Donald,

Absolutely. That's a carefully calculated risk usually (but not always) made on reams of research. It will be interesting to see what happens with the brands who have made major social statements in the past week or so (Mattel, Levis, Ford and Nike).

Early signs show Nike made a good bet. The panic stock price drop has already 50% recovered and the company is reporting getting $150 million of "free" coverage during the NFL opening week.

Could the Thomas brand be damaged by adding more inclusive characters? I think it is unlikely. If the new shows tank, I would bet it is for the reasons "parktrains" has stated: the content isn't good/doesn't connect.

We'll see. Like I said, these are interesting times.

All the best,

Rob

I am going to go back to the basic point at the start of this thread - the decline in Thomas revenue. In recent years my role in railroad preservation has been as a provider of targeted items for tourist railroad and museum gift shops. In this role I love to talk about revenue and visitation trends.

First thing is that those dealing with HIT/Thomas licensing people are deathly afraid to talk about anything on the topic beyond what they advertise. Only in the most off the record, on deep background I have had good conversations on current Thomas operations.

1) One operation has seen Thomas visitation drop by about 25% over the last two years, but those still coming are buying more merchandise. Good news is that they have kept most of the overall revenue, but they are watching the drop off as at some point there won't be enough high revenue guests left to not cut back. They have also scheduled a wine themed weekend event after the Thomas weekends (they do take a week of limited operation in between to allow for volunteer recovery time). The wine event brings in more than enough revenue to cover the Thomas decline. The wine crowd has been a better fit than a first attempt at a beer/ale event, plus two local wineries have been great partners. They heavily promote the wine event to the families attending Thomas with a discount coupon and they can see a decent number of parents coming back without the kids.

2) Another operation I talk with has a two week long Summer run of Thomas. The people I talk to there know many of the Thomas trains are going out with empty cars. They would like to reduce it to a single week event, but management (this one is a for profit-operation) feels that a) the Thomas revamp will bring new people in and b) HIT will demand a larger cut for the reduced run time which would almost wipe out profits.

3) A final operation actually lost money this year. They have a great experience with paying for The Polar Express, but growth has been marginal. They are going to try and promote a new Fall Harvest/Farmers Market event. If that breaks even and gets good customer feedback they are prepared to not renew Thomas next year.

I am a very part time locomotive engineer at the NH&I RR in New Hope, Pa. We did the DOWT event for 2 consecutive years in the 1990's and learned that at the end of the day the net earnings from the whole thing didn't come close to making it worthwhile.

Between the extreme demands on the staff ( both paid and volunteer), the large investment required in stocking up with " official" Thomas trinkets & trash, the operational "advices" of the HIT people ( some of whom had no idea about real life railroading), and the wear & tear on everyone it just wasn't worth it. Since then Thomas's run on PBS has mostly ended and thus the following has diminished greatly.

We also learned early on to run our Santa season trains using the name North Pole Express vs. " Polar Express" and thus end the need to pay that outrageous royalty demanded to use that name plus we got rid of the "experts" that came with the royalty to tell us how to run the railroad. Our ridership has grown every year in the 12 years since we changed the name so the public obviously gets it.

Until/unless Thomas gets back on PBS as a regularly scheduled show and does away with most of the PC crap its franchise value will continue to decline.

IMHO-Ross Rowland

We also looked in to running a DOWT event but determined it to not be worthwhile. In hindsight I'm glad we skipped because it may have killed the few volunteers we had at the time.




Well they haven't added the new "PC crap" yet and Thomas has already been declining. Let's not link two unrelated things.

Few comments from the original news article tells the story.

Pubbisk 3 days ago
I was veritably *obsessed* with Thomas & Friends when I was a kid, and with trains in general. So much so that I was crestfallen at age 6 when my mom told me that we couldn't visit Sodor because it isn't a real place. Though to be honest, the cartoons were never much to look at; I'd be fairly hard pressed to recall in detail the plot line for a single one of them. If anything, I remember the live action "Shining Time Station" segments more vividly. I'm pretty sure the messaging of the shows was benignly centered around working hard and not being a jerk, and maybe some other stuff about being a good friend. Iunno, it didn't really matter because...

