I realize that this is a challenge for which there's no easy or quick answer and one we've no doubt visited in the past, but I wanted to broach it while it's fresh in my mind.

I had the pleasure of attending a fund raiser luncheon this noon in Pottsville,Pa. to generate support for the 113 loco. restoration project which is coming along nicely. Much credit goes to Bob Kimmel and his merry band of warriors who have been hard at work on this for more than a decade and are now nearly finished to return the 133 to service. As my late father was a lifelong CRRofNJ man this engine holds a special place in my heart as it will be the sole CNJ steamer under steam when she returns to service later this year.

The event was well attended with about 100 folks there and a nice buffet luncheon served.

Of the roughly one hundred attendees approx. 90 were senior citizens and of that 90 I'd guess that the median age of that group was 70-72 years old. Bottom line is that a decade from now most of them will no longer be with us and whose going to keep the steam torch burning???

What can we do to generate interest in the younger generation, if anything??

Sure would like to find a good idea or two as I'm afraid the way things are going in not too many years there'll be too few interested to keep steam alive.

Hope I'm wrong.

Ross Rowland

Hey Ross, we're definitely out there. I'm 18 and will soon be starting as a volunteer at Greenfield Village. I've watched the guys work on the locomotives and related operations there since I was little and have always had a desire to get out there myself. I'm really hoping to learn a thing or two about how everything works while I'm there.

In my opinion, an early exposure is key to sparking the interest. Not everybody will stick with that interest as they grow up, but a few might.

As I said, I've been riding the trains at Greenfield Village since I was born. My grandfather exposed me to the model railroading aspect and it all kind of built on from there.

Things like the "Day Out with Thomas" events are also a good way to get kids exposed. I know I had at least a dozen Thomas the Tank Engine videos that I watched regularly when I was little.

There are more then enough young guys out there that are willing to step in, but wont. 75% of my friends fit that gap. The problem is 74% of those people, have zero interest in the politics of it all, that just about every group has. This ranges from the classic person who refuses to step out of power, even when they can barely walk to the crew in the engine, but wont let anyone touch a single thing. These are just some raw examples. Theres a handful of museums that have this figured out, but many just dont get it, year after year.

The people are out there, its just finding them..

Maybe we ought to make up signs saying something like this to hang up in our museums:

The job of any experienced volunteer
when a young volunteer appears
is to train the young one to be his/her replacement.

Problem is, as stated before, the attitude needs to change toward the younger crowd...foamers they may now be, but so were and are those who are now "up there in age" - they just don't show it as much. Taking the interest of younger folks and engaging them in what you're doing has a wonderful outcome in preserving the future of this industry.

On the same token, the younger crowd needs to realize with age comes wisdom; you do not know it all and acting like a know it all is going to get you no where, very fast. Been there - done that, has a more powerful, true meaning than one can imagine.

I have to say of my experience, the Wilmington & Western is very friendly toward the younger crowd, it was when I started there back as a teen in the late 80's and it still is today, as evidenced by the many younger folks who work hand in hand with the "older crowd". There were some old heads who were stuck in their ways, but gradually even they changed their ways or left.

When I was there, you had 2 retired Reading steam engineers and a retired B&O Conductor who also worked the W&W's line when it was just a freight line under B&O ownership, working with regularly alongside guys and gals who were College Professors, Higher ups in the du Pont industry, Chemists, Teachers, Blue Collar workers, County Officials along with high school and college aged students and other "average folks", all of whom had never put a finger on a piece of railroad equipment before. I learned quite a bit just by watching these experienced individuals and their students "do their thing"... and enjoyed working along side them all and learning much.

I know there are many other operations out there like the W&W that are friendly toward the younger crowd, I just offered them as a first hand experience.

These organizations need to operate like a giant outdoor classroom. There are teachers and there are students, respect is mutual, and needs to be given. Students need to listen and learn, teachers need to engage. Plain and simple.

What Ross speaks of with regard to the fund-raiser was very commonplace years ago, but its slowly giving way as the older folks die off. This is a double edged sword...the wisdom is being lost, but the doors are opening for the grasshoppers....a happy medium needs to be gained before its too late.

I like that... I will be forwarding your suggestion to our curator and our current board at RMEO!

I was on Bytown Railway Society's restoration crew at age 16, steam crew at age 18, and helped found RMEO at 20... I've been there for 34 years now. I definitely believe in welcoming and encouraging young blood!

Steve Hunter

I have been reading these same remarks for decades. It was the common lament back in the 1980s when L&RP was in publication and I was in my teens. Now I am pushing 40 and am rapidly becoming one of the old heads. A generation of the old heads has since passed and rail preservation is still around and attracting new supporters every day.

