Re: Help wanted in Preserving the Knowledge to Preserve!

For those of you who are FCTS members, the next Dispatch will have an advertisement for a subcommittee to address exactly those sorts of things. We want to put some standard processes in place to record a lot of that information and decisions made early on in the restoration process. There is a lot of research performed but because it isn't always consistent or well known, it is easy for outsiders to dismiss the work as substandard or incompetent. So establishing some rigor and showing that the research is as competent as any other railroad museum will reduce the amount of second-guessing and nitpicking that sometimes occurs.

Restoring a piece of equipment to be used on a 64-mile long operating mountain railroad is going to have different needs than if it would only be used sparingly at a typical railroad museum. For instance, when we embarked on the 0579 project in 1997, the CMO at the time wanted us to add steel reinforcement in the frame of the short caboose. The reasoning is that the railroad did not want to mix wood-framed and steel-framed cars. You can understand the reason why; at the time it was quite common for a charter caboose to be on the regular train, and it would be restricted to the rear. But if I suggested the same sort of fix to any museum curator in a different organization, they'd politely tell me "hell no!" Being able to record those types of decisions will help explain the reasoning when the question comes up many years later (and perhaps the after original decision-makers were no longer alive).

The information we want to collect this summer at the work sessions will make future restoration work more efficient. If my granddaughter agrees to lead a restoration project 50 years from now, I want to make sure she has access to the collective restoration information we have learned over the previous 100 years, like how to create a water-tight caboose roof.

Bill Kepner



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/09/2021 06:29AM by drgw0579.