Is a railroad/railway museum supposed to be comprised of volunteers (a hobby) or paid professionals (a business)?

All museums --and I mean all of them, not just railroad museums-- were started out by "volunteers", hobbies, for the simple reason that these people were interested and took the initiative without being paid to do so. "Professionals", i.e. those who are paid to work at museology, came later. I use "professional" in the sense of being given fiscal remuneration for labor in and/or on behalf of a museum, not as an adjective of skill, intellectual dedication, maturity, or those sorts of things. The difference between the two usages is quite frequently muddled together in these forums.

The other thing all technologically oriented museums are up against is a 3,000 year old prejudice of the Liberal Arts, the Septivium: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy (which we call "astrology" today), music, and geometry. All of these fields were worthy of the free men of Athens, hence the term "liberal" arts. Mixed into this are also the Muses of Greek mythology, the inspirers of mythology, poetry, and literature, from which comes our word "museum".

All things technological were the province of slave labor: chariot building (car building), road construction (track building), millwrights (machinists), and so on. In other words, today's "tradesmen's work", not worthy of consideration by the free men of Athens, who the well-to-do of the West have identified with since at least the Renaissance. As early as the 1880s, William Sellers, mechanical genius of the late 19th century, decried this prejudice which places technology "second-rate". Thus, the American Association of Museums refers to railway museums as "dish and plate museums". Both IRM and the little two-trolley operation up the street are lumped together under this category. They are second, if not third, rate when compared to institutions like the Guggenheim and Getty Museums.

The "people's" railroad museum movement began on the eve of WWII when a group of interested volunteers purchased Biddeford & Saco 31 and established the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport ME. By "people's" I refer to the involvement of interested amateurs, not rich patrons like Henry Ford at Dearborn. What a "people's museum of technology" represents is the common, ordinary people realizing, consciously or otherwise, the immense influence that technology has had on everyone's standard of living in the Western world. It has precedent in the revival of interest by the upper classes in the classical world during the Renaissance. Nevertheless, these upper class types were volunteers and went around the world collecting things willy-nilly, a mentality which lasted as late as WWII.

What is the difference between the Elgin Marbles residing in the British Museum in London and a C&LE red @#$%& being in a trolley museum in California? According to a great many of the posts in this thread, that California museum should trade/give the C&LE car to IRM. This would, of course, go against the wishes of the person who bought the car from the Crandic, and who showed up one day out of the blue and offered it to that west coast museum. The Greeks have been trying to get the Elgin Marbles back for the Parthenon for about 100 years, but the British Museum hasn't budged. What is the correct answer for either of these cases? You can read discussions of the Elgin Marble situation in the media, substitute "C&LE red @#$%&" for "Elgin Marble", and there are no differences from arguments in the posts on this thread.

In both cases ("legitimate" museums vs "dish and plate" museums) it all comes down to the interest and dedication of those involved, balanced against that all to human proclivity for politics. And that is a topic of discussion for another thread (besides, I'm getting tired of all this typing).