Maybe not the railroad directly. But among the letters I saw, in a folder saved by William M. Schnure of Selinsgrove/Hummels Wharf, Pa., an NRHS member back at a time when NRHS membership was fairly low (before the Southern Steam Program got into full swing, and when railfan trips were still often chartered by model railroad clubs), was a letter from Huber Leath. Leath was typing, person to person and I believe as an NRHS member, but he was also a Strasburg VP. Other letters were from the likes of the Altoona Chamber of Commerce, Northumberland civic officials, other individuals, etc., maybe even George Hart himself.......

Boy, I wonder if I can still find that danged folder........ I think I have some newspaper clippings about the fight for the museum site over in that box over there.......... Kurt, wanna make it worth my while to dredge them back up? <:-)



Nobody directly stated that idea; it was at best inferred if someone wanted to read between the lines.

And no, that idea is most definitely not true. In my "other" business of craft beer and brewpubs, I can show you brewpub after brewpub that believed location was as important as product or presentation or more so. There was a brewpub just outside of Gettysburg, located in a vintage barn structure that had been a field hospital in the Civil War battle, that produced some of the most epically wretched "beer" most beer writers ever tasted, and there were entirely serious threats to firebomb or otherwise sabotage the place because of the horrendous product and "captive" audiences (tour buses pulling in for a banquet)--the historic building kept that from happening. The brewpub business is still rife with the brewpub equivalent of a railroad grabbing a couple C&NW gallery cars or LIRR commuter boxes and an asthmatic CF7 or SW8 and calling themselves a "historic railroad ride." Thankfully for us beer aficionados, they tend to last about as long as the aforementioned "tourist line".

But lines that set up because of location? Petticoat Junction and Gold Coast RR (not Museum) in Florida.... Stone Mountain.... Black Hills Central..... Cripple Creek and Victor.... High Country RR...... Penns Landing Trolley.......... White Mountain Central.... Edaville........ Rome & Fort Bull RR......... Ocean City Western..... Cape May Seashore Lines..... Make of those what you will.

I have been volunteering at railway and trolley museums for 55 years so I have a bit of experience observing all the changes.

What makes Strasburg a success? NO VOLUNTEERS.

One competent employee works 40 hours per week. Ten volunteers work 4 jours per week each. That four hours of work figure allows for time spent to change clothes, gossip with fellow volunteers, make coffee, decide what to do, and find tools. This assumes that the volunteer is competent. Which is more efficient, paid or volunteer?

Then we have the museum supervisor who has always been a nobody in the world of business. Suddenly he has a title at a museum and it goes to his head. He becomes a little dictator. The less said about his people skills the better.

Volunteers frequently want to do work that is different from their professional lives.
Thus you may find a good painter who wants to do mechanical work. But he is a poor mechanic.

Then some museum managers are bogged down in tradition. We must do things the same way railroads did it one hundred years ago. An example is vinyl lettering. A visitor has to look very carefully to see that lettering is not painted on. (I've spent a lot of time lettering things with paint and a brush.) Vinyl lettering can go on in 10% or less time than hand painting and it looks a lot better. Strasburg has had the ability to make use of new technologies.

Then there is the power of the purse. A museum member pays for restoration of some obscure piece of equipment that is of no use for operation and means little to the public as a static display. This ties up shop space and facilities.

So with a professional staff focused on business, Strasburg has been a success.

Just getting back to this after a couple days... Yeah, I agree selling shop time likely accounts for very little at the bottom line. My point was that they didn't take the position that, since we can't use all the shop capacity, let's not build it at all, and rely on outside contractors. Instead, they put in what they needed to become pretty much self sufficient, and sell the excess, thereby keeping their shop staff employed, so the expertise is there at moment's notice when they need it. Not having to bid work out impacts the bottom line in other ways.

I can think of some other places that should have gone this route, but didn't; they have a shop, but no steam.

I would tend to agree. Ah, but there's the old Catch-22. How do you earn enough revenue to pay those employees in the first place? They had to 'Bootstrap' at some point to get there.

When's the last time you guys were there, 1972?!? Are you serious?

Here's 94 attractions in that nothingness called Lancaster County:
http://www.padutchcountry.com/activitie ... ctions.asp

21 Amish specific tours
http://www.padutchcountry.com/activitie ... vities.asp

17 theaters (real theaters, not movie houses)
http://www.padutchcountry.com/activitie ... eaters.asp

39 musuems
http://www.padutchcountry.com/activitie ... useums.asp

20 Wineries and breweries:
http://www.padutchcountry.com/activitie ... weries.asp

Festivals, restaurants, covered bridges, golf courses, hotels, B&Bs, hiking, fishing, etc, etc, etc.