The real point was that trains are (were?) cool. And the fact that Thomas & Friends featured *so many* trains in different shapes, sizes, and colors helped to give it an OCD hook of the variety that small children tend to crave (and many adults, too). This also made the toys inherently collectible, and my God, did I have a collection. Maybe other kids liked the show for different reasons, but I am pretty sure about 90% of the value there was the presence of trains.

As such, it surprises me that the basic marketability of Thomas & Friends appears to be faltering; the curmudgeon in me could argue that part of the reason is that the newer CG animation style and the toys modeled on it have become *too* cheaply cartoonish, but I really don't know. For what it's worth, I'm not really convinced that the main problem driving the show's declining popularity is its level of social awareness. It might just be that the concept of a children's show taking place in rail yard on a small British island is one with a limited shelf life. But if they're looking to introduce a shock to the system, I suppose this is one.

Wogieta 3 days ago
The new trains are awful. We have Thomas for our kids (3 & nearly 1) and with the exception of the aquarium cars (which have since been redesigned) we've bought exclusively used trains (tracks are usually Brio). Why? Because they aren't making the engines and cars LOOK like real train engines and cars like they used to. The used ones based off of the 90s/early 2000s TV show were much better. And I really don't like the CGI. If Mattel wants to save the Thomas brand, stop redesigning things!

Thomas is still pretty popular - you should see the turn out at Thomas & Friends at the B&O and other rail museums in the region. Kids still like trains, as long as they LOOK like trains. My daughter likes them, though she plays with them a bit less than she did at age 2.

Skowronek 3 days ago
Without the real train layouts it's just not as much fun as it was years ago.

Rjd2016 3 days ago
The demise if Thomas started with the shift to CG. Its been downhill ever since.

q90019 3 days ago
Agreed. The original animation was much better, as were the narrators such as Ringo Starr and George Carlin.

All this says the real problems ultimately stem from a lack of imagination from the writers, which in turn may or may not be influenced by corporate strictures (I recall how Walt Disney commented that "bankers have no imagination at all" when he was raising money for the original theme park in Anaheim).

I do wish we could move beyond children's programing, though.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=36158

Exactly. There is no cause and effect to attach the declining revenue and the new approach. Alas, that kind of argument is very common these days where people insert their own opinions in place of facts. I’m not picking on Ross, as it seems to be a default behavior for our society.

One of the worst things you can ever say as a marketer is, “well, I would like...” You are the least important part of the equation. Always think from the customers viewpoint and do so with an educated perspective for each of your target segments.

Many people make and sell things that don’t appeal to them personally, but bring great reward. It’s always about the customer. That’s a lesson the rail preservation movement has not broadly taken to heart, yet.

It's a long but interesting article that is mostly about how as the cost of travel continues to go down, and the income of large populations goes up, some areas are being over run with tourists. There are countries in Europe that get more tourists every year than people that actually live in those countries.

--- The travel industry is probably the most important economic sector in the world. It's far larger than the oil industry or the automotive industry and has an estimated turnover of 7 trillion euros a year, about 10 percent of global economic output. In addition to direct revenues, this staggering sum also includes related business sectors such as the hotel trade or the transport industry with all its aircraft, cruise ships and buses. It also includes souvenir shops and travel agencies.

In Spain, popular among holiday-makers, the travel industry accounts for fully 14.9 percent of the country's gross domestic product. And in many nations -- Greece, Portugal, Spain, France and the Czech Republic, for example -- the number of people entering the country exceeds the number of inhabitants. This creates jobs and modest prosperity, but it also establishes a certain dependency, which can also be dangerous if, as seen in Turkey and Egypt in recent years, there is a sudden massive plunge in the number of travelers. ---

How many people never go to the museums and attractions in the city they live in? And yet when you are traveling, do you look for those same kind of places to go see in other cities? Or do you only go to the ones in your own city when you have somebody from out of town visiting you?

1 of every 10 dollars is spent on the travel industry. Over 7 trillion a year. There is an ever increasing horde looking for something to do. Are you getting a cut of the pie?

Are you trying to get the locals or going after an ever increasing number of tourists looking for something to do? Is some farmer in France growing lavender getting more tourist dollars than you?

You're obviously entitled to your opinion but those are some pretty harsh statements when you are talking about 2 of the biggest brands in the railroad industry.

