Aarne (and others):

I belong to a museum (name withheld so as to avoid any appearance/inference of flaming, in deference to our moderators). Operating steam locomotive(s) used to be the norm at this museum (at least for the period where I have visited it); it stopped about 3 years ago. Currently there is an animated debate on if/how to get steam operating at the museum again (other than visiting steam, such as "Thomas").

A term used in this debate from time to time is "sustainable steam". I remembered an article you had in TRAINS magazine some years ago on this very topic. Lo and behold, I found the issue-December 1996-up in my attic last night. I think this article is as timely today as it was in 1996.

For those who didn't have access to this article, I define "sustainable" as (a) having an income/accounting model to (b) have sufficient funds on hand to do timely repairs, without (hopefully) having to pass the fundraising hat.

I think Erik Ledbetter's fairly recent article in Trains magazine may be more of an operational sustainability focus (but is great food for thought nonetheless). Others may have other definitions of "sustainable"; I don't wish to start another yawn-debate on semantics (such as "facadism" vs. "preservation").

What new observations/lessons learned do you (or others) have to share on the topic of "sustainable"?

I'm not Aarne, but had a bit of experience on this line. Ignore this if you like.

You have the benefit of your own case study to consider, rather than an amorphous broad vision. This is very good - and provides a much more concrete beginning point, and hopefully some good information to work with.

Did steam fail or not? Was it adequately supported with dollars from visitors? Is there affordable local infrastructure for maintaining it? Fueling it? Disposing of waste and similar regulatory quagmiracal issues? Were the people in charge and the entire corporate / management culture devoted to maintaining it as an integral, organic part of the mission? Management structure appropriate for that job or based on other models? Is steam operation in fact a defined critical component of your mission at all?

If it did fail, there may be changes that can be made to recreate the basis / mission / organizational structure / key personnel / regulatory environment / whatever ....such that the museum could be reborn in a form better able to continue to operate and maintain steam.

If not, you might be wise to start from the POV of what a sustainable steam program looks like, and start with a blank slate and spec out a workable model based on successful operations, locations, support structures, management structures and cultures. You can then shop for the right place with critical components in place or readily available at the current time to make that happen.

Also consider what your sustainable steam program needs to be. Supporting a mainline 4-8-4 in high speed, long distance service is very different than switching a few cars around the yard with a tank engine for demonstration purposes. There's a lot of ground in between these extremes. You need to run enough to recover the capital investment and set aside capital for the next overhaul, while covering operating expenses - which also means you run just enough but not too much as hauling empty trains wears out equipment and burns operating days with no income as rapidly as hauling full trains of paying butts in seats. With foresight, you will choose a venue with enough existing tourist potential to provide the right number of operating days and assemble the right batch of rolling stock and trackage to make a winning combination.

Technoligical sustainability is easy - mostly mechanics and applied engineering which is being explored on SteamTech, so no need to go into that here too. It is pretty dependent on regulatory and resource structures, and people, so it overlaps well with the less technical issues mentioned above.

dave

Just reviewed the new TRAINLINE which includes some mention of the decision at Grand Canyon to stop running steam and its repercussions. According to that editorial, the decision was entirely a business matter based on costs VS benefits, and steam marginilized itself out of service. Costs are much higher than diesel power, trains were not full, and the passengers didn't care what hauled them to the canyon. In a shrinking economy, they chose to run less costly service. So states the editorial. Believe what you will, it sounds realistic to me.

OK, fine and well. CGRR is slated to host the 2009 TRAIN annual convention. It is mantioned that some expressions of purposely not attending it are based on the decision to retire steam power.

So, I'm wondering: how much is it really an emotional reaction to the decision (Those Bastards! How dare they etc......) VS the reaction based on "if it can't be made to work given the tourist potential at CGRR, what hope is there for the rest of us? "

Seems to me that there is a lot of room and an appropriate venue available at that meeting for a real involved discussion of this subject, and a less mechanical, more marketing-oriented basis for the entire meeting might be considered. Anybody then who chooses not to take part based on such foolishness will certainly be a loser........

Point: steam wasn't the sales pitch - the majesty of a huge and colorful hole in the ground is. Does this enter into the equasion? Maybe this audience doesn't care, but does that mean that every audience at every operation shares that lack of concern?

Point: could the marketing mix have been altered to reinforce the importance of motive power in the mix, and profitably, thus rendering the economic slowdown moot by filling the trains anyhow due to the marketing power of the use of steam?

In counterpoint, we have empirical evidence of a tourist line in Colorado doing well in a first steamless season while a small tourist railroad in the southeast shows visitors support it greater numbers on steam days, and expect steam and show up for it based on the prominence of steam in the brochure.

