For 2011, let's do everything we can to retire this platitude:

"The public doesn't care about..."


Make them.


Enlighten them.


Why not?

A self-fulfilling prophecy works both ways. We are taking for granted the presumed lack of interest or capacity for knowledge the public has for what we do.

We lament the generation gap, the lack of interest in technical/industrial history, the ignorance of the general public, but don't we have some responsibility here? Are we just like middle school children bemoaning the inattentiveness of our students?

No more excuses.

If the public doesn't care, just what are you doing about it?

(A previous related topic: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=29925)

KL

My grand dad was a railroader who was born in 1899. When he started railroading there were hand fired non superheated engines in general use. He saw more modern steam power come & then diesels take over. He also started life in a farm house with no running water, inside toilet & kerosene lights. This same man lived to see a man walk on the moon & atomic bombs dropped. Today we really don't have things to compare with that.
The schools these days have no Machine shop or foundry classes for young people to understand how a locomotive is built. I guess our job becomes that much more important to teach the public about railroads in general. Another thing is that railroads used to have many more employees & that affected what people thought about. Many towns were "Railroad Towns" so people knew about trains.
Times change .
DBH

the recent reactivation or non activation of the Notre Dame line was highly newsified and publiscised, there seemed to be a lot of negatism towards the railroad line.

The idea was very good in my opinion, convert the line to electric haul coal to the university by that and transport Notre Dame football fans right onto the campus using the Orange cars and set up a museum in the former industrial are the South Shore switched. Politics shunned this one away, but the rail line is legally technically still intact.

Your comment about our fault isnt really our fault but we all here do something to promote the cause.
If I find the link I'll show the article how the government had caused a negatism towards railroads.

Freeways built by the government, the 1939 worlds fair showed off whats to come.

Its like a discausing of what built this country with the first transcontinental railroad.

A few eastern states have signed a declaration about improving historical education about the railways served in those states. Norfolk Southern restarting their steam excursions may be a sign of that cooperation towards that so that is good news on that front.

Each of the museums repesented here do their part for railroad education but it does not help when you hear economics can cause some state museums to falter or close.

If you have a museum you can promote it using the media for free using public announcments, TV's/radio stations always do/have this, just inform them of your public announcement and they put it up, well, it might be in the middle of the night, or specified times, but it will get there.

One of the most frustrating things for the public is that when you do succeed in getting them into a railroad museum, in far too many cases they find items on exhibit that have no clear explanation and seem to require osmosis and sunlight to facilitate the learning process. It is no fun having to search around the place for a human being to provide some sort of explanation of unfamiliar machinery, it takes your paid admission visit right to the class of service you get in a Staples or Office Max while you are waiting an half hour in the back of the store for somebody to get free and provide you some details on the computer or printer you are looking to buy. I had that experience last week and got to try out every office chair in the store before anybody showed up. Customer service just isn't a big thing in the US any more.

The simplest and most effective remedy is to locally produce some good quality, readily understandable interpretive tools (ie: things for people to read) that can be displayed with the equipment. I have been in a few museums the last couple years that had some very interesting displays done in the 1940s and 1950s which are still quite pertinent and would have benefitted greatly from better interpretive devices, if the staff could just wipe off the half inch of dust and cobwebs to make a clean place to locate them.

It really is worthwhile to make a "sweep" of your museum once a year accompanied by someone who is not familiar with railroads or their equipment, to get their comments on where improvements should be made and to identify information materials that are faded or damaged and need to be replaced. Nobody is impressed by mildew covered placards and information displays that are falling apart.

PC

It also helps if your docents for school tours, etc. know what they're showing. We had a less than great experience with that twice, once at a railroad museum which will remain nameless. Our then seven-year-old looked uncomfortable until the docents got around the corner, came over to me and said "Mom, that wasn't right, was it? Shouldn't someone tell her?" I didn't know what to do. In both cases, the mistake was large and obvious enough that it would jump out at an ordinarily educated person without special knowledge of the subject.

When the tours are self-guided, I agree: signs are critical. They get damaged, they fade, and sometimes the information on them goes out of date. A well-done printed paper or cardstock sign with current information beats a battered metal sign or one with outdated information.

Another thing that bothers me now and then: if a museum's website "current events" page brings up the schedule for 2009, people may think it's closed ot that nothing is going on. How hard it is to keep current depends on the website, but it's worth taking a look.

A lot of museums have pamphlet racks out front with folders from other local attractions. Every once in a while, when it's a slow day or what may be, if one of the volunteers could look at the rack and make sure everything there is still open, it might help. I just did this a couple of weeks ago at my volunteer gig (not RR-related)--we had some outdated flyers mixed in with the new ones.

Finally, one of our favorite museums has a bunch of broken or missing exhibits. We know why they're like that, but the general public doesn't. It doesn't hurt to have a plan for an extra exhibit that could be put out when something else fails/has to go back to its owner unexpectedly/has to be removed for some reason. Having something ready to go, even if you don't think it's all that fascinating, beats a bare spot or an Out of Order sign left there for extended periods. This is another thing volunteers can do if there's a day without many visitors or when extra people show up.

The public's apathy to Railroads is not just "our fault" although collectively it is--because it's not just railroads, it's all manufacturing that the public has apathy, and even hatred towards. I blame this on my generation--the Age of Aquarius, where we were taught that the Military Industrial Complex was BAD--and therefor all Industrial activity was bad. This is leading us quickly into third world territory. How this works when a "first world" country becomes a third world country, I dunno, because many of remember when we were great, unlike third world countries where the citizens have nothing to compare their squalor too.
As to museum interpretation, yes, it is critical to a good museum experience. Training Docents can be oftentimes frustrating as each hears what is said differently, and each one's imagination creates their own "story" of what happened.
Signage is very important, but creating the signs takes work, sometimes the time is just not there to do it. One of "my" museums was opened in 1932. I find signs stating, "this XXX is 100 years old" Problem is, when was that sign made-1932, 1942, 1952, 1962??? So I have to figure out when the donation was made (the records are not the best) and figure out when the sign was probably made so the new sign can say "xx was made circa 1850" (circa because often I can't nail it down to the exact year, or even decade!). And as we get farther away from common usage of an item, more explanation is needed. How many folks iron their clothes nowadays? How many young people even own an iron?? What's that big plastic disk with a hole in it for (phonograph record)? Any of us feeling ancient now?? :)

Indeed we have squandered our industrial base and the "value added" jobs that industry creates in favor of a "service" economy that we are indoctrinated to think of as being clean and wonderful and creating no pollution, when in fact the goods are being made elsewhere in the world in conditions far worse than manufacturing in the US ever produced. The pollution of the air and the water "over there" does not make us cleaner, these are global resources and eventually it catches up with you.(And yes, I had the practical on-site experience of seeing the working conditions and the pollution in those "new" industrial powers quite extensively during the last 40 years to allow me to make that observation.)

In the city where I grew up there are 150 abandoned mills, some of them now storage and distribution warehouses for goods made in China. Soon there can be a museum of America's Lost Industrial Age if we can find any machinery left to include in the displays.

A while back the City of New Bedford, Massachusetts, once the home of hundreds of textile mills, had some discussion about whether to set up a textile museum like the one in Lowell, Mass. Then it was discovered that there was not one complete set of cotton textile processing machinery left in the entire city, out of thousands that once existed there.

A friend from school used to specialize in scuba diving in industrial drains, and taking samples that could be used in lawsuits against the industrys. Now there are no big industries left to sue, they are all gone from his city, every one.

PC