The cutaway steam locomotive discussion prompts me to start this topic. There are a lot of non-railroad museums around that have some very interesting display and interpretation methods that might be adaptable to railroad museums. Anyone care to share their observations about displays in other museums they have visited?

One museum that I found particularly interesting was the American Clock and Watch Museum in Bristol, Connecticut. They have some excellent and relatively low-tech provisions for self guided touring. They use a call in number that allows you to use your cell phone to access narration recordings as you walk through the museum by keying in the number of the display you are viewing. They also have a storefront representing a clock makers shop, with a bench in front where you can view the window as spotlights come on to highlight specific items inside the shop while the narration tape tells the story.

Anyone else care to tell about adaptable ideas for displays that they have seen lately?

PC

I have in-laws in Pensacola, FL and when we travel down there, we stop by the Naval Aviation Museum. BTW it appears to be 100% privately funded and is phenomenal-scope of collection, condition of collection, interactive displays, lots of volunteers, etc.

To reply to your post, one thing they did recently was what I'd call a "treasure hunt". When entering the museum, visitors can pick up a special card which is like a treasure map. The map guides visitors to various parts of the museum. At these various parts or stops, the visitor must find the answer to a certain question, and when obtained, the visitor self-stamps a logo from the stop onto the card. At the end of the tour, the card is turned in and the visitor is eligible for various awards. The card asks for the visitors snail-mail and email addresses, and therefore becomes an extra tool for marketing/communications.

I have turned over one such card to the transportation (mostly RR) museum where I volunteer. I can only hope that it will emulated in some fashion at this transportation museum (but I won't hold my breath).

A few years ago on a visit to Denver I stopped by the firefighter's museum, www.denverfirefightersmuseum.org . The second was where the lockers were located, and the museum had removed the doors from several of them. Inside tools, clothing and personal items from different eras were placed on display. The fronts of the "open" lockers were covered with plexiglass as a theft deterrent of course. The overall effect was great, as if you were getting a chance to peer into the everyday life of a fireman, while also showing various technological advancements over the years.

I've often thought this would work well in a railroad museum environment.

Dave

I forgot to mention a few other things about the Naval Aviation Museum. While there are plenty of, yes, shiny airplanes to look at, they do other neat things:

1. One way of getting from one level to another is via one of those old "mobile stairways" (my term) one used to use at airports before tubes took over. This one still has some kind of logo on it. Great way to both display something and get some use out of it;

2. Context, context, context. In addition to the airplanes, there are mockups of aircraft carrier rooms, WW2-era, South Pacific shacks with radio, cot, Life magazine issues...all of the trappings of the era. All of these tell and display a people story relative to all of those shiny, cool airplanes;

3. Tell the story of a hero: there is a small section about John McCain, complete with mockup of the prison cell he occupied while he was a POW. This displays something not many of us would know, tells the story of a hero (I'm not plugging his politics either way; just relaying what I saw here), and, in a theme echoed here and elsewhere, tells us why we should care;

4. Flight simulators. These are offered for an additional fee;

5. A summer camp for youngsters.

Also-the Carolinas Aviation Museum in Charlotte, NC is at a different end of the spectrum. But two things they do should parallel things we can or should do:

a. visitors can get up close and personal to the museum's pride and joy, the Piedmont Airlines DC-3, even while mechanics are working on it. That takes an object and creates a people link, and brings the object alive;

b. the museum has a viewing platform where folks can watch jets take off and land at the adjacent Charlotte-Douglas airport. It's a low-cost, "gee-whiz" factor.

All of this can be done at railroad/transportation museums.

Yes, it is good to see some interest in exhibit design. It is funny that the only way to get everyone on this board talking about exhibits is by theoretically threatening to take a torch to a unspecified derelict and redundant steam locomotive (didn't someone once suggest we create a gulag museum for all the neglected 0-4-0ts?). This every-piece-of-railroad-equipment-is-sacred attitude is going to do us a lot of good when the public figures out that our movement is not really interested in serving them.

I appreciate that there has been a big push to take care of basics; own land, get equipment under cover, restoration, and so on, but it is irresponsible to say that the educational role of the museum is LESS important than the preservation role. With little effort being made to establish one's relevance, or to attract the support of the general public, there is NO reason to bother preserving objects that almost no one will care about in another couple of generations. Yes, demonstration train operations are extremely compelling, but if that is all we've got, what makes us different from the tourist operations, outside of all-volunteer labor?

Exhibits and interpretive display of rail equipment are given an extremely low-priority at the volunteer museums. Several ideas have been mentioned up-thread here and in the sectioning thread, but there are also actual railroad museums that feature well-designed exhibits. Interestingly, these professional railroad museums are the same institutions that the fans (and many here) love to excoriate because they have a bunch of "stuffed and mounted" engines, they have suffered from the same over-collecting problems as everyone else, and they have not gotten #XXXX running again.

