The other day I was working in the streetcar barn at Orange Empire when a group of visitors came by. As usual I greeted them and said if they had any questions to feel free to ask. A young black fellow immediately asked me what those big metal things along the back wall were. Since I didn't know what he was talking about I had him show me. He was asking about traction motors. I explained. We got down on our hands and knees and looked at traction motors under a couple of cars. He actually was flabbergasted. I find young urban black guys have a way of showing that emotion.

Later I realized that he, like most people, probably had never seen a motor larger than a starter on a car or a motor on a cement mixer and we had just discussed a motor as big as the cement mixer. H. G. Wells in reverse!

Yes, we take traction motors for granted. Except for some direct drive contraptions, traction motors are an essential ingredient in the rail industry.

Ah, a teaching opportunity. That's what we're about. But who wants to take one of those heavy greasy things off that back shelf and turn it into a cut-away display?

You don't have to "cut away" and destroy a motor. Some older streetcar motors have "split cases", so they can be unbolted in half for easier servicing and display.
Now, for a real "Wow Factor", leave the spare motor in a spare truck, with the powered wheel set propped up just clear of the floor or rail. Hook up a controller and welding machine, and let the visitors run the demonstration. Use a slightly more modern controller with some sort of spring return or other "dead man" feature so the show can't run unattended. It can even be coin operated! Journal box lids and motor brush covers can be left open with mirrors and lights provided so the audience doesn't have to stick their faces too close. This could be a way for those odd and worn spare parts that don't fit anything to earn their keep.

EMD used the kind of display method that Jim describes in his posting above. Brand new traction motors were used as displays in the training center, partially assembled, on stands that maintained the alignment of the armature through the center of the field poles. They displayed DC main generators and AR10 traction alternators the same way. The machines were sold to customers when the displays were discontinued, in most cases the customers just assembled them and put them in a locomotive.

A Diesel switcher or roadswitcher with full handrails is an excellent stage for giving "interpretive" explanations of the machinery when the doors are open. Normally the public only gets to see them roll by at a grade crossing while they are sitting in their cars waiting for the gates to go up.

PC

.

"Are you categorizing all steam locomotives as “direct drive contraptions”? Don’t forget that the rail industry got along quite well for the better part of a century without traction motors."--Kelly Anderson

Gotta cut him some slack, he's at a trolley museum, those trolley cars ain't "real trains" ya know. . . . . .:-D

Kelly's comments reminded me of a bit of confusion on the part of a railroad employee--a young one, obviously--who was baffled by a 4-8-4 that had just been overhauled, and couldn't wrap his mind around a machine that wasn't a diesel, indeed was a completely different animal:

"Man, look at that long truck, how's it going to get around curves?" He was looking at the drivers, with their long "rigid" wheelbase.

"How is this thing going to go without any traction motors?" This was complicated by the presence of a spur gear on the trailing truck, which was missing its booster engine.

"What's inside that long hood? How come the cab is so far back?" You guessed it--that's what he thought the boiler was.

I recall the late Bill Purdie, quoted in Trains, fussing about how younger people on SR didn't think 4501 could do some of the things it did. "How do they think we ran this railroad for a hundred years?" he was supposed to have said, or something similar.

The post by J3a-614 got be remembering:

I was at Dan Markoff's one of the first afternoons/evenings that he steamed up the "Eureka." I had helped build the track going out the side gate to the curb of the cul-de-sac. She was steamed up to move her away from the tender so that the oil bunker could be removed. While the work was going on inside his property to deal with the oil bunker, I was out by the front curb where the Eureka was located.

We had a policeman come by because he saw the smoke rising and wanted to check it out.

Then we had a 20-something that was ex-Navy and was into race cars. He pointed to the cylinder and asked, "Is that where the turbine is?" I responded something like, "No, in there is a double-acting piston that moves the rods connected to the wheels."

An awful lot of this is on the order of the cliched stereotype of the toddler far more fascinated with the box the present came in than the present itself, of course. Our equivalent would be the family far more fascinated by the pump handcar than the 4-8-4 that brought them to it.

