Thank you Randy - we tend to focus on the nuts and bolts, and forget that everything we do and every decision we make needs to be measured against the yardstick of the audiences experience. Reality for them is what they perceive. Media - like wireless headsets and GPS related information programming - is just one tool we can use to help shape thet perceived experience.

I can see how a badly produced presentation delivered through this technology has the potential to be a jarring interruption rather than an organic enhancement to the rider - hope there's enough funding left to do a good professional job.

dave

One other thing nobody's pointed out:

The narration system in question makes lineside narration OPTIONAL.

Seriously, have none of us ever been subjected to an utterly banal on-train announcer? Even if the narration is actually quality, doesn't it get old after about thirty minutes or three trips? Have you never wanted to beat your head after hearing for the twentieth time, "Yes, ladies and gentlemen......... THIS is PARADISE!" (Apologies to the Strasburg RR..............)

I want to take the opportunity to say that my tendency is to write longer explanations - but to respect your time, I will provide straightforward answers.

1) Length of route - a lineal expense based on how long = proportionate dollars?

It's not the length of the route but rather, how much content is being produced? You are correct. 90 minutes of fully enhanced sound production will cost more than 60 minutes of commentary. Fully enhanced sound production defined: professional narrators, character actors (for historical reenactments), music and sound effects.

2) number of cars equipped.. * seats .. number of headsets & transmitters?

Exactly. The number of cars being equipped plus the number of wireless receivers and headsets. The other factor is the number of languages and/or topics. In many cases, operators want to a) provide foreign language services or b) provide more than one topic - for example - a sightseeing tour and a children's tour.

3) Fixed cost software and narrative charge (not length or volume based)

The software is free with one system or 20. There are no licensing fees. Narrative charges are based on length of time (minutes). There are different levels of sound production such as narration and music only or narration with historical reenactments, music and sound effects for example. These are things to take into consideration when evaluating a) the type of experience you want to provide and b) budget.

4) any system access or rental charges?

This is at the operator's discretion.

5) How 'portable' is the system between cars?

Carry on, carry off. The system is 7"W x 7"D x 1.5"H. The system is plug and play.

I was down at the Harley Davidson plant factory tour in York, PA, and that is the best factory tour ever - mostly because they spent the bucks and made sure that everybody on the tour had a wireless radio earpiece. Clear as a bell. Anybody doing a shop tour, etc. ought to see that place. The single earpiece made it so you could hear, yet still experience the racket of the factory floor. Rule applies to trains.

The Harley Davidson plant factory tour is on my list of must sees! With regards to your comment - there are a variety of listening accessories available. This is at the operator's discretion. I also want to clarify that we do not recommend providing 90 minutes of content for a 90 minute tour. I agree with you - there needs to be "off time" and the train itself is an integral part of the experience.

Wow, great answers. See, I hadn't even thought about production values, multiple story lines, or heavens, multiple languages!

This may be specific to the HD tour and maybe your tourist railroad shop tour, but the wireless earpiece deal was also fantastic to deliver the safety lecture, and also bring everybody to a dead stop when the tour leader had a forklift crossing our path. I can't imagine doing anything like that without making sure that everyone could hear you clearly.

One of the stunts the guide did that I'll never forget is that after he told everybody to turn on their radios, he said in a very normal tone of voice to "raise your right hand if you hear me"....and immediately walked to anybody that didn't raise their hand and checked the radio. Neat trick.

I like the idea of using these, or something like that, because yup, you can leave it in your pocket this time for the "Welcome to Paradise!" announcement, and just listen to #90 dig in on the hill up out of Leahman Place one more time. I generally observe that about 70% of narration is either unintelligible or unwanted, the only thing worse it not to have it at all!

I agree wholeheartedly. What you describe is exactly what this system does. We provide wireless transmitters for step on guides, educators or volunteers for example. The receivers work for two purposes:

1) to receive commentary broadcast from the GPS Digital Audio System and
2) it can also be used to deliver group tours by a live guide. Body-worn transmitters are used by tour guides as a tool to effectively communicate directly with their group at a comfortable conversation speech level, utilizing a boom microphone (just like your tour at HD). Up to 8 guides can be speaking simultaneously with their own groups without any interference (with any other group).

Let me give you two examples of how this can be used:

A volunteer or a guide wants to provide live commentary to a group of passengers that step off the train at a scheduled stop. Using a transmitter and a head worn boom mic, the guide can continue the experience "off the train" by providing personal and live commentary to wireless receivers and headsets.

School teachers appreciate a clear and convenient link with their students (without having to yell). Teachers can provide their own educational curriculum on the train without interrupting other passengers who may be listening to a tour.

Well, just as a suggestion - it sure would be nice to have this on some kind of demonstration at this years TRAIN convention, either as a vendor, a seminar, or on the Grand Canyon as our own group.

I wanted to re visit this topic because I am thinking about trying to implement something like this but instead of asking for over $300K, I was thinking of a system for under $300. Using a Galaxy Player 5.0 http://www.samsung.com/us/mobile/mp3-pl ... G70CWY/XAA as the GPS/Mp3 player unit. I would hook it up to the PA and have the narration play, but this also offers more opportunity. The PA system is mono and the output is stereo so two tracks can be played at once the right side of the audio would be fed into the PA while the left side could be fed into a small FM transmitter then you have one part of the track playing the standard narration and the other part playing a say... Spanish narration that can be picked up on a radio. The only problem is trying to find software that will do this in the android market.