Although we had a number of people show skepticism before we first ran Thomas in 2005, nobody has regretted it since. Over the last 14 years it has allowed us to purchase the land we are on and the building we are in and partially put a new roof on it.
However I think it may be about time to pull the plug on it. Our first year we had 22,000 people with most years drawing about 19,000. Last year we were down to 12,000 and this year we barely made 9,000. The financial numbers are not all in yet, but we will be lucky to break even.
I hope Mattell realizes some things have to change or Day Out With Thomas will totally disappear.

What if the 2 biggest brands in the railroad industry were the easy obvious choices, but not necessarily the best. What if the easy choices were limiting you and causing you to miss out on more lucrative endeavors?

Harry Potter fest isn't the first time Warner Bros. has derailed an Aurora-area event
http://www.chicagotribune.com/suburbs/aurora-beacon-news/opinion/ct-abn-crosby-harry-potter-st-0314-20180313-column.htm

Was curious how much WB was getting for their cut and if they were cracking down on the smaller operations that maybe had been flying under the radar. They want 30% off the top. That's not 30% of your profit, that's of your gross. Plus that comes with all kinds of restrictions.

Here's a few pertinent parts from the article:

What’s in a name, you ask?

Well, plenty ... if the one you are asking is Warner Bros., which four years ago also happened to put the kibosh on the Fox Valley Park District’s Polar Express at Blackberry Farm, telling local officials that after the 2013 holiday season, it would have to fork over 30 percent of the profit as a licensing fee in order to stay on track with its holiday train ride.

That not only derailed Blackberry Farm’s Polar Express, it hurt dozens of other nonprofit Chicago area organizations that had been using the name since the 2004 release of the movie “Polar Express.”

Nonprofits, of course, don’t have that kind of money — nor do they have the bucks to get in legal battles with entertainment empires. So most of them dropped the name. And that’s what this Aurora festival group is doing, as well.....

“What’s in a name? Not much,” said Jeff Long, Fox Valley Park District communications manager .

Even though Blackberry Farm’s “Polar Express” had been one of the a popular holiday offering in 2013, Long said that by “not being married to the ‘Polar’ aspect of the event,” it allowed the park district to “greatly expand beyond just a train ride and book reading to include more than a dozen new activities that keep families moving and avoid the dreaded ‘I’m bored’ whine from the kids.”

Also, he pointed out, the event eventually expanded from two to three weekends, drawing a record 10,000 guests in 2017, compared with the barely 4,000 in attendance the last year under the Polar Express banner.

“Polar,” he chided, “we barely knew ye.”

Blackberry Farm is a public park in Aurora, IL. https://www.foxvalleyparkdistrict.org/facilities/blackberry-farm/ It gets it's name from the creek it runs along. It has a 2 ft gauge train among other attractions. It is a museum/park with a number of historic buildings including -

* Big Rock Train Depot (1860s): One of the two original buildings at Blackberry Farm. See what a train lobby and ticket window looked like in the mid-1800s.

But by ditching Polar Express, looks like they call it Holiday Express, and adding unspecified activities, they so increased demand, 2 1/2 times to 10,000 that they had to add a weekend. Certainly be worth somebody finding out what activities they added and what they've done to drive demand out the roof. Anybody live in the area? Certainly worth somebody going by and talking to them. Or maybe somebody could get on the phone and find out what the "secret sauce" is. I'm sure they would be happy to share what worked for them since you wouldn't be competition for them.

Amen to that. I'm one in a million kids who loves trains. However, that number is dwindling by the day. It was largely thanks to my boy Thomas that younger folks got into trains. Now, I didn't get into trains because of our Brighton-Built boy, but he certainly contributed to it. I'm still a big fan of Thomas, and will be until the end of time. But I hope that the Thomas reboot will get some young folks into trains.

I really thought these threads would cause confusion and delay. I am glad they haven’t as the subject is very important.

The point was made above that US railroad preservation is dominated by older white men (guilty as charged). That’s not a problem IF we make decisions based on more than our personal beliefs.

For example (and if this strays too far in making the point Rick, I apologize), Nike.

My inbox, FB newsfeed and Twitter feed were filled with anger this week about the Kaepernick ad. To a person, all of those complaints came from friends who are a) male b) white c) US citizens and d) over 45. If their thoughts were the only ones you saw, you would think Nike committed a huge error.

Some interesting data has come to light since. While the stock price dropped 2.8% right away, it has recovered half of that. Online sales skyrocketed in the days after the ad. A marketing industry study showed the ad turned off older people, but not younger folks. It also went over very well with athletes who are the key influencers of sneaker culture.

