For museums who don't have regular steam in service, I'd like to recommend that you consider renting Flagg Coal 75, an 0-4-0T owned by John and Byron Gramling. Byron is the master mechanic on PM 1225 in Michigan.
In February, the Florida Railroad Museum held it's first ever "Month of Steam", which I proposed and managed. I had contacted John Gramling last year to see if he was interested and, with that indicated, I proposed it to the museum's directors. They approved the project so we made plans to bring the engine to Florida in February, 2007.
In short, an extensive marketing and advertising campaign was implemented and produced very favorable results. It is very important to do this to gain publicity and sell tickets. We held a press day prior to the event where every member of the press who attended got to run the engine. That got us a LOT of publicity!
We had to buy a truckload of coal and have it delivered from Virginia. Then we paid for trucking the engine from and to Michigan. And the Gramlings were paid a very reasonable fee for the engine. The Gramlings provided mechanical maintenance and lubrication supplies from their fee. It was overall a reasonable expense to get the engine but it still was a challenge for the museum to cover the expense. Some directors got cold feet but we went ahead and the engine was delivered on time.
John and Byron Gramling are professionals at this, with experience doing similar but shorter events in Michigan, Indiana and North Carolina prior to our event, which was to be for an entire month. As it turned out, it was so successful that we held it over for an additional weekend so we ran for 5 weekends, all together.
When the engine arrived, it was unloaded and on the rails within two hours and steamed up the following day for trials and museum crew training. Although it is a small engine, we found that it can easily handle a five to six car train on our nearly level track so we had a train capacity of over 400 seats. We charged $ 16 for all tickets.
With the publicity, which included extensive coverage on the Tampa Fox 13 morning show and two big articles in the Tampa Tribune plus many other articles in various local newspapers in the area, we were soon running several sold out trains each day. We covered expenses for the whole month in three operating days.
The engine is pretty economical, too. We used only about half of the coal we had bought. However, due to it's small saddle tank, we could only run about three miles each way and then had to take on water. So, we ran four trains each day (Saturday and Sunday), on two hour departures with a running time of around 50 minutes. This gave us time to unload, service the engine and re-load for the next trip.
In addition to the steam engine, we added extra events each weekend. Three of the weekends had train robberies with a local group called the "Hole in the Head Gang", one weekend had antique farm tractors and equipment on display with hay rides and one day with antique fire trucks from a local collector's group. These added more interest and helped fill the seats. We carried about 7,000 passengers during the five weekends.
The Gramlings are extremely fine people to work with and the museum hopes to repeat this again next year. What is so good about this arrangement is that it gave our museum the opportunity to present real working steam without having to undergo the expense of restoring and maintaining a steam engine on our own. They trained our engine crews who normally run our GP7 or RS3 diesels, oversaw the operation and provided maintenance, all at a very reasonable rate. The museum gained a lot of favorable publicity and made badly needed money which it will use to upgrade track and restoration projects.
I'm submitting this to show others something that can be done at reasonable cost to further your public awareness and to generate revenue. The Gramlings have a second engine, an 0-6-0T, that will be finished soon so they may be able to expand their offerings in the future.
One thing I said in our press releases and ads is, "This tank engine is REAL". I emphasized the fact that, although this engine is not representative of main line steam power, it is very representative of America's industrial history and thousands of tank engines served at coal mines, quarries, along docks, at factories, and many other industrial applications in the past. Aside from that, it's billowing exhaust, whistle, and escaping steam provided all the steam atmosphere one could expect.
It truly brought a lot of nostalgia to the museum's visitors during the weeks we ran it. We're still getting calls asking when it will run again.
-Jim Herron
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