You get the idea, but in case you don't, there's lots more here:
http://www.padutchcountry.com/

They even offer a book for those of you while still seem to think the place is one step removed from East Ely...

Bob and Ross - I think precisely because of the sheer tourist density of what you speak, Strasburg may be an "outlier" that is not useful for us to study unless we have the good fortune of being neck deep in a similar "tourist nexus".

No, wait, I take that back. It's absolutely useful to contrast Strasburg with Middletown/Hummelstown, Stewartstown, Gettysburg and other rail attractions in Lancaster County. With all the same advantages, why don't they succeed in rough proportion?

John - don't worry about it lol.

Nothingness - yes, I remember the vast nothingness there in Lancaster County. I had to sit in a half hour of L.A. traffic just to get to it, off that exit ramp on 30 and down 30 past the mind-numbing outlet malls, tourist traps and kitsch. My GPS routed me 30/896, I now see there's a back way.

Length of train ride - exactly right, I agree. From a railfan's perspective I consider it horribly short. I prefer at least a 5 mile run. However, Strasburg uses the trolley museum's trick of "padding" the experience with a bunch of other stuff (i.e. a runaround and a meet) so it doesn't feel like you just paid $18 for a 3 mile ride.

There are some outfits that insist on running the railroad they got, customers be damned, or more specifically with no thought as to how to manipulate customer experience to correspond with the ride they have to offer. These are the ones who run 20 minute "that's the ride, take it or leave it pal" bounces, or 2-hour kiddie trains.



I don't like your conclusion. but... I believe line volunteers absolutely can be effective, but require managers whose conduct is respectful and "acts like a professional". This is wildly incompatible with the truth of your last paragraph. One sharp-elbow volunteer manager can be the doom of an organization. They literally throw the organization under the bus to satisfy their vanity. And the Board may not have the courage to deal with them if they don't see their replacement ready to step up, which of course he is not, because he's been driven off by same.


That is implied by saying "location is everything". Here.


Here's a counterexample on location. Contrary to out-of-state opinion, Michigan is doing great except for a few horribly depressed urban centers. All around Detroit is this ring of suburbs that are doing so well they look like Silicon Valley except for being lower density of course. Particularly on the west side near the freeways, and all the west side freeways converge at the 275/96 mash-up.

Just north of that mash-up is Coe Rail. Smack in the middle of the target market. A 20-mile radius from there is mostly customers. Lansing is an hour. Beautiful railroad too, rolls right through a protected parkland which buffer it from the million dollar homes nearby.

Then you have Clinton, 50 miles west-southwest of Detroit proper, a beeline down US-12, most of which is doubled by freeway. Clinton is the start of the Irish Hills tourist area which runs down US-12 -- though in decline, is still lush with antique dealers and Michigan's NASCAR track, which is HUGE. Other than that, a 20 mile radius is farmland, farm towns and Ann Arbor. It's 40 miles from the wealthy western suburbs. The railroad travels from downtown Clinton to dead-center in downtown Tecumseh, another antiquey charming town with the best restaurant in the county just 100 feet from the train stop.

Then Blissfield, on the south edge of the county that Clinton is on the north edge of, and thus, 20-odd miles further. Blissfield proper is a tourist town with antique shops and a lovely restaurant but there's not much else around.

Then you have Owosso, in rural mid-Michigan absolutely surrounded by corn, and with no particular tourist aspect (no offense). The freeway near it is disadvantageous to the metro market, so MapQuest routes you through the aforementioned 275/96 mixmaster then 66 miles further, half that wandering up 2-lane roads and then a puzzle inside Owosso proper to find the place.

Location Location Location, you say. I think you'll agree I've listed them from best to worst? Success should be proportional, right? RIGHT??

Well.

It's exactly the opposite. Owosso is Project 1225, certainly the most successful preservation organ in the state (which is standalone all-rail; ignoring the rail departments at Henry Ford and Flint parks). Coe Rail is closed and lifted.


Ohio Railway Museum -- echoes my point here. Their problems have NOTHING to do with location. And if ORM focuses on the business fundamentals, they'd be doing land-office business, and they'd be able to use that revenue to improve everything about the place and turn it from a "Faded Glory" into a "Preservation Paradise". But the nature of a Faded Glory is that all efforts to focus on the business fundamentals must be resisted as affronts to the power structure or some bull. But nobody's willing to fight through the organizational politics to actually grow the place. Plus, can't very well advertise a train they refuse to run.