Item: how has the Great American Saddletank Touring Show operated by the Gramlings affected the smaller venues, most of which have no other steam on offer? Might this be a good sustainable model?

Just a few off the cuff ideas here - but related to issues many of us will face whether we want to or not. Under these circumstances, I'd rather be better informed than wishful.

What do you guys think?

dave

I'm not sure I can recall offhand what I wrote in 1996. I suppose I could look up the old magazine, but I might be embarrassed by what I wrote, and since I've been paged, here goes.

I've had maybe two insights on this matter since 1996. Two insights in 12 years is about my speed. As I recall, I wrote about trying to match the rate of reinvestment in the chooch to budgeting from available revenues. That is as big a problem as ever, and seems to be getting bigger for everyone who uses steam. But I would add a couple more considerations. More than budgeting is probably involved when a steam locomotive stops running, especially at a nonprofit institution.

Dave, you've discovered on your own what I was going to call the Grand Canyon rule: if the Grand Canyon is outside the coach windows, it doesn't matter what's on the front of the train. For everyone else, it matters. How much depends on your organization's mission, product, and the environment in which you're marketing the product. If you've got the back yards of Owosso, Michigan outside the windows, with rusty GMC pickups and unstylish sunbathing Michiganders, it matters a lot. It even matters if you're in bucolic Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, surrounded by highly-merchantable Amish folk. In these scenery-disadvantaged environments, the steam engine is much of the show, and maybe the whole show if you call yourself a steam museum. Our winter trips wouldn't sell out months in advance at high prices without the front of a Berkshire coming out of the snow, looking VERY much like the cover of a popular children's book. That scene is our South Rim.

The question is how to keep that scene happening. Most railroad museums are getting tolerably good at devising and adhering to a mission statement, so I won't bring that up. I will point out that things change, though. We stumbled into the Christmas-trip franchise. It wasn't in the first prospectus for our organization, and it may not work forever. New products will always have to be tried out, and added to the mix if they prove popular, all while conforming to the mission. This has been Insight No. 1: it's still hugely hard to turn a steam locomotive into a marketable product that covers its cost. Maybe it's impossible; the long-term results aren't in yet. Sharp marketing and luck seem to be involved, and both are in short supply. Hopefully, you're not out of both at your museum.

Insight No. 2 involves a variable I left out of the 1996 editorial: people. I suspect if you analyzed the long list of Steam Engines that Don't Run (Any More), for every failure of budgeting or business plans there would be a people failure. These engines only run if someone wants to make them run. We've seen some astonishing triumphs of sheer determination over crummy machinery in recent years, and we've seen some basically-sound machines parked because the people responsible simply became exhausted and no one else stepped up to the job.

People's effort needs to be budgeted just like money, only more carefully. We seem to be having some success at that. The 1225 North Pole Express trips are unbelievably demanding on volunteers' time, but we've managed to pull it off for 5 years now, including all those ties and cups of cocoa. Still, the demands on our people are evident every time this thing runs.

Attracting and retaining volunteers is a big topic that has been taken up elsewhere, and will be again, but when a nonprofit society abandons steam power, I suspect the problem lies here and not in the chart of accounts. At the Steam Railroading Institute, we're lucky that our operation generates enough cash to let us pay sharp people to manage the operation day to day. The biggest job of T.J., Greg, Jodi, Chad and the rest of the paid help is to create an environment that makes 80 or 120 other people WANT to come and drill out telltale holes and dig ties. The one piece of advice I have on this score is, don't hire from the bottom of the barrel, and make people skills a major hiring qualification. Even at the risk of starving other items in the budget, including the locomotive sinking fund I wrote about in the original article.

Mechanical Footnote: "Hello, ship."

I don't know if a mechanical problem sidelined your organization's steam locomotive(s), but I'll add one footnote on hardware, brazenly swiped from experts in the field: don't undertake more repairs at once than you need to. A steam locomotive is an assemblage of parts that all wear out on different calendars, and it's easy to fall into the trap of trying to do everything "right, right now." My original point was that you need to match your budget to these rates, for tubes, firebox, engine, foundation rigging, wheel profile, et c. If you try to undertake all defects at once, the problem can grow unmanageable.

I got to see an example of how to do this at a recent SRI board meeting, when incoming CMO Greg Udolph presented his assessment of the state of the various components of PM 1225. The goal was to divide all the work that the engine will eventually need into an affordable calendar built around the 15-year inspection. Some work will be done in advance of the 15-year teardown. Other jobs will be combined with the inspection, and still others delayed.

