Oh yes! At least according to the actual practice of museums with carbarns.

The poster child for what you're talking about is ASL 100. Seashore acquired it in 1949. It sat around how long? Well over 40 years, waiting its turn in a shop not yet built. PAID OFF: http://www.trolleymuseum.org/exhibits/ASL100.php ... Or take Sacramento Northern 1005, arrived at WRM in 1963 with its back broken. http://people.virginia.edu/~ggg9y/holman.html and now it's tip-top. Illinois Railway Museum's GG1 waited 20 years for some paint. St. Louis MOT is now starting in on the Black Diamond. viewtopic.php?f=1&t=32614 Or how about Mid-Continent's fish car. Sure, a lot of cars come to a museum and are immediately restored - but those cars usually sat somewhere else for a long while first.

These are all flagship projects -- but the same basic issue applies to those less grand.

What I highlighted in purple leads to the danger of the opposite extreme: you don't collect what you can't restore today -- and as a result, you collect nothing at all. Or even worse, you snub relevant equipment for irrelevant equipment. That's wrong because a healthy and functional museum always grows its capabilities over time. Notice that the organizations with carbarns built them BEFORE they built their shop, got their wheel lathe or car jacks, before they ran Thomas or had million dollar budgets. They stored things they knew they couldn't repair. They didn't have the facilities. But their master plan called for getting the facilities, so they saw good reason to wait.

Is this healthy and normal? Normal for sure, least among museums with barns. These aren't exceptions. Here's the takeaway: in all these cases, the decay was stopped long before, by getting the cars indoors. And then, when the cars were done, they live indoors so they stay restored!!! Without that, projects like that wouldn't gather much support. You notice you don't see a lot of projects like that at museums without carbarns, but virtually every museum with a carbarn has a "jewel in the crown" type project.

Healthy? While it can be demoralizing to have a carbarn full of projects (tell me about it), it's nothing on having a yard full of them.