It was in the "dog house" on the back of the tender, under the supervision of the "Head" Brakeman. It even had steam heat!
[After proof reading, I realized that adding the 2nd set of quotation marks would make better nautical sense.]

Many years ago a travelling NRHS convention passed through our railroad museum. One of the persons riding the trip was standing next to several of us from our museum and began to tell us all about how he ranked railroad museums and tourist railroads by the quality of their restroom facilities. Laughed our rearends off for weeks thinking about that one.

Richard

You may find this hilarious, but you'd be surprised at how many people, especially women with children accompanying them, rank any venue on the quality and condition of the "facilities". If yours are dirty or smelly, the man of the house may want repeated visits to your museum, but he'll be overruled by his spouse.

Don't laugh about that one. Most non-railfan visitors rank a lack of nice, clean restrooms high on their list of things that make them want to avoid any attraction, and choose another. Good parking in reasonable proximity, adequate waiting room with interesting displays, and other warm fuzzy creature comforts mean more to them than having the exact correct color of black on the locomotive.

dave

"Laughed our rearends off for weeks thinking about that one.

Richard"

I'll bet that when given a choice between a "green plastic phone booth" and a decent rest room facility, you'd shy away from the blue-water outhouse and go for the real thing.

The other posters have beat me to it, but I can't stress enough how true their comments are. We still get compliments on our "Comfort Coach" at Thomaston, almost 4 years old now. And there have been a number of RyPN'ers who have requested more detailed info about it.

Simple fact: The moms make the travel decisions about where the family goes, and they absolutely will decide if the family goes back to a place again. Seeing the ladies walk out of their end of our facility with smiles and positive comments was worth the big price tag.

Like it or not, the standard we're all compared with is Disney, as to a visitor's experience. We're in the entertainment biz, first and foremost.

Howard P.

You can add to that a hard surface to push the stroller along. Paved walkways not only make the pushing of a stroller easy, but help with wheelchairs and scooters that the mobility impaired will use. And they keep the dust down.

Years ago, when IRM was talking about their paved roadways, the point was made that it is the wife and mother who makes the decisions about where to take the family.

Oh man I have so many great quotes from being involved in the railroad industry, and a few of my hobbies like Civil War reenacting, and working at the Cincinnati History Museum too!

The oh so common one at civil war reenactments while cooking breakfast in a tin frying pan is: "Is that fire real?" My answer is: "It is a special effect fire." Scary thing is a professional firefighter asked me that once and believed me.

The other one was portraying a soldier at the Cincinnati History Museum and some one looked at me and my friend and declared that we were the worst looking animated robots he has ever seen in a museum. Right......

Then the best comment I ever witnessed and heard was during the Independence Limted with N&W 611 & NKP 587. We chased the train from Norwood, Ohio and out along the N&W peavine. While watching the train go through Macon, Ohio there was a local family out there watching the train go by. Well as the last 8 or so cars start to go by I see the water hitting the track from a toliet. My father and I step back.

This family standing about 5 feet from the track yell "How neat is that kids, we got sprayed by steam from the steam engines!"

My father and I just turned around, walked away and both made a loud comment about "That wasn't steam that sprayed you!"

Then working for NS once we derailed a car in Lexington, Ky in the yard to a warehouse. One of the employees comes out with a camera to take pics. He starts making the railfan chit chat. Oh great. We already know where this is going.

"On my model railroad layout I can pick the cars up and re-rail them. Can't you do that here?"

We just busted out laughing, and walked away!

While the person asking the question was not a railfan, the story sort of belongs here...

Last June, RMNE hosted a full-bore "major motion picture" film shoot at our Thomaston station. The script called for the lead character to wait for the arrival of and board a 1955-era Connecticut commuter train. On the (overcast) day of the shoot, I placed a pair of traditional marker lamps on the rear coach. The head lighting effect and electrical guy kept looking at them and eventually asked me, "What kind of special bulbs do you use in those things so that they flicker so realistically?" "Kerosene", was my reply, and he was really amazed at that.

Howard P.
H.L. Piper, CT

Seriously - absolutely. A couple of museums I know have dreadful facilities, and yes -- it's a serious challenge to get womenfolk near them. I also think museums with a restoration shop are wise to have a "shop bathroom" ideally with shower, so shop crew aren't cleaning up in the visitor bathroom.

Very seriously, business publications still tell of the old fashioned gasoline station chain that advertised heavily about their "Clean Restrooms", because some "Know It All" had proclaimed that women determine where the family car will stop, and he knew what they wanted. The competition believed that give-away glassware was cheaper!

Yep, them were the days. When Superheater became too much of a pest there were several things the guys did to run him off. One time they told him a particular loco's lagging was infested with "thermites," which were weakening the boiler shell. The best was the group that came up with the "committee to scrap the J" moniker to describe themselves and horrify him away. Looking back after all these years these were rather cruel, but at the time they were just plain great. He was invited to do a slide show once at a group meeting and it was just eye wateringly funny, although he was entirely serious. Anyone know what is what with him these days?

As an employee at the old "Roanoke Transportation Museum" at that time, I was considered to be an associate member of the committee. The avowed "mission" was to take the money raised from scrapping 611 and restore the fireless 0-4-0 to operation. There may be members of the committee on this board. Several of them have gone on to successful careers in the railroad industry. I'm thinking that the joke was taken as far as making up a phony newsletter that was mailed to him.............
We were so cruel and politically incorrect back then.....................

David mercifully dropped out of both local DC area NRHS chapters seven or eight years ago. There are still reported sightings of him at a local area library, where he apparently uses the computers to get on the internet. I'm told he likes to e-mail politicians with his rants on steam preservation (cringe). For all I know, he could be reading this right now. Hopefully, he won't manage to get Steamtown closed and the locomotives sold for scrap!

Seriously, David is mildly mentally impaired, and it manifests itself by his being socially obnoxious. His Father died several years ago, and apparently he's been in more of a decline since then.

I overheard a similar conversation, but this time by someone who should have known better.

I was at Knott's drooling on their steamer (at least that is how my GF describes it) when I overhead one of their "conductors" (not part of the engine crew) explaining to a park patron that the locomotive used to be steam, but they had converted it to diesel and it wasn't steam anymore. Of course she meant that it had been converted from coal to bunker oil to diesel oil. I was tempted to step up and correct her, but then I decided they were both happy in their ignorance and left it be.

I'm not familiar with the guy you're talking about, but I think there are plenty like him. I think a close friend of mine said it best once in regards to guys like this that we knew, when I asked why you see so many of these types into trains; "It's because the Star Trek folks will only accept a limited numbers of loons in their ranks and have already met their cutoff number."
At caboose hobbies once, my brother (who only has a passing interest in trains) and I were in the book section and this guy walked around the book racks humbling to himself the whole time. "Oooh, don't have this. Oooh, Santa Fe… wow, so good. So Good. So Good. Oooh, Santa Fe… wow, so good." I was asked when we left the place what that guy's problem was (as if I'd known him or something). I just said, "Foamer" and oddly, I didn't need to explain it any further. It seems the term transcends our hobby.