects of an organization's effort: some approaches work better in certain areas or fields, and there is little reason to elevate an operational philosophy into a theology as long as the participants don't need to use blind faith to buy into the result...

Note that much of what I'm going to say actually comes before the kind of chapter headings johnsox and Becky were listing. It's good to have a project 'cookbook' of things to do when particular situations or opportunities present themselves. I am more concerned with the setup and organizational planning that goes on to allow responses to be made, and coordinates them into an overall plan that is coherent and not just a set of reactionary, ad hoc, or as-the-spirit-moves actions in sequence. There is a joke about the first law of engineering being 'you have to know the answer before you start'. But that is really no joke in engineering: the 'answer' is something like a bridge that has to stay up, and every step you take presupposes that you are working toward that known result. Defining the known result is the most important initial step to take, and the rest of the chapters indicated follow from that, in my opinion.

I suspect some of the practices from a process like ISO 9004 (which is customized for service industries) can be better adapted to typical 'preservation' organizations than one of the more production/process-oriented frameworks. For example, one aspect of 9004 certification is that every internal process in an organization be documented, and the results tracked according to plan. That's a lot of work to set up, and perhaps some expense if you use someone's 'library' of sample documents as a starting place. But when everything is formalized you can begin to hone the definitions, work out the best ways to present historically-validated practices, note down things in your or your volunteers' knowledge that you might not think to write down otherwise. Even if it turns out you picked the wrong quality metric, or your motivation plan is Dogbert's brown ring of quality, all the formal data remain useful and applicable to new models, or useful in building or honing a PERT or 'project management' plan, which are essential in their own right. (Don't overlook the value of your local chapter of PMI, or similar organization: a member might be willing to work up a full plan for you as one of the two required practical exercises for the CPM certification...)

A great deal of planning need not take a great amount of time -- provided that you have the organization, the tools, and the talent ready to hand, and the motivation present to use them effectively. And once that capability is built, honing it (rather than shuffling the deck chairs, the motivational posters, the furry suits and other BS) becomes something equally amenable to process and quality systems in ways that common-sense experience and 'outside knowledge' of new technologies alike can contribute.

Excellent point! Even if you don't know how to do the task, knowing what it is before you start is the key.

Let's start with a scenario:

Old 97 is a Baldwin ten-wheeler built in 1908, retired to the park in 1958 after a fifty-year career on the daily local between Farmtown and Biggerville. When diesels took over, she was set out on the old siding behind the Farmtown depot, then the switch was removed and the rest of the rail pulled. The depot was torn down in 1965, replaced by the police station, and the pocket park no longer has rail access. There is no cover over the engine, but the Boy Scouts have had an annual clean-up day until recently. The police station is directly across the street, so vandalism has been light and mostly confined to graffiti. Some fifteen years ago, city lawyers convinced the council to board up the cab and chain the door. This means the current teenagers have no emotional attachment to the locomotive, and their parents don't have the memories of their kids leaning out of the cab windows.

Now a small manufacturer has started up in the formerly abandoned Wideco building just past the depot site. They have offered the city a good price for the small park provided they get rid of the engine so the lot can be paved.

I see four alternatives here:

1. Get her out of danger, store her, er, uh, somewhere and work on what to do later
2. Cosmetic restoration
3. Operational restoration
4. Let her go and salvage what you can

Nearly every project starts with #3 as a goal, but they never plan beyond #1, which often results on #4 happening eventually.

A fifty-year-old engine retired at the end of steam is liable to be pretty well whupped, but that won't be apparent to people who love her and have never seen steam run. The Boy and Girl Scouts painted her to keep her nice and shiny, so she has fifty layers of paint stuck over some alarming things. It's also gloss house paint, which is not going to work if she somehow does go back in steam, and the red, white and blue driver spokes and the daisies painted on the pilot may not be historically correct. Now, Mary Frances down at the town's museum and her historian friend Moldy Pages the Third don't know beans about steam, but they want to help. What are we going to tell them?

