Oh my. I check in only every month or so these days and look at the interesting threads that pop up!

A few thoughts as RyPN's third staff member after Hume Kading and Bob Yarger, and member of the original Board of Directors.

Most of the history posted above is on target, but there are a few gaps. To summarize very quickly:

1. RyPN started as an unincorporated web site with Bob as Editor and Hume as Publisher. Hume was the moving force. I joined in as Associate Editor.
2. Several years later, in late 2003, Hume incorporated RyPN in Texas and obtained a 501(c)3 determination. The BOD was Hume, Bob and myself. I was treasurer.
3. Bob stepped down from the Board and from any involvement in RyPN around 2005. Why? He was burned out, especially by the complaints about his photo postings on the Interchange.
4. Hume and I stepped down from the BOD at the end of 2006, and wrapped up our formal involvement with the site. Why? We were both burned out. Hume was especially disappointed in our inability to attract articles--the magazine side of the site, not the Interchange, was his special focus. I had already stepped back from doing any work on content, and was by then also burned out moderating the Interchange.
5. 2007 opened with the corporation and site handed over to fresh people, with Hume, Bob and I all out of the picture.
6. In April 2007 an Interchange member threatened to sue the BOD. The BOD had no D&O insurance. Two out of three members resigned as they were unable personally to defend a lawsuit.
7. Here my personal memory and involvement ends. I understand there were several attempts to reconstitute the Board of Directors, all of which eventually petered out. I forwarded the Treasury funds and books to the next Treasurer, and I have no idea what became of them after that.

If you want to restart RyPN on this domain, I would say work out the idea with David Collison, who has kept the site and domain alive. If he agrees, go ahead and start from scratch with a new corporation. The old one is surely defunct by now.

But I'll be really frank with you all. Rob Davis put his finger on it--RyPN never at any time suffered from a shortage of people willing to tell us what to do. It suffered chronically from a shortage of people willing and able actually to do: to write good copy, to edit professionally, and to handle the mechanics of posting and site maintenance.

Until someone can come up with a staffing model that does not involve volunteers who will inevitably burn out doing what is a fairly thankless job under fairly constant criticism, all the good "what RyPN should do" ideas are kinda the same as "once we rebuild our NYC Hudson, where should we run it?".

First, build your Hudson.

This discussion prompted me to contact the officers of several historical groups as well as the former editors and current editors of several magazines. Just for general information, the consensus was that fewer than 1 in 50 members in most organizations actually produces material for publication, a group with 1000 members is indeed fortunate if it has 20 who are regular contributors.

But within the population of writers there is another problem, only a portion of authors produce "publication ready" packages for the editor, many produce "article kits" that have some of the ingredients of an article but require the editor to do a search for additional material to fill out the story. And that is one source of additional work and frustration for the editor, he is forced to become a subject expert on each individual topic submitted, and learn about it in order to seek material and write captions. For a volunteer working part time while holding down a full time job, that can be overwhelming.

And unfortunately when discussions and articles are mixed on the internet, the authors end up having complaints and criticism thrown at them when they try to participate in the discussion. They don't have to put up with that for something they are doing as volunteers and pretty soon they quit writing for the organization altogether and/or vote with their articles by sending them somewhere else for publication.

PC

Dead on correct in my experience.

The need to submit as complete an article package as possible was something repeatedly emphasized to me by Jim Boyd.

And it is very worthwhile advice, because if you plug all the gaps, caption all the photos, and maybe suggest a layout, your article gets right to the top of the stack when they are short on time and need to complete an issue.

PC

Erik, truer words were never spoken. I liked your comment so much I felt the need to bold it and make it red.

My experience with placing information on the internet is mostly confined to www.steamlocomotive.info. I still listen to people's suggestions (the non-obscene, non-anatomically impossible ones), but rarely try to implement them. I'm very lucky to have three editors who care a lot about the site and continually try to update the database to make it more accurate.

I do what I can to help the Interchange along, but frankly cringe at the thought of having anything to do with the articles/briefs thing.

Doug

I submitted a few articles here myself, along with articles to the Bulletin of the International Stationary Steam Engine Society and my own Steam Lizards Group on Yahoo.

I used to be like Bob Yarger, and scrounged the web for pictures of surviving steam pumps to share my Steam Lizards Group. But I noticed that nearly every time I posted something that I spent quite a bit of time researching, not only did not get any "atta boys"; but someone would leave the group instead. Someone at my job also tried (and didn't succeed) to get me fired, in part by claiming I spent too much time on the web. That caused me to drop out of steam scene for several years.



And I think that will always be a cronic problem with L&RP/RYPN. We are just not a very big community to start with. Divide it by 50, and it gets even smaller. Divide it even smaller into those who can bring an article to completion; and you are down to a handfull of individuals. I don't think Version 2.0 will do any better.

