I see in the latest newsletter that these organizations have decided to merge. Has there been any discussion on here about this? Not sure if I have strong feelings about it either way.

LOL! Saw that coming.

Before people declare it to be the end of tourist railways, I'd propose it's merely the Internet reducing the relevance of paper newsletters and face-to-face meetings.

The two organizations have been in a slow discussion over the last several years to see where they have common grounds, needs, initiatives and now best to serve their member organizations. They see the combination as a way to better serve and represent the member organizations. Last year the two organizations combined their publications -- Railway Museum Quarterly and Trainline -- into one. This proposal will produce a stronger organization.

For a full explanation see the combined "Presidents' Report" in the newest (Spring, 2011) issues of the combined RMQ/Trainline.

I am a former ARM Secretary and Director and I see this as a forward movement that will benefit both railway museums and tourist railways.

Has this issue been posted on line?

I was able to find the winter one by going to

http://www.traininc.org/trainline/trainline.html

and one comment, corporate mergers --- including those in the non-profit world -- rarely (if ever !) occur overnight and always require a lot of thought and planning.

Bob H

The Spring 2011 issue will be available at the TRAIN website in a day or two. I just got the electronic version late last week, and I was busy with a special event at the MRSR over the weekend so it's not posted yet.

The Spring 2011 issue of RMQ/Trainline is now available for download on the TRAIN website.

http://www.traininc.org/trainline/trainline.html

My concern about a ARM/TRAIN merger is while it seems a natural development, railroad museums and tourist railroads have different missions and purposes. A museum is established to preserve and interpet, while a tourist railroad needs to get people on board, and sometimes with little regard to preservation and historical interpretation.
I am curious how issues such as these will be addressed and any conflicts resolved.

Disclosure: I am an affiliate member of ARM.

Having worked for both, there's a lot of technical overlap, similar business management and structural issues, and above all else marketing and visitor experience concerns in common. It doesn't matter how much you preserve and how well you interpret it if nobody shows up to experience it. The object for both is providing meaningful experiences to visitors that will draw them in in numbers great enough to sustain the business, so what seems to be a philosophical difference is actually a very unimportant detail from a practical operations / programming perspective.

dave

Similar views have been mooted loudly in the last two years' discussions, so certainly people are being mindful of it.

As an association executive, I can tell you that hard dollars and cents speak strongly in favor. Neither organization on its own generates the cash needed to maintain an ideal level of staff support and program activity. Pooling resources will help the combined organization devote a greater proportion of the limited money available to advocacy, training, etc, as opposed to simply administering the mechanics of its own existence.

There have been several joint conventions in the past, and one coming this year. They have been some of the best conventions ever with a wide variety of activities, speakers, and presentations.

The meetings I've been in on basically accepted two truisms:

1) Railroad museums have to behave more like tourist railroads to be customer sensitive, build ridership and attendance, and provide an educational AND entertaining experience....

2) Tourist railroads need to behave more like museums, to appreciate the legacy of the equipment, the accuracy of the presentations, preservation of the assets over time, and educate as well as entertain.

I think the goals of the organizations are essentially different, somewhat, but the overlap in the ven diagrams has shown to be so overwhelming as to make it the driving force here. The voice that the industry needs - particularly in front of the FRA and now even the STB, can only be funded by a larger, stronger, organization. Neither of those organizations differentiate in reverse, for sure.

We have been fortunate to have an OUTSTANDING facilitator in these discussions so far - this has been a thoughtful and well-planned exercise to-date in my opinion.

There's a lot more stratification within the existing organizations that's possibly even deeper - the heavy rail vs. streetcar in ARM, and the shortline freight/part-time diesel excursion and the big-time excursion steam guys in TRAIN. Some of those fault lines run deeper even than this issue does, and we manage to keep everybody in the same tent.

Well put, Randy.

Gee, I've volunteered at railroad museums, tourist railroads, and traction museums--to which camp do I belong? Maybe the psychiatric field can help:

"The diagnosis of Dissociative Rail Preservation Disorder (DRPD) is defined by criteria in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV (DSM-IV). These include: liking both trolleys and trains, liking mainlines as well as branchlines, and liking both large and small locomotives.

DPRD is a relatively new term. The DSM-II used the term multiple foaming disorder (MFD), the DSM-III grouped the diagnosis with other major rail-related dissociative disorders (Gauge-Indifferent Enthusiasm Disorder, Steam-Diesel Displacement Disorder, and Trolleybus Preservation (because that's just wrong on so many levels))."

While I wholeheartedly agree that most museums need to do a lot more to serve their constituents, I would suggest that this should be achieved not by being more like "tourist railroads," but instead by being more like successful non-profit museums. Viable non-profits are not the same as for-profit businesses that just happen to use volunteer labor and not pay taxes.

To the general public one railroad museum tends to look a lot like other railroad museums. Things that are significant to railroad historians like "the first of these" or "the last of those" are far less meaningful to those who have not studied railroad history. What most visitors are looking for is an entertaining and educational experience in a clean and enjoyable location. They want to see and/or ride behind the locomotives and equipment that they would not normally have access to. Museums that give them that kind of access and experience are much more interesting than those the just have the equipment all neatly painted and in a row, usually too close together for effective viewing, and covered with "keep off" signs.

Meanwhile opportunities to create interesting and unusual exhibits that might serve to more clearly distinguish one museum from the others tend to get bypassed because they are just too different and don't fall into the way things "should be". Imagine that you had a really nice switcher or roadswitcher that unfortunately "went swimming". It will never be economically feasible to make it run again and it is presently just a big block of rust occupying track space. Do you scrap it, or do you use it as the core for a really unusual and different exhibit, perhaps by displaying it with one side of the hood opened up to show the machinery or making a partial cutaway out of it. There may be other preserved roadswitchers of that make and model, but how many of them are cutaways? If you are going to get out the cutting torch why not do something creative with it?

Unfortunately, in the US, the decision would usually be to scrap it. And a combined national organization probably won't have much effect on that.

PC

No, it's not about exhibits and an artificially sanitized environment - it's about providing an experience. The best museums bring visitors into a scene and make them a part of what their ancestors might have experienced themselves in a similar scene at a previous time. Context is important. The Book on the Wall isn't.

dave