An interesting aside I discovered about Facebook sharing of this story:

As the one who does 90% of the posts to the Facebook page of the Baltimore Chapter NRHS, I am able to take a look at what Facebook analytics tells me about the posts.

The average vintage or "news" photo post "reaches" 1,375 of the folks who follow us (we have 3,906 "likes" and almost every single one also "follows" us).

The average post linking to another website or Facebook post "reaches" 919 of our followers.

The two posts we did linking to the 503 mission's GoFundMe page, and encouraging others to go and donate, reached 107 and 34 accounts. The second one was a morning repost of the same post I had done late the previous night, after the first post got less than ten views.

I'd be interested in our social media gurus crunching the numbers behind the scenes. It appears that FB just may have it out for GoFundMe.

Gee, I wonder why.

http://money.cnn.com/2017/03/30/technol ... index.html

I believe this story already has a happy ending. A mainline steam locomotive that was about to be cut up will now not be cut up. The effort that prevented this destruction demonstrated the effective use of social media and crowdfunding in an unprecedented manner in steam preservation. From the number of shares, it appears that not only did Mr. Sobczynski successfully use these tools to convey his message to the preservation world, but also succeeded in reaching some people who may not think about rail preservation on a regular basis (yes, I know, how could this be, right?) or who even may have never thought about rail preservation or the preservation of our industrial heritage their entire lives.

If Mr. Sobczynski is successful in purchasing the locomotive and knocking it out of the park (trucking it out, actually), even better. The article I linked to also included two quotes by the representative of Inland in which he states that the city may be rethinking its approach. As I have mentioned before, there have been some posts and article quotes from members of the local community expressing frustration/dismay that the local government could not keep this artifact, with its ties to the locality, in Port Arthur or at least close by. Mr. Glueck and his colleagues at NESCO faced some local resistance to their plan to get 470 out of the park and back to operation so I'd expect some of the same in Port Arthur.

Finally, as Mr. Sobczynski alludes to in his most recent video, the transfer of title of a machine that required abatement of hazmats to a scrapper is a bit different than such a transfer of title to an individual who intends to return the machine to public operation. There still may be technical, legal, and political issues to iron out, so getting to contract will no doubt take some time. Given the skill Mr. Sobczynski and Mr. Hovey demonstrated in working this situation on the fly and preventing the locomotive from being cut up, they are the best people to have on the task of getting this to the best possible outcome.

I told the reporter I was an NRHS member and was only voicing my personal concerns. I do not stand for the national organization at any level. Reading the full article I don't see anything wrong with my assertions, please state your concerns Dave. I will promptly call the journalist later today to edit the post in response to some of your recent comments. I admit I should not have reached out for the sake of good will but it has already been done.

EDIT: Disregard, I'm not getting myself into this fight.

And I won't go further past this: it's not about whether you were right or wrong - and neither of us was involved to know exactly what went on - but that publicly making them in the media at this still yet unfinished stage, and in the name of a national organization, will not help and may confuse a smooth path to the desired result. Once all is settled and done, a post mortem would be welcome as a means of trying to find a way to proactively work towards preventing such things from happening again - but only after this is finished.

Why were you interviewed at all? You aren't involved. I'm not sure what you thought you were going to add to this. We already have representatives on site and in the interest of not screwing things up it is better for those representatives to handle all media inquiries.

Not only that, but your statement was factually incorrect. You could easily have contacted one of us on the project or watched the update videos to learn the truth.

That's understood; from my perspective along with some of the other donors there was a mutual feeling that we were being scammed and I wanted to touch on that. I'm going to assume the journalist "played with my words" a bit to make a good story, I should of known that. To be honest I doubt this will have any impact on the #503 if anything it will give Inland a reason to be more cautious sharing public information. Regrettably I don't think any of us have seen a campaign quite like this before thus all the suspicion.

I understand. Jason and Nick tried on many platforms to explain the reason for the increase, and it was not due to anything the scrapper did. He actually has been an ally in all of this. Publicly accusing him of greed or wrongdoing, whether intentional or not, can make the success of a project harder to achieve.

One thing that we should all understand is that the news media can be our friend but can as quickly be our worst enemy. Used correctly the media can help build support for a project, but if the wrong message gets out or the wrong word is uttered all of that support can be flushed down the toilet with one article. In those situations it is imperative that we all have a unified voice, and that is assured by only having one spokesperson representing the interests of preservation.

At this point, we have the money in hand and the city govt. is working on providing us a clear title. The most important thing that we can all do at this point is to let things be. Jason and Nick are in daily contact with the city and the scrapper and are on top of things. I know that in this social media world we all expect results in nanoseconds, but right now we are working on a much slower schedule. As Jason says, "At the speed of government".

The media must be dealt with in a very carefully calculated and controlled way. That’s one reason why many organizations have policies that specifically address the discussion and dissemination of information.

Sure hope this has a happy ending.

Ross Rowland

Very true! About 5 years ago, the government agency I work for switched to sending out press releases with the specific information, contacts, etc. for projects. Most of the local papers just print the press release or use it for their article. Rarely are we permitted to take direct calls from the press and everything goes through our Public Information Officer.

It has worked tremendously well in getting the correct information to the public instead of shall we say the "Artistic license" used by some journalists that ended with me getting called up on the carpet numerous times due to misquotes or items that I thought would be off the record.

On a last note let my article serve as a good example of what happens when you don't adequately inform your donor base of what the hell's going on. I hope that in future fundraisers like this I can count on the recipient to give me a straight answer than leave me in the dark. I show my gratitude to these two young men who took up a tremendous challenge but that doesn't mean there couldn't be future improvements as needed.

Cameron

Congratulations to what was a very hastily arranged campaign in getting the money together with a very happy sounding ending on the horizon.

Yet at the same time, they have hundreds of donors that they answer to, not just you. As a collective, donors need to wait a reasonable amount of time for the information to get out, not jump to rash actions if they don't hear back immediately. It took very little time, within the overall timeline, to get the proper information out. People simply didn't wait a reasonable time for the correct information to be released.

I remember the journalist clearly telling me he had been in contact in Jason through Facebook and was told by him personally that he felt there was some sketchy business going on. I bought it and said my opinion. If Jason did truly say that at some point then I'm afraid I don't know what to believe Jim.