In other words, every ticked-off older white guy who burned his shoes has not hurt business, as they are not the future of Nike’s market.

Let me bring this directly to rail preservation:

The demographic that runs/saves the trains is NOT the future, nor is it large enough to sustain the movement as it is today. So, what to do? We need to have our Nike moment. By that, I don’t mean controversy; I mean an approach that is 100% targeted at the growth audience of tomorrow.

What if we don’t? Declining interest will be marked by data like continuing DOWT revenue declines. The web will be filled with more woe-is-us stories about how no young people want to volunteer. We’ll make fun of their digital habits, their politics and their life choices. And they will turn their backs on us. As we ride off into the sunset yelling at clouds, all we have worked for will rust back into the earth.

Thomas, Nike, etc... all suggest that now is the time to start evolving and preparing our life’s work to be taken on by young people with their own POVs. It’s worth it.

Do we want to ride out the next 20 years complaining about others while our lives’ passions rust back into the earth? Or do we put the future first, and help understand, embrace and partner with people who have a different POV?

The choice is ours.

Thank you for your post, Rob.

Anybody ever hear of the Hillcrest Tree Farm in Reedley, CA? http://hillcrestreedley.com/

I stumbled on them looking for info on standards/construction/maintenance of 15 & 16 inch gauge track. I've since been fascinated/mystified by their business model. You look at what they started with in 1992 when they bought an established Christmas tree farm and what they have today and it just begs the question, there's how much money in selling Christmas trees??? As far as I can tell they are a for profit business. You look at what they started with in 1992, 5 acres with another 10 leased. They've since bought that land, plus additional property, built buildings, shops, and a whole railroad. You just have to wonder how much have they invested over the last 26 yrs. And that was on top of all their other expenses, plus paying themselves a living. I would love to see their books. Where do they make the most money and what is the most profitable.

Here's a history with a lot of emphasis on the railroad. http://www.hillcrestreedley.com/detailed-history

<< Like the old story of the general who lost the war for need of a pen, installing and maintaining a steam railroad required investing five times the work and price of the actual track, cars and locomotive. >>

It does appear they've had a LOT of volunteer labor, and various people have loaned them engines over the years, but still somebody had to pay for the materials. They were able to do this from Christmas tree sales? Anybody know the inside story of the economics? Where's the money come from and where does it go? I did notice on their website (it's not kept up to date) they ran out of Christmas trees, sold out, last year and told people to stop coming during the week since they were closed. Nice problem to have. Still open on weekends.

The thing to note about this, anybody doing DOWT or Polar Express, this is your competition. Don't think so. They also do pajama Christmas. http://www.hillcrestreedley.com/pajama-christmas Put your pajamas on and come out at night for unlimited train rides, free cookies and cocoa with live music. They also have food vendors with food for sale and Santa Claus where for an additional fee get your picture. It's so popular -

<< Tickets are limited and had by advanced sales only so there won't be the usual crowds seen during the day. Making for a much more cozy and relaxed atmosphere. >>

What are they calling crowds? The one Tuesday evening they are open they split it into two 1 1/2 hour sessions -

<< Enjoy a more intimate setting with limited crowds--Only 250 per session. This night is ideal for those who can only experience the Pajama Christmas for a short while but don't want the higher crowd numbers of our regular night! >>

So it's hard to say what they are calling crowds. 500 or more? But if over the 12 nights of pajama Christmas they only do say 5,000 at $19 a ticket is $95,000.

And no Polar Express any where to be seen. Blackberry Farms in IL after ditching PE went from not even 4,000 to 10,000 and had to add a weekend. Interesting to note, Blackberry like Hillcrest, one price to get in, and then unlimited rides. Would be nice if somebody took it upon themselves to find out what Blackberry did to so increase demand and report back. Ideally it would be somebody that could physically go to the park, see the amenities and talk to somebody that is in charge.

So DOWT and Polar Express might have been the easy, obvious choices, but were they the best? Are they still the best option? Are you missing out on more money by staying with them instead of offering something else?

For those interested, Hillcrest started with this.

Has progressed to this.

Here's the track plan.

And if you don't think they are running a real railroad, check out this video of live steam with car after car after car with quite a few adults in them. Some of their track has 1.5% grades. https://youtu.be/9y70eKg8Tb0