And you will also be fighting volunteer burnout among those handfull of individuals. It is not limited to railway preservation; I have seen it in church groups and the Microsoft Flight Simulator community as well. The fact is; most of us do this for fun, or because we enjoy it. When it stops becoming fun and more like a second, unpaid job is when you have to decide is it really worth taking time away from family and othe priorities. The nit picking by some of the 950 who don't contribute doesn't help.

There's a slight irony in timing on my computer screen.

At the same time on the same day that I am hearing "names" whom I respect lamenting the relatively thankless job of volunteer editing, writing, and production that we go through with rail publications......

... on the Yahoo Group of another locomotive group in the U.K. (basically, the combined efforts of four groups/individuals in one e-mail group), we are discussing one particularly obnoxious, er, "yahoo" who, in order:
1) took films, videos, audio tapes, and whatnot of these locomotives in service, in preservation, and back on main line charters over the course of at least 25 years;
2) finally got a computer and started transferring some of these to digital and started posting them on YouTube en masse;
3) became angered that his numerous video postings didn't receive fawning adulation in the YouTube comments (as I am to understand it, he received no comments whatsoever);
4) proceeded to remove all the videos in question and post scathing derogatory comments about the fans of this loco class in numerous forums, and then offered up for sale on eBay his handsome, polished, full-sized replicas of the one loco's builder's plate and nameplate, purportedly spare replicas made for the one loco and later offered up in a charity raffle which he won;
5) yanked the replicas from eBay after one day after no bids were received (note that he didn't publicise the auctions);
6) posted a noisy, chaotic YouTube video of him smashing and cutting up the plates into pieces for the scrap bin;
7) posted numerous threat-laden, violence-pledging e-mails to one private loco owner and the loco-owning groups.

Suffice it to say that the police and mental health officials have been notified.


So, even though I know the two are non-related, you'll forgive me if, for the moment, I look askance at anyone lamenting a "lack of appreciation" for their publication efforts in the rail field............ >;-)

It's usually active nagging, not passive lack of appreciation, that accelerates burnout. In my case it was a simple tradeoff--the moment RyPN became consistently, predictably less rewarding than spending time with my family or working at the museum or enjoying one of my other interests, it was time to phase it out.

This may rate a separate thread:

Quick question about, for lack of a better term, a "mission statement" for RyPN/L&RP online/print:

Should this future effort, whatever form it takes, be restricted to discussion of stuff actually preserved today, or anything of a historical railroad nature?

We can be extremely liberal with the standards, but at some point the line has to be drawn.

Let's take a hypothetical example: the Maryland & Pennsylvania Railroad. A successor company still exists, running over some of the surviving trackage. More surviving trackage is in the hands of a preservation society. Some right of way and structures are preserved, and more is possible in the future.

Would we allow an article on the Ma & Pa of old, including photos of equipment and trackage that no longer exists? Would we stay focused only on the current survivors and preservation efforts? What about the "Then & Now" photos popular in the Society's magazine?

One of the areas of friction in this forum in the past was repeated postings of "neat" old/vintage photos of currently preserved equipment, and then later stuff that wasn't even preserved. The former photos have their place, particularly in the context of one of those articles mentioned earlier; the latter are history but not "preservation" and is perhaps more appropriate in Classic Trains, the R&LHS or NRHS magazines, or the like. (Or, as proposed here for Bob Yarger's photo links, a separate forum just for old photo links/postings.)

In theory, literally anything old that still exists can be labeled "preservation," from that old VW Beetle down the block from me that's rusting out and falling apart to the old newspaper I find stuffed in the rafters as insulation. Should we refine the definition slightly?

And I can tell you what makes the effort all worthwhile....

You are waiting on "hold" to talk to a guy you used to work with who is now the project manager at a large engineering firm. All of a sudden the line picks up and it is a lady whose voice you do not recognize. She says....

"I saw you were on the line waiting, and I just had to talk to you. I recognized your name right away, you wrote a wonderful article about my Grandfather and the locomotives he designed".

And you find out you are speaking to the Granddaughter of one of the best known locomotive designers of all time....

It doesn't get any better than that.

PC

ADMIV is extremely liberal in his use of the pronoun "we" in his comments about RyPN. Until David Collison tells me otherwise, there ain't no "we" involving ADMIV, with respect to RyPN.

As a matter of information:
Current valid entities recognized by the IRS as having 501c3 status are listed on the IRS website. The IRS recently purged quite a few if they had not filed any tax returns for a number of years.

Not nit-picking, just want to be clear...Bob's "section" should be part of RyPN, and not on Yahoo.

Stephen

From a strictly legal sense, absolutely.

From the standpoint of participation and utility insofar as making RyPN a resource worth visiting..... if you specifically exclude people who don't physically "own" a membership stake and aren't offered same through some channel or another, then it's a chat room with two or three people involved, and to heck with everyone else.

You can easily make that happen, y'know. Go ahead.

Make my Day!

Mike Tillger