At the same time, we railfans, more so than most such groups, suffer from a degree of insular thinking. It would behoove any intelligent museum group to bring in a "focus group" of intelligent outsiders--teachers, travel agents, historians, caterers, parents, bus drivers, county officials, etc.--and give them a before, during, and after survey of their expectations, what they actually experienced, what can be improved, etc. If you can find the money (maybe grants or help from the local tourism board?), it would even be worth paying the participants for an especially constructive feedback session. What's more important, touching up the paint on the sides of the cars or touching up the paint in the restrooms? What were they expecting that they didn't see? What surprised them, positively and negatively?

Bilgewater on bringing in a group of ' intellectuals ' !
They are not your audience ...
You don't need to make a Congresional Investigation out of this ...
You already started, right here on RYPN;

Walk around your displays and continue to make the observations you already started.
Take notes and come up with simple but effective solutions as have been suggested.

And RIGHT THERE, Brother Preservationists, is the perfect argument for packing it all in with this rubbish, and going off fishing, gold-panning, homebrewing, or anything more rewarding than this crap we do. Call in the scrappers and dumpsters.

EVERYBODY ELSE OUT THERE is your "audience," or at least a potential audience. Whether you're their object of interest is at least partially up to you. And actively rejecting their input and possible interest will guarantee that this avocation withers and dies, while "philanthropists" continue to underwrite giant rocks as "art," cute puppies, doo-wop reunion shows on PBS, zoo animals, pinball-machine museums, and whatnot.

I'm pretty sure the direct drive contraption comment was "geared" towards diesel and gas mechanical engines (pardon the pun).

I have seen a single power unit with an appropriate sign impress the general public. The sign compared the displacement of the single cylinder to the displacement all the cylinders in the average passenger automobile, and then mentioned that there were 12 or 16 power units in a locomotive.

The context was the diesel shop at the Reading & Northern at their 25th anniversary open house. I think the full shop, along with a locomotive you could get into, contributed to the wow factor of the power unit, because it showed the facilities need to work on it, and the whole massive machine it was part of.

There was actually a little crowd around the power unit.

-Mark

One of the exhibits we sometimes set up for special events is the "pit tour". A streetcar is positioned over the servicing pit and handrails are placed to allow safe descent down the stairs. Visitors are issued hard hats and escorted by a volunteer member who explains the "down and dirty" part of electric railway operation. Even the gong is pointed out, and I usually quote the San Francisco Muni PCC operator who, after unsticking the gong mechanism and testing it OK, said "A streetcar needs its bell like a rattlesnake needs his rattles." The visitors can see the traction motors and the air compressor. I try to tailor the tour to the group at hand--some want more detailed information than others.

I haven't done it lately, but I used to run streetcars on our demonstration railway. One day I was running Huntington Standard LA Ry 665. Our passengers included a father and two daughters in the 9-12 year old range, and they were curious about how trolley cars ran. 665 has "motor traps", removable sections of the floor which provide access to the traction motors for servicing. I removed one of the traps and pointed out the 50 hp motor and explained how the control system allowed the motor to build up speed without pulling to much current. The analogy I often use is how starting the motor in a refrigerator or washing machine, which is less than one hp, can cause the lights to dim (especially in an older home), so it's easy to see that a motor this big takes a LOT of current to start.

Being in Southern California, where "all the world's a sound stage," several of the cars in our collection have "film credits", and even non-railfans are impressed by a bit of Hollywood glamour, such as the streetcar that Hedy Lamarr operated in a 1940 film.

Unless it's a "rush job", or something hazardous, it's good for members to take time to answer questions from our visitors; it's one way to differentiate a railway museum from a theme park.

It is, indeed, surprising what catches our visitors fascination.

Last summer a youngster and his mother visited one of our "open houses" at the station in Stewartstown, PA. He looked at the various items around the office then pointed at the contraption sitting on the agent's desk. It had a keyboard like a computer, but it did not have a video monitor nor a powercord. He asked his Mom "what is that thing?" His Mom smiled and said "that is a typewriter--a manual typewriter. It's what we used before PCs!" (It is a 1950s-era standard office machine.)

Yes, youngsters do find fascination in seemingly mundale items! -- Ray

I've found one of the more mundane things that seems to "wow" people is that flanges are not the primary means of keeping the train on the rails. That one never seems to get old.

Heard at work: "Gee that (the electric typewriter) has the same keyboard as the computer!" [We have only one typewriter left in the office.]