Has any museum operation within reach of this forum actually surveyed its customers to determine what they would like to see when they visit their museum? I'm only guessing that the average 21st Century non-railfan (the cash-paying customer) would want to see the the Amtrak locomotives and coaches they once rode upon, as well as the steam locomotives which one pulled their parents' or grandparents' trains.

Not a real survey, but visitors at Shore Line Trolley Museum often want to ride open summertime trolleys instead of the more authentic closed cars that the real trolley companies used most of the time, especially in more recent years.

Not a survey, but talking to our visitors and excursion passengers I find 3 main things....
Most of the visitors under 50 years old (read families) have never riden a train.

Visitors want to be able to go through the static display cars and see what they are like in the inside.

Visitors enjoy docents or other museum staff/volunteers explaining things to them.

Bill

The average 21st Century non-railfan has never ridden on Amtrak. Don't believe me? Ask 'em...

Want a train they can relate to from prior experience? You probably won't like the choices..

1) Thomas
2) Light Rail Vehicle/Subway
3) Commuter train for urban areas
4) Heritage trolley, if you're lucky, or more likely a rubber tired bus masquerading as a trolley.
5) The Chance CP Huntington from the local zoo/amusement park

Sadly, the general public these days doesn't ride a lot of trains. Railroad museums are changing from a place where you go and say "Remember when..." into more of a place you go to see something you don't see in the wild, like a zoo with it's elephants and tigers.

Not even.

Railway museums tend to be located out in exurban sprawl, and there, everybody drives, even Barbara Ehrenbach's "Nickel and Dimed" working poor. The chance of a Michigan or Ohio visitor ever having ridden ANY transit in his life? Very close to zero.

You'd expect it to be much better in a traditional bastions of public transit like the Bay Area, where owning a car in San Francisco proper is more of a hassle than it's worth... the BART system makes transit glamorous for the suburbs and near exurbs... and voters consistently support transit (and fund high speed rail!)... and Amtrak runs service almost as dense as the Northeast Corridor. Maybe Fred Krock will pipe in with his own informal surveys of riders at the Western Railway Museum. But it's much worse than you'd expect.

The majority of visitors come to the museum with no sense of context from which to understand our museum. We might as well build an American Civil War museum in Beijing.

So what did Henry Ford say? "If I listened to my customers, I'd be building a faster horse."

So it's not about giving the customer what they expect. Because they don't have a clue. It's about giving them a good experience. We have a lot of room in which to surprise them. I continue to be surprised by the stories I hear from railway museum presentations.

We've done either intercept surveys or customer surveys for about 80% of the feasibility studies we've done over the last fifteen years.

It's more common to have at least some experience with rail-based mass transit, but experience with Amtrak, or prior long-distance, is pretty negligible. The 'nostalgia' era is pretty much over, except for some bus tour and nursing home market segments.

It's always important to remember that in our surveys, it's pretty consistent that the museum/excursion is more than likely to be the first time a visitor has EVER set foot on a train - at least over 50%, sometimes a lot higher. The most typical response is 'something else different to do' on why people come to a railroad museum or excursion.

People pretty much come with large sheets of white paper taped to them. They have no idea what to expect and are receptive. The danger to that is they also 'don't understand' the givens we THINK they do, like this is OLD equipment, it's is 1) noisy, 2) dirty, particularly for coal-fired steam, 3) lacks creature comforts. WE might understand and chuckle over the 'passengers will please refrain', but in this day and age, the concept of that technology, not just the reality, is fairly unthinkable.

The biggest thing I hit, over and over, on satisfaction surveys is a) restrooms and general car conditions, and b) 'all we did was go backwards' back to the start. Honestly, people somehow still think its a big train set loop, or Disney World. Everybody has their work cut out for them for what to do on the return leg of the trip. You'd think people would understand that, but THEY DO NOT.

I think most of us know that there are very few people coming to relive the past as they knew it. So I am willing to go along with there not being a significant "nostalgia" market. But I think there is a market for people who want to experience the history we provide without abandoning all of the 21st century creature comforts. Colonial Williamsburg or the Queen Mary come to mind. So what do we call this market?

You can sell two thing. One is history and the other is an experience. Something amazing is the number of visitors who have never ridden in a vehicle with steel wheels running on steel rail. In one informal survey that number was well over 50%. This is in an area with San Francisco Muni, BART, San Jose and Sacramento light rail, Cal Trains, and of course Amtrak.

With streetcars you can explain that this was the family auto of its day. Typical urban families didn't have either an automobile or a horse. I believe that 50% family penetration of automobile was not until 1915. You can paint a verbal picture of how the public used these cars. Make it relevant to life today. Young men would take their best girl for a trolley ride on a hot summer night because it made a cheap date (some things never change). People would ride cars to amusement parks, ball games, picnics, work, school, and much more. A working Johnson type D farebox demonstration usually draws interest.

The same priciples apply to steam railroads. The train depot was a center of local activity. Families rode trains to visit relatives. Trains transported travelling salesmen. Politicians spoke to assembled groups of voters from open platform observation cars. In many towns the railroad was a major local employer. All this can be built into your verbal presentation together with appropriate photos.

When our museums started, noistalgia was a big draw. Most of those people now are dead or physically unable to come to a museum.

The magic word today is RELEVANT for the general public. Do not cater to the railfans or enthusiasts. They make up only a very small percentage of visitors. If you start talking to railfans, you probably will loose the interest of at least 90% of your visitors.

Fred Krock
Western Railway Musuem

What do we call this market? Well, "Clueless" comes to mind.

