Cycling; Avoiding the Preservation Jam

The teams of people working on every rail preservation project I’ve been involved with appear to go through emotional cycles. No not pushbikes, but a repeated cycle of;
1. enthusiasm for hard work,
2. bask in the glory of attainment,
3. mild antipathy,
4. then lethargy and disinterest.
The cycle restarts when something or someone new comes along.
Sometimes the cycle is short, say a month, but more frequently the period is a year or two.
It is perfectly possible for some projects to get stuck in one part of the cycle, particularly the later two stages. Many of the once running preserved locos that now languish in the sidings of the UK’s private railways are testament to that.
Why does it happen?
I suggest that in reality it is just human nature at work: When there is a target to achieve, everyone involved works enthusiastically to attain it. Once achieved, everyone revels in the glory. Then we take it for granted, and finally we start to get bored with it.
I’ve heard this basic tale in different guises from four different groups/owners in the last month alone. The trick to keep the team together and making progress appears to be to find the next exciting (and achievable) target before lethargy takes too strong a hold and it becomes difficult to break.
The new challenge can be as simple as a new livery variation, obtaining and fitting headcode blinds (or plating them over, and adding market lights), or more complex issues like reinstating the train heat boiler, or even mainline running.
However, just when you have reliably achieved your ambition, whatever it is, even the holy grail of mainline operation, the next part of the cycle will start, and you will need to quickly think of something else to keep the volunteers motivated.
One trick I know used by the management of some owning groups is to have several targets running simultaneously, each with different timescales to attainment and diverse enough in content to stimulate different sub-sets of the volunteer force. This way there is a wider spread of focus and as one team starts on a negative path another on a positive upswing can re-fire their flagging enthusiasm.
Interesting, the smaller the group of people making up the team the worse the down swings appear to be. Larger groups seem to be able to keep focused for longer and are better able to continue making progress when a single (perhaps key) member of the team needs time away from the railway.
In my opinion the upshot of this is that diesel traction preservation is best undertaken by larger groups of enthusiasts as smaller groups more readily get into stagnation.