What I didn't go into, out of sheer kindness or mercy, was the sheer level of atrocity into which said particular Ranger's spiel was mangled. This poor soul, who had rather obviously been forced to crash-memorize a tour spiel on short notice and/or was new to the job, couldn't go a sentence or two without badly mangling some fact or information. Some of it was simple "typos" while other bits of information were wildly off course--probably on the order of NKP 759 burning anthracite or oil, mangling railroad names, or whatnot. The other two railfans and I initially tried to discretely correct him, but after a point it was hopeless--we just walked away shaking our heads. This was in the early or mid 1990s when the NPS was still trying to get a grip on what they had and were dealing with.

In all fairness, if I were suddenly hired on short notice to run a tour of our local zoo or computer museum or an auto museum, I'm sure I'd mangle the spiel atrociously. But I at least would have the wherewithal and honesty to have a stack of note cards on me to tide me over until I knew what I was talking about. This Ranger did not--and should have. And it wasn't just "2-4-8"--it was "This is a 2-4-8 type of steam locomotive; that means it has two wheels up front, four in..... [looks at the loco again]... four back under the cab, and eight in the middle...." I've sort of repressed that nightmare, but I think he may have even started a spiel about one locomotive while in front of another.......

In all fairness, I hear that the Steamtown NHS has its house in order now. Otherwise, we'd still be hearing about this kind of stuff on the forums here and elsewhere in railfanning. A lot. An AWFUL lot.

And, in all fairness, had I lived closer to Steamtown then, I would have instantly volunteered my services to help train the rangers or write/edit a better lecture for them.

Or "corpse-man!"

I couldn't agree more with Robert John Davis's observation that the human element of Steamtown's history is just as important as the machines themselves. Many railfans today tend to remember the performances of the locomotives in the past, but most forget it was the people (most of them unheralded) behind the peformances that made them possible.

A while back, I wrote an article titled "The Railroad Legacy of F. Nelson Blount". Though I never submitted it for publication, I did recently provide a copy to Jim Boyd as information for his forthcoming Steamtown book--and excerpts from it will appear in that book. In preparation for my article, I talked at length about early Steamtown and FNB himself with Bob Adams. One of the things that Bob Adams told me stands out: Bob said a main reason Blount was able to establish Steamtown and accomplish all the things that he did during his lifetime was because of his ability to surround himself with people that could get things done.

Same goes for the Steamtown Foundation era after Blount's death: a lot of people contributed to keep Steamtown alive until it could be turned over to the National Park Service. There were a number of times during the Steamtown Foundation era that Steamtown could have "died", but it didn't thanks to the effort and dedication of a number of believers who wanted to see Steamtown survive and prosper.

There are those who will want to debate forever over the decisions that were made along the way. I can say unequivocally that money (or perhaps more appropriately, the lack of it) was always Steamtown's number #1 "problem"; money, more than anything else, drove the decisions that had to be made to keep Steamtown alive. I give a lot of credit to those that had to make the decisions on how the limited funds available were to be spent and to those who were dedicated enough to work with the limited funds available to make things happen. We sometimes forget that Steamtown DID survive to become a National Historic Site against what were, at times, very great odds. I can only say "thanks" to all that were involved along the way--because without them, there wouldn't be a Steamtown NHS today.

Frederick G. Bailey

A good read, though I always felt it didn't fully captured the personal side of Blount (at least in the 1967 edition), was the book The Man from Steamtown. I wonder if any stories of how NFB was as a person to meet. He must have been a rather interesting character.
http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=the+man+from+steamtown

I should point out, for those who have yet to run across this book, that it was published by a Christian book publisher, and that a fair deal of the book is taken up with Blount's conversion to evangelism; as I recall the last chapter is basically a religious tract. Yes, it's part of who the man was, and with the accounts of him taking time out to evangelize to Steamtown visitors, it becomes interesting to speculate what would have happened long-term had Blount not died in a plane crash.

If you're expecting a detailed railroading-man's account of the operation of a steam museum, you may be a little disappointed.