This is an article I wrote for the Orange Empire Railway Museum's Gazette, their monthly newsletter, while I was in residence there last spring as a full-time volunteer. It was an effort to help them along the road from being a club to being a museum. I think it will help you think more on the club ---> museum transition. It received five stars by some members and no stars by others.

http://railfan44.blogspot.com/2012/09/e ... t-and.html

Reading your article, I'm left with a feeling that the specific things you mentioned that could be taught - with the exception of streetcars running down the streets - were the kind of technical trivia we thrive on, but that would put the average tourist to sleep.

One thing we need to work on - especially in our interpretive programs - is not to let our passions control the content, but to focus on more universally interesting stuff like the human stories that grab people who don't care about deisel electric propulsion and different track gages, but would be fascinated with what streetcars did to allow cities to grow before we had autos and freeways, and why we are building them again since we have no more room in cities for autos and freeways.

CONTEXT, people........everybody wants to know how to get to where they need to go, few of us care about just how the hardware functions to perform that service. If a visitor asks, we should of course explain it to that visitor personally.

dave

In our Museum's most recent newsletter, our Board Chair in his columm addresses this very issue, or at least supports what Dave is saying. Here's Dave French's column.
"Hello everyone! Last month I quoted an article from Railway Museum Quarterly which emphasized the point that the trains and trolleys in museums mean little without human context, and I wish to expound a bit more on that point.
I guarantee you that many if not most of our riders at MSM care little or nothing about the technical aspects of our streetcars. I’ve seen many times how the passengers’ eyes glaze over as a well-meaning Operator goes on and on about the car motors and controllers and trucks and overhead wire and electrical power. What many, if not most, of our customers care about is the human context of this beautiful car they are riding. How many times has a customer told you that they or their parents or grandparents or other family members used to ride the trolley, or that a family member worked for TCRT? Despite that family connection, these folks often do not know much about the street railway system. They like to hear about what was the job like for the trainmen. How many hours did they work? How much were they paid? Did they really have to stand on an open platform to run the car during the Winter in the early 1890’s? How much was the fare? Did kids ride free? How often did the cars run? How could you possibly board the car safely when it was stopped in the middle of the street with automobile traffic on both sides? How many employees did the company have? Did they get to ride the cars for free? Did the cars ever get stuck in the snow? What did you do if the car you were on was blocked by a broken down trolley in front, how could you get around?
These questions and many others can all make good end of the line or carbarn talks and answering them puts that human context on the ride, plus adds a historical connection between our riders and the passengers of long ago, and between our volunteers and the platformen of long ago. In the October issue of Railfan & Railroad magazine, Professor George M. Smerk (Professor Smerk is a member of our Museum.—Ed.) writes in his Transit Currents column about what he calls a historical vacuum: “Most Americans lack any great understanding of the role that various modes of transportation played in the development of the United States.” He goes on to suggest that schools should be better funded and do a better job of teaching transportation history. Well, maybe. I have a lot more confidence in the ability of you, our volunteers, to accomplish this by giving our riders that human context to demonstrate how important streetcars were in the history of Minneapolis, St Paul, Duluth, and the other Minnesota cities that had streetcars.
OK, so I am preaching about educating our customers, about streetcar history in a way that “grabs” their attention by talking about people who ran and rode the cars. But why the heck should that be so important in this day and age? Well, I will tell you. In the same issue of Railfan & Railroad, Alexander Craghead in his Departures column summarizes how railroading right now is really a growth industry in the US: “Tonnage hauled by US railroads is nearly double today of what it was in 1990, and a staggering 12 times what it was in 1900. Railroads have never been as busy and as profitable, and this is, remarkably, during the Great Recession.” He goes on to note that Amtrak has set an all-time ridership record for 8 out of the last 9 years and is likely to do it again this year. Streetcars, light rail, and commuter rail continue to be built at a pace not seen in 100 years. Short lines and regionals have taken over branch lines and made them profitable and kept them in service all over the country. I think back to the 1970’s when the Rock Island folded, the Milwaukee Road abandoned their mainline to the Pacific Coast and weed covered branch lines were simply abandoned, not resold, and I certainly did not think of railroading then as a “growth industry.” Wow, things have changed! So my point is, dear friend and gentle reader, not only is our museum a showcase of the way things used to be, it is also a living connection between the past and today’s resurgence in flanged wheel on steel rail transportation in our country. So not only does that human context apply to the past, it also is very applicable to the future. I look forward to telling folks that our Twin City Lines PCC No. 322 used to run down University Avenue just like the new light rail line will.
I’ll see you on the car!"

Well said, I'd say.

Dave and Jim, I totally agree with you that we need to teach our visitors the historical/community/personal context of what they are riding or looking at. But right now many of our museums do poorly at telling or showing even what an artifact is/was. How many of our static vehicles can visitors only walk next to and can't see into. I remember the comment of one visitor at a museum after he and his children walked beside a non-operating train, "Well we've seen the wheels".

Show and telling is easy compared to teaching what it meant. So my article was about walking before running. But some museums are walking fine and starting to run. I have also been to a museum or two which are still crawling.