Literary-minded steam foamers will recognize this process from the opening chapter of "The Sand Pebbles," where Jake Holman says to himself, "Hello, ship," and wriggles through the bilges of the San Pablo until he knows where every pipe goes and what every valve does, and knows exactly what kind of s***box he's dealing with. I realized I was seeing the results of Greg's first several months of wriggling under PM 1225 (no pit in the new shed). There has to be someone in your organization who can do this, or there's no point in turning a wrench on the locomotive.

I don't know if you have seen the survey results from NPE, but T.J. put a question in the survey asking how important the steam engine was to the experience. The available choices went something like this:

I would not buy tickets again if it was not pulled with 1225
It was important
Somewhat important
Not Important (heck, we could get away with pulling the train with a diesel.)

You know what nearly everyone said (the last time I was updated at least)? Most of the people said that they would not purchase tickets again if it was not pulled with 1225. I guess that answers the question that volunteers are gonna have to work their butts off on the 15-year.

Why not? You have a mission, presumably a charitable one if you have a 501(c)(3) status, and your job is to execute on that mission. If your mission is to tell a story and you need steam to do that, then it's entirely proper to set fares which are affordable to your constituency, and then close the gap through fundraising. How many operations do we know that absolutely run steam at a loss? Huckleberry... Steamtown NPS...

There's something to be said for "running your nonprofit like a business"... but not to the extent that you become indistinguishable from a for-profit business.

So for a museum the real question is what program services do you want to provide, and can you find a way to fund those program services. It's not, like, "bad somehow" if some of that money comes from donors instead of the farebox.

Aarne, Dave, HF, and Robert-thanks for your thoughts on this!

A couple more thoughts:

1. Asking people who have bought tickets to ride behind 1225 if they want to ride behind 1225 is a bit like asking the choir at First Baptist if they would join the Baptist church or would they prefer a grove of Reform Druids? Nice information about those who you are already reaching, nothing enlightening from those you are not. I'm more concerned about knowing why those not participating are making that choice.

2. Donors are great icing on the cake, poor bread and butter. Corporate donations are much reduced of late, as are the number of profitable corporations. Private donors are pretty well strapped just paying their bills. It isn't a popular philosophy (what about me is?) but if you are not providing a function in society that is found worthy of providing the necessary community support to cover your costs from earned income, you need to reconsider your mission or your strategy and actually reach and impact enough people such that you are, or you will die a deserved death from institutional irrelevance.

dave

Perhaps a more british model should be adopted here in the states. In England I have found there are many locomotives that travel between heritage railroads, spending a few weeks or months at each. The United States has long had a surplus of steam: the fact of the matter is as things stand now we have more operable locomotives than demand, which results in previously operational locomotives in good condition sitting idle or, worse, going on display and eventually lapsing out of their operable condition. Meanwhile some museums have no permanent steam, or have the steam but not the money to restore it to operation. Railroad museums and tourist railroads get business, in the most part, due to the locomotives, not the scenery. Museums rotate their exhibits, why not their locomotives (And here I mean more than trucking thomas or flagg 75 around the states). Create a mobile locomotive pool that can be leased or used for given events. Idle steam does no one any good. Just image, a formerly all diesel railroad holding a "steam month", hyping the presence of a historic steam locomotive of grand scale giving excursions all month. Raise the ticket price, split profits between the hosting road and the locomotives owners. End result, the locomotive stays in maintenance, and the road in question has money to improve their infrastructure or finish the restoration of "good old 103" that was begun in 1980-something.

The only problem I could see would be transport, as mainline roads are less than friendly to steam locomotives using their tracks, even in transit. But then, that's another issue entirely.

This is the conventional wisdom in railway preservation, but it does not seem to be true with a lot of other non-profits; most especially history museums. Scott Cessna and others are fond of saying that "Non-profit is not a business plan," and that is certainly true, but non-profits are not the same as for-profit businesses. A non-profit business plan must be different. A great many (non-railroad) museums do not cover the cost of their programs from admissions and memberships. They rely upon a variety of funding sources (donations, grants, subsidies, etc) to perform their mission. They may need to curtail some of these activities in response to the economic climate, but these outside funds often make up a major portion of their budgets.

A lot of folks in our movement do not seem to understand that there are a lot of resources available to sophisticated non-profits that understand the importance of politics, community outreach, and public service. In fact, it seems that a lot of non-profit railroad museums are run like marginal businesses that don't have to pay their employees. There is a whole world of professional non-profit administration out there that the rail world often seems to not notice.

My theory is that many railroad museums have not had to worry about this stuff, because the tourist railroad model has dominated our movement and has been able to provide a marginal level of success. This business model has prevented a lot of groups from maturing into true public-benefit non-profits.

We are based primarily on a historic model based in the 1950's - '60s. Whether this is a blessing or curse or doesn't matter - who knows? It is what we are and where we are coming from.

