Re: Help wanted in Preserving the Knowledge to Preserve!

Greg, We're not trying to boil the ocean here. In any restoration project, the majority of your work is fairly mundane. Cutting and fitting boards, painting, doing the simple assembly. We don't need to document that. But in some projects, there are certain activities, like installing a coupler, applying roofing materials, or wiring up headlights from a stationary source. These items are tasks that the typical restoration volunteer won't have experience with. A lot of times even simple hints go a long way to prevent massive frustration.

Over the years, I've worked with some pretty smart people on these projects; those who have years of working in the railroad industry. Most of the time they are quick with a workable solution. But sometimes even they are stumped. Luckily the good ones maintain a network of other experts who might have encountered the same situation before. Essentially that's the intent of this, providing resources to help things move forward. We want to be able to expand the pool of volunteers for the future, and unfortunately, younger generations are not being exposed to skills that are needed to maintain these types of artifacts.

When we're at a work session, we have a limit and set time to get things done. The worst thing you can do to a new volunteer is to have them sit around while somebody figures out what to do. Or I guess even worse, start down a path and 2 days later realize you've been wasting their time. That's the best way to ensure they'll never come back. We want to provide the team with some ideas upfront about how things are going to proceed. There will always be room for new ideas and improvements. But we want to be able to present what's been done before.

Valuable manhours not available for doing the real work? Maybe. There are railroad enthusiasts out there that would enjoy the opportunity to participate in restoration projects, but often they are scared of not being productive. Maybe they are younger and feel inexperienced, maybe they are older and no longer want to crawl on their stomach underneath cars. In 2019 we started this initiative and had some good results. Improvements this year we'll try is to look ahead and plan to cover certain tasks. In general, we'll want that volunteer doing this to feel like their part of the team, and be able to take initiative when they feel a particular set of work would be important to record.

Bill Kepner



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/10/2021 01:16PM by drgw0579.