I haven't read everything in this thread, but just want to say that as an engineer or designer you are always making case-by-case judgments and decisions. You just can't capture that in single text book. Schools and apprenticeships make you learn how to think about and solve problems. They do not give you a recipe book to solve every particular problem you will ever encounter. At my last employer, the standards group asked me to reduce my design engineer job process down to a short recipe that they could publish as a standard so anyone could do it. They just didn't have a clue what an impossible request that is. So a book on best practices is good, but it is not a substitute for making sound judgments based on professional training and experience.

That's why I want to get explanations. When you tell people to do exactly this in that order, you get a cookbook. Cookbooks are not all that useful even in kitchens. Why something did or didn't work well is the critical information we need to send forward. Yes, you do have to use your judgment, but that judgment comes from experience. What we're trying to do is gather and condense as much of the experience as we can before the last steam-generation people leave us, then use it as a base for further investigation and new techniques based on sound principles.

Glad this discussion is going so well, especially as a young person with much yet left to learn, I figure the more resources (especially rr specific) out there the better. When I was just starting out, learning the basics, the archives in this forum really helped, and bringing the knowledge base together for a publication seems like a great idea.

It seems to me like this biggest decision to make early is which form of publication the project be shooting for. The gathering of resources, anecdotes, technical information, ect. will be the same regardless, but if the end result is meant to be a physical publication, that information will have to be edited and put together for a publisher, verses a Wiki page, which could be put up on the fly as things are prepared.

If the thought is to sort of "group-edit" this project and prepare it for a physical publication, Google Docs: https://www.google.com/docs/about/ might not be a bad choice. As far as putting together a Wiki, my first thought would be approaching RYPN itself to see if it would work as an offshoot of this site. We've got the articles, briefs & editorials, but having this Best Practices Manual in a Wiki format seems like it would be a good addition.

- Chaz Robitaille

The Wiki is made already, but I'm still figuring out how to work it properly. It doesn't help that I'm on limited bandwidth (think cell phone for all your home internet needs) and can't go watch a half-hour video to explain it.

One thing I thought of is that nearly all of the recent restorations by credible groups have been the subject of blogs, so there's a blow by blow record of what happened when (and occasionally what didn't happen when, and why.) Having that information will be a help to future groups trying to come up with a timeline. Not everyone is going to have the resources to pull off a 611 rebuild, but we now know it's certainly possible and that a five-year plan is in no way unrealistic for a small project. When I say "five-year plan" I'm including a serious, concerted fundraising effort, without which nothing else happens.

Thank you for recognising the critical value of real fund raising campaigns. If you have funding, you can hire the talent you need to supervise and lead work your projects with your own people. If you have no money, your potential results won't exceed your ability to find and retain knowledgeable volunteers who will lose patience and burn out and leave if you can't maintain funding to keep up progress, leading to loss of momentum and recreating the wheel as people move in and out. It's a great way to make a 3 year project turn into a 15 year project, and if your first guy replaced the tubes as job one, you're back to square one.

dave