Re: "Procedural" Challenges

Thanks, John -

You and a couple of others - Festus, in particular -
have summed up the situation extremely well.

Preservation is an activity - it requires expending energy to overcome entropy -
otherwise everything will slowly decay into chaos if left to its own devices.

Without clear, WRITTEN guidelines (including diagrams and photographs) - passing the knowledge down from generation to generation - history will be lost. If a D&RGW shop foreman from the sixties passed 90% of his knowledge to a C&TS foreman in the seventies, and he in turn passed 90% of the knowledge to a foreman in the eighties, etc., etc., by the time we get to the twenty-teens we'll be down to less than 60% of the knowledge we once had, and 90% is a VERY optimistic number - especially when the focus is more on keeping the engines running than maintaining exact historical accuracy. Passing 85% of the knowledge each decade for five decades leads to less than 45% of the original information being available after just 50 years. Of course this applies to the entire C&TS, not just the locomotives.

High-level preservation and interpretation plans are sorely needed, and the sooner the better, so that detailed guidelines can be developed for day-to-day activities. Hopefully this can be done in a way that both preserves history and attracts tourists - the two are NOT mutually exclusive.

- Russ

p.s. I'm leaving for Chama in about an hour, and will be off-line for a couple of weeks.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/23/2008 11:02PM by Russo Loco.