In his 1941 essay The Lion and the Unicorn, George Orwell accused the English of being a nation “addicted to hobbies and spare-time occupations”. Perhaps it’s this trait that that has led nearly 20,000 volunteers — almost 90 per cent of the total workforce — to run and maintain Britain’s heritage railways network.

The majority of these volunteers are north of 50-years-old — “males of a certain age” as one industry worker put it — who would’ve likely grown up with steam trains in the not so distant past. That means there’s a potential demographic time-bomb looming.

So the industry, if you want to call it that, is worrying both about encouraging young people to get on board, and about the risk of losing old engineering expertise. And, let’s face it, steam railways aren’t exactly cool.

“The ageing workforce that is made up of workers from the 60s is sadly dying,” says John Crane, a director of the Heritage Railway Association (HRA). “These people are not being replaced, and more importantly the workforce is associated with a loss of skills. Obviously we’re using old-fashioned technology which isn’t appropriate for modern industry and the skills are being lost.”

The majority of these volunteers are north of 50-years-old — “males of a certain age” as one industry worker put it — who would’ve likely grown up with steam trains in the not so distant past. That means there’s a potential demographic time-bomb looming.

I'm a long-time member and currently membership chair at the Wilmington & Western RR in Delaware. It is my goal to increase our ranks across the board and I'm making up a playbook as I go along. I'm making a special effort to bring our young people into the ranks. We have a number volunteers under the age of 30 and their ranks are slowly growing.

Some points from my playbook:

Make everyone feel appreciated
Teach young people (often pairing them with expert craftsmen)
Organize fun events (one was watching Emperor of the North in the locomotive shop).
Using social media
Communicate regularly
Buy pizza every week for our work sessions
Keep encouraging them

This affects preservation of first hand knowledge as well. The time "window" where it is possible to locate people and get an accurate and well stated overview of an event or project is about thirty years. When you get to forty years after the event, it is increasingly more difficult to find the people who made the history, and by the fifty year mark, if you can find them at all, they might not be able to help you due to memory loss and impaired ability to communicate.

PC

One of the reasons there are so many older volunteers at railway museums and similar organizations is that we are living longer, healthier lives. That's a good thing, but it shouldn't discourage us from welcoming and encouraging younger folks who share our passion.