An interesting figure jumped out at me while reading Sunday's Baltimore Sun article on B&O Railroad Museum's plans for a 175th anniversary of the founding of the line that will occur in 2003. It mentions last year's visitation was at 120,000 and growing about 10 percent annually.

I am wondering what our most visited railroad museums in the country would be and if anybody has the figures for last year.

At NCTM, thanks to Thomas and a slew of special events, we kicked up the number to 129,000. I expect that CSRM is still in the half million range, does anybody know? And does anybody know where Steamtown falls in the list?

http://nctrans.org
Wrinnbo@aol.com

I believe that steamtown is about 200,000, a little more or less, but about that.

Hope this helps.

Dave Crosby

bing@epix.net

Jim:

The California State Railroad Museum had right around 635,000 admissions last year (1999/2000). This figure represents actual attendance at museum facilities, train rides, etc. and is not based on car counting or other estimating/sampling techniques. The actual number of visitors served (as distinct from visits), however, is smaller, but we don't know how much smaller. The problem is this: the museum can easily measure individual admissions, tickets sold, number of free school visitors and so on, but there is no systematic way to determine how many people do multiple things on the same visit. In other words, a person who visits the museum on a Saturday and also rides the train on the same day is counted twice. There is an overlap, but its a relatively small number (because, in fact, most train riders on a given day are NOT museum visitors on that same day, and vice versa, and visitors to the Library or Hardware Store aren't museum visitors, etc).

Visitation is up this fiscal year (since July 1, 2000) due to a 50% reduction of museum admission fees, but it's too early to know the total annual effect. As it is, the California State Railroad Museum is the most-visited railroad museum in the world.

Walt Gray

wgray@ss.ca.gov