I think it was a lot easier in the 60's, and even the 70's, where the docent - the presenter of the experience, was probably IN the group, as Mom, Dad, Grandma or Grandpa. The excursion operator had to run the train and that explanation part was mostly covered. I grew up in that generation, my father taught me, showed me, told the stories, connected it to family history.

Today you are SERIOUSLY lucky if the adult leading the group even knows the difference between a steam locomotive and a diesel. What's worse is that we 'assume' that the riders understand that while the excursion operation is now limited to 15mph (FRAI), the 'real trains' could, and did, operate at 100mph in many locations and this was viable and practical transportation. I cringe when I hear a parent explaining to a child 'that's why nobody rides trains anymore because they were so slow'.... ouch.....

The other funny part is that unlike your typical 'railroad' museum, the streetcar museums as a whole seem to do a rather plausible job on explaining the technology to the public. A rider can at least imagine how an electric streetcar in their town would actually work, and many do, which has contributed to the tremendous increase in light rail, and vintage streetcar, transit operations. The streetcar museums have seeded this well and very much rekindled the transportation debate - we see it all over. Meanwhile, on the intercity rail front,the entire concept of travelling from town to town by train? Really? Well, not so much. There are exceptions (try the Adirondack Railroad between Utica and Thendara!!) but for the most part, not so much..

Over the course of many years of giving tours of railroad equipment and facilities, the activity that has consistently gotten the most positive feedback is to open all the hood doors on a diesel-electric road switching locomotive and identify and explain the function of the visible machinery. Road switchers are a ready-made stage for interpretive presentation.

PC

This has really been an interesting thread. Our museum used to have a very short ride over museum trackage and, to help give the "customer" a better experience for his or her money, we included a tour of our Shop building. This was a nice slow walk with the train conductor talking about whatever equipment was in the building at the time, or what was on the train or perhaps even about the donated building itself. The public seemed to like it very much. Now we operate over short line trackage offering either an approximate 10 mile roundtrip or a 20 mile roundtrip, a nice leisurely ride. The shop tour has been forgotten. Do our current trip offerings give the visitor a better deal? Perhaps they do. Then again, maybe not.

Les

That brings up the question of what you're selling... Do you promote your operation as a "train ride" or as a "museum"? While often the two are intertwined, and railfans don't distinguish, there is a big difference.

Some of the best know tourist railways around are solely "train rides". Grand Canyon Railway and the Napa Valley Wine Train come to mind as operations that do not (as far as I'm aware) make any pretense of being a railroad museum. They both do quite well.

In fact, finding an operation that is both a top notch museum and a top notch railway is more challenging. Strasburg comes to mind, as does Seashore and a few others, but they tend to be the exception.

The first question is what is your museum/railroad's goal. As much as I dislike Mission Statements in a corporate setting, I do think they're very worthwhile in a non-profit organization.

- Bob Harbison

My guess would be that the visitors found the information in the talk / tour provided more context to make the ride experience meaningful for them. When they choose to visit our sites, they have made a small investment in time and money, and thus are already on "our side" in wanting their experience to be enjoyable and meaningful. It is up to us to fill in Randy's white paper with things that make it pleasant and meaningful. If they walk away having learned that they hate train rides because the cars are ratty, the pace slow, the scenery the backs of junkyards, the climate hot and dusty, and the staff interacting with them socially inept, even good restrooms won't save it.

If you run a transit agency, more miles is a better deal. If you entertain, not necessarily. Depends on what those additional miles give and take away.

I'd rather we did a lot less and did what was left well than do a lot more badly in more places more often. What the visitors experience is reality from their POV. We have the power to create that reality. Let's make it worthwhile.

dave

Another one of the things we've run into a lot with the Museum functions is the difficulty of depot/site museums where no moving train experience is offered at all. Pretty much tends to become a food museum without a restaurant. The lucky ones are adjacent to an operating railroad for 'free', but you still can't offer a ride. Anything that moves even a short distance is better than nothing as a demonstration; that includes the trolley loop at MOT and the little 0-4-0 in Savannah; Spencer. The more difficult decision is the 8-mile trip out across the cornfields at 15mph and back and the overall contribution of that to the experience.

One feature I've always put on my surveys is 'trip too long' and 'trip too short' and it usually seems that it breaks into two camps on the distribution curve - those that don't want anything over an hour and those that never want to get off.

I've always admired Strasburg for consistently making a good visitor experience with very little track and a lot of other activity. And one of the things I've always enjoyed it the return short 'sprint' from Goff's into Strasburg, that just for a brief moment, remind people that it DOESN'T always run at 15mph, and the looks on peoples faces when it picks up speed makes for a very nice finale, actually. That same kind of showmanship was happening on TSRR last December for the Polar Express when the train would unload a trip, then back out of sight, then load the platforms for the next train out...and then bring the train back in steam locomotive first, for the grand entrance. The kids just went NUTS. They could have just as easily let the train sit and simply reboard. That's visitor satisfaction, applied.

There's an easy way to find solutions to that dilemna. Just check out what most airplane museums do in the same situation. Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, The Museum of Flight in Seattle are generally recognized as some of the finest museum's around. Neither one "gives rides" except that on rare occasions they do have planes visit Seattle, and possibly the Smihsonian does something along those lines. But the fact of the matter is that 99.9% of the guests aren't getting a plane ride with their visit.

They do other things to help recreate the experience, typically with an on site theatre and a quality film. Full size dioramas are also used.

Sacramento seems to have figured it out, and others could learn from their examples.