If this is to be a "living document", meaning easily update-able, then I would strongly suggest adopting the onetime common railroad practice of writing rulebooks - loose leaf, three hole, meant to be put in a three-ring binder as needs and practices change over time. Perhaps making this an "on-demand" e-book might be the way to go. It sounds like the best way to accomplish this publication might be to take a page from something like Linux, make it open source, written and driven by those in the field as a gift to future generations of wanna-be preservationists, so they don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. That means it needs to come up near the top in Google searches under anything resembling "Railroad Preservation" so it can be easily found by those with absolutely no railroad background. There's no real reason that a small group of experts needs to do all of it. There is a need for a small committee to make final editorial decisions to avoid chaos. I think everything being discussed here can take place over the internet, so contributors can live anywhere they have web access.

Internet presence with frequent backups seems like the way to go. Materials and the associated processes are changing so fast that anything in print is apt to be obsolete by the time it's in someone's hands.

As for the 4.9" bolt...oy. There really was a patient who developed steadily worsening anemia in the hospital, even though his routine, elective surgery had gone perfectly. It didn't resolve until someone discovered that Doctor X had ordered hourly blood tests immediatey postop, and no one had thought to cancel those. When they couldn't figure out how he was losing blood from something like a laparoscopic gallbladder deal, Doctor Y was called in and also ordered hourly tests. Two days later, somebody realized they were slowly bleeding him dry. He recovered in only a few extra days.

We probably need two versions..

1) The full version... for the folks on the ground

2) The executive summery... the short form, explaining to remote board of directors and funding agencies... both to show that the is a standard, and that the working group is accountable to it.

Randy

One-page printable summary, perhaps? References to the appropriate governing boards and any approvals we manage to get?

The quest for a single, comprehensive document that would govern the repair/restoration of locomotives in general, will probably be rather impractical.

However, there may be a short cut through the woods.
Please consider:

1. A fair number of the Standard Practices of the builders and the railways currently exist on CD and easily acquired.

2. In order to create a complete, detailed plan of work, the document that is used to develop a quality program for the new construction and/or repair of boilers and pressure vessels can be used (with only slight modification) for this work.
Have supplied the site presenting this document known as NB-57 as follows:

http://www.nationalboard.org/SiteDocume ... 7rev11.pdf

If we review the document, there are a myriad of questions, the answering of which are how an individual organization develops their unique quality program (read restoration/repair procedure). If we go through it asking how each question would apply to the work, it soon becomes apparent that this approach can be applied to any restoration/repair and cover all contingencies.

Now, by using NB-57 along with the Standard Practices we come very close to the end result of Becky's quest.

Just a thought, but give it a test.

Respectfully,
Dave Griner

Creating a manual of best practices is a laudable undertaking. Question is, Will anyone read it? More to the point: Will anyone OBEY the manual or will ego take over?

What I have noticed over many decades of steam railroading operation and preservation is that there are lots of "experts" out there _a few_even know something. Far more THINK they know something or more to the point know EVERYTHING!

Unfortunately, what I have observed over these many years is the many "Humpty Dumpty" steam locomotives. Far too many of them. All in pieces and nobody can put them back together again. Frequently when I was consulted about restoration of a particular steam locomotive regarding its condition and restoration costs I would advise the interested party that they would be $50,000 (now 100,000 plus adjusted for inflation) into it before you would know what you had. In other words, a steam locomotive stored outdoors for decades would need major work and until you got the insulation off the boiler and thoroughly examine it inside and out as well as a whole lot of other things you could not possibly know the cost.

This was proven as recently as the restoration to operation of CPR 2816. Using the best available expertise available examining this engine which had been neglected for decades, a generous figure was arrived at. Even then, once work got underway more things were determined to be in need of replacement to ensure its operation for many thousands of miles. Result, over budget and way late outshop. End result, a very successful restoration that proudly represented its owner and the history of the CPR.


Going back to the beginning many restorations are started with what is available. all too often the available engine is a well-worn engine that had reduced maintenance in its last years. Too small, too big, too anything but right for the task ahead. Lack of indoor shop facilities, lack of money, lack of knowledge etc, etc, etc. The number of good choices have been few and far between. The long term success has often been less than what it ought to have been.

A best practice: Keep a log of your bearings' temperatures, which you measure with an Infrared Thermometer ("Temperature Gun").