There's no way that fans consider the museum and tourist operation across the road from each other independently. I considered it as much a 'package deal' to hit both as I considered the hobby shops along my route in MD to get there as well as the antique stores and a couple of good books stores with lots of RR books to also be part of the draw for going at all (which, I did often, when I was stationed in Maryland).
While tourists don't hit the museum quite as much after riding the train (I agree, what non-railfan wants to see something static after a ride like that?), it's just one more reason piled up to sway a train fan on a Saturday morning who's thinking of going but not 100%. "Aw heck, I can spend all day there looking at stuff at those places," they'd think, maybe even including the O scale museum down the road as well. When you lump that much stuff together, the decision is far more easily made.

For example, the Air & Space museum in DC is considered to be the most heavily visitied museum on earth depending on who you ask. If it wasn't tucked in among numerous world-class museums, all within sight of each other, would nearly as many people visit that place annualy? Of course not!

I might be missing something, but I was just looking at the aerials of Strasburg and could no find any indication of there being any freight customers.

There's a transload on the north side of the property. Also look at the far east end in paradise proper, the Strasburg line parallels the Amtrak for a bit then comes back and connects into an industry.

I could be wrong, but I don't think freight is their primary revenue stream.

I differ re: Air & Space. They are most-visited because of the fascination with Sci-Fi and real space travel, and because they offer a one-stop destination like our friends at Strasburg RR, Smithsonian style: life size objects on display (the planes), a cafeteria, IMAX with at least three different daily films, and the planetarium.



Raises hand and runs for cover. I've been to SRR and not to the Museum on several trips to Strasburg. On one visit we met my sister-in-law and her husband, who live on the the north side of Lancaster, just to ride the dinner train. On another trip we took our grandson to the Maze. One trip my wife and I just stopped in and people-watched at the station. Across the street, the exhibits at RRMPa lack the pizzzazz of the CSRM (infotainment?). The best part of RRMPa for me is the upper level viewing area. Only from there do you get the impression of how grand the collection really is.


I differ with this as well. Illinois Railway Museum is all-volunteer and offers a package of rail experiences at one location (streetcar, mainline passenger, and interurban rides), with a nice set of supporting amenities (clean bathrooms, bookstore, the diner, a bit of streetscape) . Might they be the SRR of the midwest?

Summary
IMHO the founders of Strasburg were in the right place at the right time and have had steady hands on the throttle ever since.

Wesley

Yeah, I can see lots of people not visiting the museum. Notably parents who are there to give the kid a train ride, or families/large groups for whom it would take too much cat-herding to get everyone in and out of the museum.

Was Strasburg always 100% non-volunteer for employees? Looking back 20 or so years ago, I don't recall that being the case then. I could be wrong. And, note that Illinois Railway Museum isn't 100% volunteer, at least as far as I know - they do pay some people to sell tickets, etc.

Let me tick off a few more reasons why Strasburg has done so well:

1. Commitment to running steam-powered trains basically 100% of the time for its entire existence: how many competitors can say that? A comparison in this space can be made to Mid-Continent: I think not having steam operating there has hurt them tremendously over the past decade. I wonder how much the same has impacted IRM as well over the past 15 years.

2. First-mover advantage. This applies to other businesses, so why not in this space? Strasburg was arguably the first to do what they do day-in and day-out when they started back in the day. Because of this, other businesses (caboose motel, choo-choo barn, etc.) located nearby. Once a successful business like this gets rolling it is hard for competitors to match it.

I'll leave it to historian Kurt Bell to answer for certain, but as I was to understand it, at least some of the folks who "volunteered" in those very early days--if, indeed, they did--were also shareholders, or quite possibly the shareholders' kids or relatives. The railroad also used contract pros for some of their early work, sending the Plymouth to the Reading shops for overhaul and hiring in some track gang workers.

The April 1961 issue of Trains has an account of the early days by William Moedinger, although it should be suggested that almost anything the senior Moedinger wrote about the line was as a public-relations spokesman and storyteller, not a historian.

I'm willing to bet that after five pages of this banter, those that work for the 'burg are sitting back reading this and just laughing. Laughing at the fact that we act like we "know" from firsthand experience why the 'burg is so successful, but have only stood on the outside looking in. If they're so inclined to share, I'd like to hear what anyone with a distinguished tenure at the 'burg chime in with their valued opinion as to why they're so successful rather than sitting here listening to a bunch of us foamers bicker about who knows what like a cacophony of cackling hens! I'm sorry, but after five pages and no response from the likes of Kelly, Linn, Steve or Rick it's hard for me to think otherwise.

Naw, they pay other people to deal with them newfangled computeer thingamajiggies.

>;-D