Donald,

Yes, we have been following along and it has been very entertaining! The reason we haven’t commented is because we don’t want to screw-up the thread.
Seriously, it has been very interesting. There has been both fact and fiction posted by various well-meaning folks. The bottom line is we have to consider preservation, presentation, monetary, regulatory, entertainment, and most importantly, survival issues on a daily basis. In order to survive, you have to adjust to the times. Certainly, it is great to go to the enth degree to restore a piece of equipment to the last molecule in detail or original appearance. But, can you afford to do so and will it contribute to staying in the black? Do your customers notice you used vinyl imitation gold lettering on the tender instead of lettering it by hand?
In 1960 when we hauled 7,000 people, there was no competition. In 1992, we hauled 475,000 people with a fair amount of competition. In the mid-90s, we started to get aggressive with contract work for the shops for supplemental income. In 1999, with greatly increased competition, we countered dwindling numbers with Thomas. In 2006 we started the value added stuff to try to attract people to the property and stay a while. In 2011, we started to aggressively pursue freight business. In 2012, we began to enhance the appearance of the mall/station area to make it more attractive. We also introduced the steam powered mixed train and it wasn’t just because it is really cool.
Will everyone be happy with these changes? Certainly not. We only hope the positives far outweigh the perceived negatives.
All of this other stuff is worthless without our regular steam powered passenger train as that is our identity and will always be. The ride is virtually unchanged for 53 years with the exception of a couple of private enterprises along the way. Luck, proactive management, location, and most of all, very good and loyal employees all contribute to this Company being a success story.
BTW, please continue the discussion!

Rick

The few times I've been to the railroad over the years as an adult, I've long been impressed by the high standards of professionalism towards the appearance of the physical plant, and employees, and the use of complimentary attractions to keep visitors on-the-property for as long as possible (food concessions, souvenir/book store, the Cagney train ride, etc.). Having spent a couple of seasons working on the railroad at Cedar Point, I would favorably compare the condition of the facilities at Strasburg to that park. Making it possible for casual patrons to just decide to go there for a day's outing, knowing that the train will be reliably operating several trips a day, on the hour - what transit people call "memory service", in as clean an environment as is possible with a coal-fired steam operation, is probably the foundation for the overall success of the company.

A year-and-a-half ago I did a mini-show for a friend's pizza and slide night gathering with the theme of "The Best Railroad" (leaving open for interpretation what that would involve). The others made their cases for roads like UP, BNSF, NS, etc., but I think I made a very credible case that mile-for-mile, and year-for-year, the Strasburg is the best RUN standard gauge railroad in the U. S.

I don't know much about Strasburg, but I think they have been very lucky. All it would take is one event and the whole think could fall apart. Highway construction takes 1/2 the RR. The Mayor/County Commissioner from H*ll gets elected. Attack of the Nimbys. Hurricane Lenny washes out the RR. etc., etc. Any successful business can be wiped out by a act of God or Government.

-Hudson

Paul -

NOT! The Strasburg was built to 4' 9" gauge, making it technically a broad gauge railroad. Not sure if any of the 4' 9" trackage is still left though.

Les

I've been comparing the New Hope & Ivyland RR with Strasburg. I think that the NH&I deliberately tried to imitate SRR's model - touristy location, historic line that they owned, even closer to large population bases, for profit corporation with stockholders, hourly daily steam operation, mixed trains for the freight, lots of advertising including roadside billboards, paid employees for everything. They also cooperated with nearby tourist businesses by running a shuttle bus to the shoppes at Lahaska, where there was an offline ticket office, and were really willing to pick up passengers at other stations which had free parking. in addition to the terminal where parking cost money. There were some missteps - steam wasn't ready when promised for the grand opening, so rented Diesels had to be used, and airconditioned sealed window coaches at only 25 m.p.h. got dead batteries.
But something went wrong, and NH&I went into receivership after 4 years in 1970. They were burning through cash faster than it came in, and were lightly capitalized with little reserve for lean times. Ridership didn't fill those frequent trains to refill the treasury, why not?
They did have more miles of track, but didn't spend much to maintain it in those early years, and used less than half of it for passenger service. I do suspect that they paid a lot more in officers' wages than SRR, and that the officers and other insiders weren't helping to finance the early days. But, still, why were there less riders, and why did Strasburg do so much better in its early days?

I may have told this story before, but one thing that I remember from my mis-spent youth had to do with advertising. I was a volunteer at Black River in the '60s and early '70s. It always amazed me that Strasburg ran a regular ad in the Hunterdon County Democrat, a weekly paper, which was published in Flemington. I never saw a newspaper ad for Black River in the Democrat or what was called (at the time) the Plainfield Courier-News, which I delivered. There were two BR&W billboards in Ringoes, and one in Titusville, maybe 12 miles away, but those were the only advertisements I ever personally saw.

Meanwhile, the Morris County Central, during about the same time period, was running ads on one of the TV stations in New York, and I was told that they had a sign at the appropriate bus platform in the Port Authority bus terminal on 42nd Street. Something like "Take this bus to the Steam Train"...

Of course, the location, timing, marketing, attention to even the smallest details, and good management made the Strasburg what it is today.

I know of an interesting operation that operated on a funded volunteer model (paid stipends/mileage) that was DESTROYED by the conversion to a paid staff model.

This was an operation that had people drive up to 250 miles to work 12 hour days. In the 7 years that volunteers ran it, there was never a cancellation because of crew shortage and no reportable injuries.