I have far more rail preservation oriented friends in their teens and 20s than in their 60s thru 80s. We are here, but we don't go to Saturday luncheons. When we get north of 60 then we will start going to the luncheons!

For what it's worth, I'm a 25 year old who would have loved to attend the 113 luncheon/fundraiser but was obligated to be somewhere else today. If I lived in the area I'm sure this is a project I would have tried to be involved in for many years. As far as the overall question of how to attract youngins, there is no one answer. However I think there is a huge disconnect, on the whole, between people my age or younger and anyone older than us. It is directly related to technology. What can be done to bridge the divide? If your reading this your probably already doing it. I truly believe that this is one of the largest factors.

As a 31 year old "Millennial" or "Gen Y" male, I think myself qualified to respond here. In many ways, life for our group is much more hussle bussle and ridiculously busy than it was for previous generations. When I read in books about the adventures of folks like Hastings, Collins, Krause, and Crist I'm green with envy. This envy is not only for what was available to them in railroading but also in free time. They didn't have to worry about answering work email or making sure that all their notes in Xactanalysis were up to date in reply to some corporate goon on a Sunday afternoon.

Automation makes it so that our gang is on the clock at our jobs 24/7. This is in conjunction with friends, family, and spouses who now expect constant access to your attention via social media, electronic devices, etc. This is on top of the conventional duties of fatherhood, marriage, homeownership, and the like.

Although grouchy old man syndrome may be a contributing factor in addition to club politics; the times are different too. Plus, don't forget about an economy where things cost twenty times more than a few years ago yet most people make the same per hour or maybe even less.

When I was in college, I got to work around steam and the railroad for three years. That time was and will always be very special to me. However, due to the realities of marriage, fatherhood, and the burden of responsibility that is my job (a non-railroad related vocation), trains will likely be for me what baseball was to "Moonlight" Graham. Perhaps, someday I'll have my Roundhouse of Dreams. :) Until then, I will cling to my rare moments of opportunity to go be a spectator of the rails and be thankful for the efforts of those who are blessed with the time available.

I'll be turning 27 this year, and feel like I should commend folks who have reached out and encouraged me in this avocation over the years.
I don't know that my personal story is any "recipe for success" but it may help.
When I was just a kid my grandfather used to take me on walks after school by the railroad tracks and the sound of a passing train was a constant in my childhood. My other grandfather was an avid Lionel collector and we shared a lot of good times over those toys. Really though, it was my parents taking me to see functioning and displayed locomotives that got me interested in volunteering and working on steam, and railroads more than anything. There is something in a young boys mind, or at least my own, that upon seeing a live locomotive, seeing others cold or forlorn just makes you want to breath life back into them, the same way a child might nurse a bird with a broken wing back to health. At that age you are only limited by how big you can dream, and I was dreaming pretty big.
When I was around 12 or 13 I started volunteering on the previously mentioned G-5 #35. At that young age, though my skills were limited, I was given tasks to be in charge of and jobs that needed doing. Once, i wire brushed the entire inside wrapper of a firebox. Looking back, I am not really sure why this needed to be done, but at the time I felt a great sense of accomplishment.
At around the same time I began to notice "foamers". I will say that as a young adult, these strange folks were possibly the biggest motivation to leave. Now, looking back I know it is not fair to stereotype in this way, but you get the sense that some folks just get way too excited about trains in the wrong way, or their excitement lacks depth of intellect. I really feel that this is a disservice and may cause young folks to leave the hobby, rather than embrace it.
To sum these are my overall thoughts:
Get kids involved in a meaningful way and give them responsibilities and teach then something that suits their interests.
Approach things from a living history point of view. Those with sufficient interest will go back and read books to fill in their gaps in knowledge later on.
Trains with faces telling allegorical moral stories are good (you know what I'm talking about) but just make sure you are their to make the transition to trains without faces when they aren't cool anymore.
Keep foaming railfans at a distance. The blossoming volunteer will either embrace foaming themselves or reject the hobby altogether because of that maladjusted group. Or they may remain unafiliated and walk the narrow precipice in the middle which is that of the railroad preservationist.

Ross, thanks for this topic and that visit in 614's cab back in 98.

Steve Piwowarski

I don't want this to turn into a politics-laden screed, but it may turn out that way.