Jim, let me ask, say you have a new docent/operator, maybe a young person, maybe an older one who grew up on a farm. How does your museum teach them to be able to answer the types of questions your Board Chair discussed in his column? In 1910 how much was a motorman paid in the Twin Cities? A conductor? How many hours did they work? How many of your current volunteers who interact with visitors can answer those questions correctly? I hope you will answer 100% and tell us how they know.

Let me pose that last question more broadly to everyone who reads this. How many volunteers at your museum or tourist railway can discuss the historical context of what you are trying to show and demonstrate? And how do we get over that hurdle?

When I rode on a train on the Nevada Northern the docent sat in the end of one car and read into a microphone from a loose-leaf binder about what the train was passing through and some of the context. That was effective and I'm sure quite accurate. But what if she were asked a question on something not in the binder like how much was the engineer paid?

Nobody can know everything; there's no disgrace in saying "I don't know, but if you come with me after the tour I'll find out for you."

dave

Interpreting history was one of the joys of running STIB, our Belgian single-trucker last Sunday. After the car made its way on a study Brill 21E truck through the curves and switches and came to a quiet stop for our inbound meet, I explained to our visitors that this experience was typical of street railway transportation 100 years ago. The ride on STIB 1069 was not a "Trolley Car Song" experience, but a noisy, bumpy fact of everyday life. One of the passengers made the connection and wondered alound about how someone managed a ride when carrying groceries, or with a toddler in hand. They got it.

Trying to get all of the operators to deliver this consistent message is another matter. A notebook (or tightly scripted memorized message) as was observed is one option. But then there is the risk of deer in the headlights from the docent/conductor/volunteerwhen a visitor asks a question that is not in the script.

Related to this is a lesson I learned early on. One trip I observed that the passengers were very much enjoying their own company on an afternoon ride. The just did not appear to be engaged or interested in the "welcome to the Trolley Museum" speech. So I wound it up quickly and asked for questions. They continued with their own socializing and seemed quite happy. They weren't rude (that has also happened) , but just enjoying the day. I have picked up on this same scenario many times over the years and adjusted my presentation accordingly. I have yet to figure out how to effectively pass this insight along to my operating colleagues so that they too are able to make similar adjustments in presentation on the fly.

And then there is what can happen when you have three or four precocius 6-8 year olds who need to be engaged in an enitrely different way and a canned speech will just not do. In that case I was fortunate to be mentored by the late Ed Frazier and have kept a few of his tricks and stories on hand. But as with the chatty crowd described above, how do we get the operating staff, who come at us will all sorts of skills and personalities, to adjust to the audience at hand?

Wesley

I agree that we must continue to press forward on telling the railroad story - but there are so many angles.

Also - we should recognize that some people are simply out for the day to enjoy the ride - to be entertained, or to relax. They may have no interest in learning about anything that day!

Many of us haven't even defined the story we want to tell........

dave

Many of us have no choice. We have the museum we have.

Western Railway Museum cannot interpret mid 20th century Canadian steam any more than Steamtown can interpret pacific coast transit.

IRM cannot reconfigure their site to resemble an early 20th century locomotive works. B&ORM cannot reconfigure their museum so the roundhouse is not the focus.

Imagine entering the first exhibit at CSRM and seeing the tunnel portal, a well car with two containers stacked, and a machine notching out the tunnel portal to clear the stack. That would be insane. That is just not what CSRM is.

You have the story your collection tells. Unless you are IRM!

So your choice is linited. Now how do you turn that into a story? Here too there is only limited choice. OERM is in rather a poor position to Interpret Jim Crow. You need an RPO to talk about RPOs. Got Ann Arbor stuff? Talk about avoiding Chicago.

You can't go wrong, any story that makes sense will do. You can change it later.

You have a choice of many stories, even with a small collection. You can choose to tell the story of advances in technological innovation, or the story of commercial development created by cheap reliable transport, the story of how people moved themselves around, the story of how people moved stuff around, the story of how people built a railway business and its evolving prosperity, the story of how having a railroad made it possible to populate a frontier, the story about how all the Swedes moved here because the NP sold them passage and land, the story of the people who ran the trains, the story of the people who killed the trains ..........you probably can't tell them all at once in an entertaining and concise enough manner to please your visitors.

So, again, no matter what you have in your collection, it is only stage props used to tell a story - not every story possible - in a way than interests and affects your visitors and makes them glad they came.

Collections are not much of a limitation, other than if too large you can't keep them up.

dave

Some of us are better than others at this, but the key is to tailor the talk to the audience. If there are small children in the mix, keep it on the short side. If it's a local historical society, talk about the old days in their area and how important trains and trolleys were to the growth of their town. Truck drivers might be impressed by the V20-645 engine if you have an FP-45. We have had visitors who were intrigued by our General Electric rotary converter (the backup source of 600 VDC for the trolley cars). A subject that sometimes comes up at trolley museums is the "General Motors conspiracy theory"--how best to explain this rather complex story to the casual visitor?