Good management of resources is essential in all businesses. Tell the Illinois Railroad Museum how volunteers are such a fail. I don't think they'll buy into it. Try to convert IRM to a paid staff model and they may well fold up shop in a year. Suffice it to say, the culture that is developed with an operation has a great bearing on how things work, converting from one model to another is fraught with hazard.

Strasburg started with a paid model because that's what you needed to run an railroad in the ICC era. However, I wouldn't be surprised if some of the Strasburg VP's weren't working for a very modest wage. Managing modest resources, and creating value added profit centers (passenger operatiors/shop services) are a couple of the means by which the Strasburg has survived and prospered through the years, just as volunteers have allowed IRM to grow and prosper.

Good management of the operating culture that is started with is key. No matter which path (volunteer or paid) is chosen, it isn't easy, and many (sadly) fail.

Kudos to Strasburg for doing well!

Michael Seitz
Missoula MT

And we've seen failures come from not changing culture and management strategies when larger changes require adaptation to continue to prosper. How many stagecoach manufacturers did we support in 1855? How many are left now?

dave

Mike's comments are why I'm uneasy with going to a paid-staff model. It all makes such perfect elegant sense when we see a Strasburg do it successfully. But it always turns you from a Preservation Paradise into a Money Chase museum. Why? OVERHEAD.

Debt = total money you owe. Mortgage balance.
Overhead = burn rate. Cost per month/year of simply being open. Utility bills.

SMRS and MiTM and Fox River and ORM survive, because they have low overhead, because they don't have a payroll. It takes a shockingly modest level of ridership (about 5000 a year) to keep them solvent. All ridership above that is gravy, and goes entirely to mission purpose. So these organizations can happily rock up and down with turns of business, exceeding their minimums by a wide margin and each year varying only by how much "gravy" there is.

So you convert to paid staff, and now you have a headcount of 1, 4, 8 FTE's. Thing about payroll is that the fully borne costs* of an employee are about double salary, and these are FIXED costs that do not move up or down with your revenues. This dwarfs your previous overhead. Lickety split your "minimum ridership just to stay solvent" rockets up from 5000 to 20,000 to 50,000 to 100,000.

Employees are spectactularly easy to hire. Every problem once ignored or solved with volunteers now seems like a reason for another headcount. That means that even as you exceed your "minimums" and produce gravy, it's rather tempting to spend the gravy on more headcount. The Executive Director wants to do this, as it increases his "little empire", which ratchets** upward in size every time you have a good year.

And then comes the storm. Or the economy. Suddenly you have conditions which once only meant "less gravy" when you when you needed 5000 riders a year to stay alive... but now that you need 100,000, it is a dire threat to your existence. KyRM's situation.

** Employees are spectacularly difficult to fire. It's heart-wrenching, and you don't want to fire someone only to have conditions turn around shortly after. So you fire too little too late, stripping equity to keep staff, hoping things recover. AND THEY DON'T, partly because salaries forced you to cut other things like marketing that would build business back up. This defines the death spiral which becomes the organization's new normal.

It's rather difficult to transition smoothly from employees to volunteers. Volunteers are too prideful to just step into a job somebody else was just paid to do. So, it doesn't happen. The guy who finally locks the door and hands the keys to the sheriff is a paid employee.

That's how paid staff murder heritage railways, especially if amateur boards are involved who don't have the icy detachment to fire when they must.


* Because he needs your half of FICA, unemployment insurance, healthcare, dental, vision, 401k participation and administration, various other insurances and perks, a legally habitable workplace, a laptop, WiFi, a phone, and PBX, all the details right down to that panel of "Employee's Rights" signs.

Edit: grammar

For decades, IRM has used paid employees (read "high school kids") for ticket admission, bookstore cashier, and cafe staff. Low level positions that are notoriously difficult to staff from volunteers. I believe later on they took a paid ED, but it's Nick Kallas, so it's family. WRM took the reverse approach, their first paid employee was an executive director, and have backfilled with paid staff starting in back office, groundskeeping, then cashiers as IRM did. There's a strong sense of firewalling the paid staff at these cashier/service positions at IRM... not so much at WRM.


You presume THEY know. That ain't necessarily so. Often the view from "inside looking out" is a great deal more distorted than the view "outside looking in". In tech we call that the "echo chamber" and it kills dot-coms on a constant basis.


Smart move.

Righto. And frankly, that kind of restoration is exactly what RRMPA across the street is for. Whether that car wanders over to Strasburg to get run, and how often, is a curatorial and business decision. This is a debate we have internally at the museums: do we use painstakingly restored historic fabric as our daily operating cars, exhausting the historic fabric and risking "George Washington's axe" syndrome? Or do we get some throw-aways to do the daily grind (the apocryphal generic coaches everyone seems to have)? Or do we purpose-build, and do we make it obvious (converted flatcar) or passable replica (San Fran. cable car)?

It's more complicated for us because we are both entities in one: the tourist railway business and the museum. We have two "bottom lines" (the other being the Mission). The same shop is working on both coveted restoration work of the jewels, and plain maintenance of the throwies. It's jarring to have to bump restoration work because of a mechanical need on a daily runner. Strasburg experiences no such conflict.


BEGAN? At my mid-2012 visit I was very impressed with the site. Stuff was under construction, but that's cool - people like construction, it puts renewal in plain view rather than being implied by decay's absence.

I was very impressed with 'all the other stuff' on the site. You could easily kill an afternoon there if you had kids. Which takes a big load off capacity balancing, because if your ticket office says "Sorry, it's 2 hours til the next train", they won't leave.


I was very impressed that Strasburg would hurl itself into the general system by hauling freight for others -- the tourist train alone puts you in "FRA-Lite", which eases the regulatory burden a lot, particularly in the office.

Too cute by half.