I'm fairly sure that railroad museums are cursed, however, with the same curse as many post industrial revolution industrial history museums. That era of our national history is exceptionally colorful, vital and completely dirty, wasteful, unfair and politically incorrect. So, while it presents a lot of wonderful lessons to be interpreted, it presents a lot of problems garnering support that other more culturally acceptable subject matter interpreters have largely overcome, by not being perceived as that in the first place.

We've built a huge popular mythology and well supported preservation movement based on our colonial past, and the subsequent revolution. It has been convenient to leave out the less acceptable portions of reality in constructing that mythology. Artifacts representing handmade crafts have greater popularity and percieved value than mass produced items which are probably more robust and reliable, and less costly.

So, we are in the industrial ghetto of historic preservation and we need to recognise that reality and deal with it as best we can. Comparing us with Williamsburg isn't valid, in terms of support structure. Hell, our own railroad industry doesn't contribute too much to preserving and interpreting its history so why should private foundations or wealthy individuals do better?

What we need is George Washington's inaugural train........

dave

Dave, I have a great deal of respect for your opinions and insights here, but I do not agree with the premise that railroad history is in some way inherently unsavory to the American public. A lot of people really like trains, and I am not talking about railfans. I would actually argue that this has been a part of our problem. Some degree of marginal success is easy to achieve due to this fact. This marginal success has done just enough to prevent railroad preservationist from having to invest in developing the kind of support or institutions that that other history (and art) museums have.

I use the example of the California State Railroad Museum far too much, but it is one of Sacramento's best attractions, and certainly not in spite of being a rail museum. They do not have the huge state-subsidy some imagine, and they do not have an exceptionally scenic train ride. I suppose not everyone has the Transcontinental Railroad to build a museum around, but that is really only a part of the museum's story. They have all-weather indoor display of many beautiful and intriguing artifacts. They do a good job of telling the human stories, and they are easy to get to.

I recently visited the Tenement Museum for the first time in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The museum itself is an 1870s(?) tenement building that is mostly preserved in an arrested state of decay (a few rooms have been restored to represent specific eras of use). I was expecting some expecting some really dry and depressing stuff. Here is a museum dedicated to poverty, immigration, and the minutia of turn-of-the-century housing reform, and to my surprise, I discovered it was very popular. Their tours are very well designed, and all of the dry history stuff is presented as background to the stories of specific and real families that once lived in their building. In this case, people are probably drawn by an interest in their ancestry. Many visitors are probably descended from folks that may have lived in that very neighborhood in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.

I don't see why similar stories can't be used to solicit public interest in railroad history. A lot of people are already inclined to think trains are kinda cool. You must admit that most rail museums do a poor job of telling stories that are interesting or relevant to the visiting public. Some museums still barely understand that they are there for the public. They survive off the income from the ride and the efforts of volunteers that love their museum (club).

Anyway, I strongly believe the tools and techniques used in the rest of the non-profit museum world are applicable to railway preservation. In fact, they may be essential to the movement's future.

Small world...a Tenement Museum fan here on RyPN! My wife and I visited the Museum last year. They do a lot within the decayed structure. I think that decayed setting adds a lot to the experience. Somehow it wouldn't be the same if perfectly restored, because I imagine the building decor was never much to look at anyway. Their docents are obviously well trained to tell the stories of the families. I always look for new ideas on such visits and came away with several.

http://www.tenement.org/

Wesley

Actually it's kind of funny. All that's true, but we have a special exemption. :) We have the astonishingly good fortune of being the chosen and anointed transportation mode of the greenies, the new urbanists, the anti-wars, the "let's be like Europe" crowd and the energy-independents. Ours is the only transportation mode that can be powered by windmills, nuke or coal. The robber barons are long-forgotten, deregulation has worked, and every town outside the northeast and midwest is putting in new streetcars. Despite the recession, 23 out of 32 public referendums on rail projects passed, including bona fide high speed rail. We have the most rail-loving government in decades. Everybody loves us.

We're historians. Can anyone name a time in history when the population has had a higher regard for railroads than now?

What can we do with that?

[quote="robertmacdowellWe're historians. Can anyone name a time in history when the population has had a higher regard for railroads than now? quote]

Anytime before the Eisenhower administration that wasn't fraught with robber baron or labor conflicts with the industry. In respectful disagreement, I see (and it may be a regional difference) very little public support for railroads among the general populace, relative to a wishful longing for a return to the 1970's economic era of lots of cars and trucks on an ever increasing road system suported by subsidized cheap fuel. What support there may be for commuter rail is based on the private interests of deveopers who want to built to increase the value of their properties along alignments, and a few individuals who are from civilized places and don't want to have to drive to get anywhere. As for the greenies - where's the trails-to-rails?

dave