The rail preservation movement--the little local museums, the Strasburgs, the Museums of Transport, the trolley museums--generally got their starts in the post-WWII "Greatest Generation/Great Society" eras, when people worked to retirement and then did stuff in retirement, living off of pensions and Social Security. (It was also an era when "women knew their place," families had 3.2 kids and a dog, Dad smoked a pipe and drank martinis, etc.) Folks did stuff until they got married, then went and raised their families, and then returned to volunteer with their church, the Rotary, the fire department, the school board, the Loyal Order of Water Buffalo, Red Cross, Scouts, or whatever after the nest was empty and/or they retired.

The young people I'm talking with today, rightly or wrongly, are cynical about their future. The young ones that I know and work with that I see as potential future leaders, the ones with brains and drive, the ones I hope we pass torches to in every endeavor, seem largely cynical about the future. They see the numbers in the big battles over Social Security, view the entire thing as a legal "Ponzi scheme" (again, I'm not saying that idea is right or wrong), and they say "Retirement? Hah!" It'll never happen..."

This doesn't just affect us in rail preservation. It will (should it come to pass) affect ALL philanthropy and volunteerism. I truly cherish the fact that I work with 80- and 85-year-olds that are "too damn busy to slow down" or "busier now than when I was working!", and that I have a 70-year-old that says "No way I can die until I catalog and label the rest of these 150,000 slides...". But no one is coming forward to replace them. And I don't think we smell bad or whatnot.

At one place I work with, we have but four people that I am aware of that are under 50--out of a cast of maybe fifty. And one has autism and needs some supervision. This syndrome is common with a lot of fields with which I work--ham radio, ethnic cultural societies, historical-artifact organizations (lighthouses, covered bridges, historical buildings, etc.), folk music, etc.

An interesting suggestion that comes at too late an hour: Immerse yourself in an organization that attracts a younger audience, and find out, literally, "what makes them tick." I once volunteered with both a major science-fiction convention and a major Japanese animation convention, both times at the invitation/begging of others to assist in specialized functions. The mental, cultural, and environmental shift was like night and day. The sci-fi crowd/con, after 30+ years, had basically "calcified" and was set in its ways, for better and worse--same regimen, same procedures, same hardware, same structure. The anime convention, a movement that effectively spun off of part of the sci-fi convention environment, was free to write a whole new paradigm or matrix, and change things on the fly. When I parted ways with them both, the sci-fi con was pulling in the same 1,500 people it had for years, while the anime con had to cap attendance at 30,000 by orders of fire marshals, and was launching a second convention on the other side of the country.

One last note: One of the most promising potential volunteers I ever knew, a guy who bought rail equipment and donated it to museums and engaged in "subterfuge" to get other equipment to other museums, a noted photographer whose work appeared in official company publications and promotional material, a "walking encyclopedia," a rail employee who was still proud to be a railfan......... died of a heart attack about a year before his retirement from Norfolk Southern.
You get robbed like that enough times, you get cynical.

The live steam community, can't recall exactly which organization, uses "each one teach one"

Are things different on the west coast? We seem to have quite a few young volunteers, as well as a few females. Not sure why, but it works...

I am currently, as I type, trying to coax more than one potential "young gun" not to "jump ship" and flee the hobby because of this syndrome, and more.

We're not necessarily talking the outrageous "foaming" parodied so well in that notorious YouTube video, or the propensity of certain folks to document every movement of every train or locomotive past them, or even the way some party insisted that a locomotive was sunk in a quarry. In one particular case, the guy is walking away from us because, in his [paraphrased] words, "I'm seeing the same [balderdash] in online comments and 'discussion' in the hobby that I came to despise in schools and playgrounds. Name-calling, egomania, and politics. I don't need this."

There exists a "page"/website online somewhere that was set up for the sole reason of mocking and "bullying" another particularly overzealous railfan. I'm not going to tell you what it is; too many already know, and some of us are trying to have it shut down. If I found the instigators, I'd take them behind the proverbial coal pile. THIS is the rubbish that turns off our prospective volunteers--they hear this kind of stuff, and don't want anything to do with the "high school clique"-ish behavior they though they finally left behind for good.

One museum I have worked with had a sign, a year or three ago, up on the "notice bulletin board" of the crew room, explicitly ordering (and I paraphrase), "THOU SHALT NOT TALK ILL OF ANY OTHER RAIL MUSEUMS IN ANY CAPACITY WHILE ON DUTY!" This stemmed from an incident where some "gossipy trash talk" about another rail museum's "problems" between crew members was overheard by some visitors from another group in a position to effect beneficial transactions (trades, partnerships, donations, whatever). Whether that complaints aired were valid or not was irrelevant. The willingness to "gossip" and "talk smack" soured, then killed, a potentially beneficial deal.

Related? You decide.