In the 5 or so years since I started following this board, there have been very few discussions on exhibit design. The Railroader's Memorial Museum, Steamtown, RR Museum of PA, and California State RR Museum all have devoted significant resources to creating exhibits. Some have been designed by outside professionals, some by museum staff, and some by volunteers. They are geared toward addressing different aspects of railroading and use a variety of techniques. I would love to talk about these; compare what worked and what was popular, their development, some design theories, their cost, etc; but there needs to be an institutional will to make this stuff a priority, and I am just not seeing it.

Excellent comments here!

One of the things that I always wondered was why the public exhibit strategies of the locomotive manufacturers were not at least tried by some of the railroad museums, including the "visible locomotive" method of displaying diesels that worked very well for EMD and was not destructive to the locomotive. There are surviving photos of those EMD visible locomotives on display at state fairs and even at railroad stations in the middle of small cities, with enormous lines of people waiting to see them. All those folks were not walking up and down the outside access ramps to the locomotive just to get exercise.

EMD had this method of display nailed down to the point where the non-operable "visible" locomotive was part of the demonstrator set and traveled with the cab units. They could set it up as a display very quickly, even on the siding at a local railroad station, and could show the locomotive at night since it was equipped with spotlights and internal lighting. There were also a number of times when the visible units were used for training at railroad shops. While it is not practical or affordable for a railroad museum to sponsor traveling displays of this type, perhaps there are worthwhile lessons from their static display methods (and their showmanship)?

By the way, another museum worth seeing and studying is the Owls Head Transportation Museum in Maine, an excellent presentation of many aspects of transportation in a variety of industries. They have a dedicated "Engine Room" where they display diesel, gasoline, and steam engines of various types.

PC

at the Western Railway Museum we have a simple to produce exhibit that is available to any group regardless of what kind of trains or railroads they are dealing with.

It is a display of old post cards in the Bay Area. We have blown them up in some cases. Station and Depot buildings are always popular.

The old time graphics before chrome color cards was wonderful.

Especially if your museum has any Diesel era passenger equipment there are bound to be post cards of it.

They are easy to mount on portable display stands and I have watched people enjoy them or show the kids " This is our town way back when"

Ted Miles

When visiting RR museums I see much about things, equipment, etc., but see very little about the people that worked on the railroads. I know there are exceptions, but the emphasis is always on things. We need to do a better job of telling the story of the workers in an interesting way. What about the mechanics, the car inspectors, the track gangs, dispatchers, station agents, RPO clerks, Pullman porters, etc?

On another note...where I volunteer we have started a place to display railroad ads. Some of them a quite colorful and interesting. Over the holidays we displayed Christmas ads. We a changing it out to display WWII ads. Visitors seem to enjoy looking at them.

The advertising is indeed fascinating, and quite adaptable to display use.

It would also have been nice if the designers of steam and first generation diesels had gotten more attention from the railroad historical community, but that opportunity was largely missed and the telling of their stories has now been passed along to those of us who knew them. It is an area where first-hand accounts of history would have been much better than second-hand re-telling. Back in the 1970s I tried to point out the time critical aspect of documenting personal history to some of the groups where I was a member, unfortunately with too little success. The people get older, eventually they get to the point where they cannot travel and drop out of sight, the next thing you hear is when they are gone. Too late then. Sometimes we get preoccupied with counting every rivet and oblivious to who designed the equipment or why it was developed.

I would like to mention the USS SLATER Destroyer Escort Museum in Albany, New York for their excellent adaptation of the existing lockers and structure of the ship into display area. This museum ship also provides an interesting example of how to use a website. Their pages with identification photos of historically correct items they are seeking for display are particularly effective. The USS SLATER also has a very dedicated volunteer organization, including several teams of veterans who "commute" to the ship from the midwest in shared transportation. The ship has a fully restored and functional galley to feed the volunteers on board, which allows them to make the best use of their available time on site.

PC

PC,

Yes the USS Slater is a very outstanding group. They have even had one of our volunteers who is an old time radio expert doing projects for them.

Their web site has a newsletter that is well worth reading; one month later than their members see it.

Speaking of radios the railroads used them long before the current style of hand held types. I have never seen a museum display on railroad communication all the way from hand lanterns to GPS.

I wonder how many visitors who see the manikin at several museums with an oil lantern in his hand know what he is doing.

Ted Miles

Ted, we have a very active local railroad enthusiast group out here, the Norfolk County Railroad Club which meets at the library in Norwood, Massachusetts. The gentleman who plans their meetings has been very successful at getting presentations by industry professionals, and this has included programs and clinics on signaling and communications. There was an excellent program last year by a presenter who showed and demonstrated many kinds of radio equipment from his collection. When technical programs like this are available, they are very well attended. There are a lot of people out there who are searching for things other than the typical color slide shows.

PC

Yours truly will present a program on segregation aboard DC's streetcars and buses. We're using the public library meeting room since our facility is closed for moving.

http://dctrolley.org/Feb1.htm

Wesley