< Now how can such a system cost $350,000? >

Cuyahoga Valley is not a tourist railroad. It is a railroad contracted by the National Park Service (aka the federal government) to take riders on a trip along their canal. Being part of the federal family of dependents, and in light of the environment in Washington today, it does not surprise me, nor should it surprise anyone else, that they are able to provide the dollars necessary to integrate pricey techno gadgets into their patron experience.

On the contrary, given the cuts back in NPS and the public sector in general, military excepted, I'm both pleased and surprised to see any dollars going to cultural public services. My guess is the funds were earmarked and allocated for this purpose a few years back, and it took a while for the process to go through procedure to reach implementation.

dave

The gadgets are not the issue. In fact, the tech is becoming vanishingly cheap, thanks to the emerging crop of digital devices, particularly Android. That is if you want new, and don't want to just use hand-me-down EOL smart phones which are essentially free.

No, the reason for the big cost is the guarantee: they are buying a turnkey system. That means they write a fat check and a system shows up wrapped up in a bow. Working, complete and fully custom, and they can sue if it doesn't work. The $300k paid for surprises, profits, insurance, subcontractors, salaries, health insurance, and the business's home office overhead, office rent, etc. They probably spent more on airline tickets than on actual tech gadgets.

Two things about that.

First, as you observe, the $300k is largely overhead. Writing the contract, reading it, writing the bids, flying people around, insurance, time in meetings, the bricks-and-mortar cost of the contractor's office and support staff, health insurance, FICA, customer approval dog and pony's, everything done in Word, Excel Powerpoint or Outlook that isn't the presentation proper, all of the above for each subcontractor and their subcontractor. Hayek, Bogle and Lancaster all agree: the best road to profit is to cut overhead to the bone. That's why a lot of internet startups, their office is Starbucks. And this is why I am so rabidly Against "hire a professional". And why the professionals are so mad at me. That overhead is their bread and butter. They don't bat an eye at burdening your project with all the overhead of THEIR office. Figure if they do it to you, they do it to your contractor too. If 3 layers of subcontractor are each losing 50% to overhead, how much actually makes it into the project proper? 1/8.

The second difference is accountability. By accountability I mean tell the truth and keep your word, or more specifically in this case, the job gets finished, it's right, and it costs what is expected. And that is the value that professionals bring. That's why they're worth all that when we can afford it. Yes RCD, you certainly CAN build a better experience than the professional. The $300,000 question is whether you WILL! Or whether, as often happens, you will get stuck, get distracted, overlook critical steps, hit writers block, wildly underestimate unavoidable costs, make up excuses for quitting, or get bored with polishing it and call it "done" when it's still really lame. Which is where most amateur/volunteer projects go wrong. You need the level of accountability of a business owner, which is orders of magnitude higher than that of an employee.

For the professional, that level of accountability arises from the desire to get paid - a lot more than an employee gets - and not sued. This is the essential feature of a capitalist economy, that high accountability flows from self-interest rather than altruism. RCD, you have to originate that level of accountability from inside your heart.

Frankly, given our profitability (or lack thereof), the only way things get done at many railroad museums is when a volunteer brings the level of accountability of a professional, without burdening the organization with all that overhead or profit motive.

We've had GPS-based narration on our excursion train since 2007. "Off the shelf" equipment is used, so it simply just works, no muss or fuss. This system has worked day in and day out without issue since the day it was installed. Any tourist or museum operation can easily implement this same setup for under $2k.

There are a number of steps to ensure success.

First, we hi-railed the line and captured GPS coordinates and direction for the locations where we wanted the narration to play.

Then we enhanced and adapted our narration script and indicated a GPS location for each section of the script.

Next, we went to a local recording studio and, for $140, had them record our best "voice" reading the script. We left in a few forgivable errors to make the narration seem less "announcer-ish" and more "live" (for the most part, our customers assume the narration is live -- we don't advertise that it is a GPS system). The studio cleaned up the recording, added some light compression to help the narration stand out against the passenger "din", and separated each segment of the recording into a separate .wav file to match each GPS location.

A GPS antenna was installed on the roof of each of our four cars ($59 each antenna), with wire routed to a shelf in the electrical closet of each car. Both magnet mount and permanent mount antennas are available. This way no matter what cars are or aren't part of the train on any given day, the system will still work. A comm line interconnects all cars so no matter what car the GPS unit is in, it will play to the speakers in all cars.

The GPS unit itself ($1200) is manufactured by a couple of specialty companies supplying the theme park industry. They provide Windows-based software to set up a playlist to enter your GPS trigger locations and the associated sound file you wish to play. Standard memory cards are used to store your sound files, so you can pop in different cards for different trips or itineraries.

We made up a small rack that holds the GPS player and the pa amp, altogether about 1ft x 1ft x 1ft. The rack can be installed on the shelf of any of the cars; just plug in the antenna, speaker connection and power, and you're ready to go. Of course a microphone can also be plugged into the amp if you need to make any live announcements. The system give you the ability to play sound files manually also, using standard toggle switches wired to a connection panel on the rear of the GPS unit. We have a couple of switches set up for departure message, safety message and emergency message.

We only have our narration in one language, played on the pa speakers in all cars, but the system does posses the capability to play more than one track, which could be routed to wireless transmitters.

One word about sound quality: the "fancy" GPS system is pointless without a good pa installation. We installed proper ceiling-mounted PA speakers (not full-range shelf speakers from Radio Shack or the like) that are designed to emphasize vocal range ($25 each, 5 per car). We also use a 70-volt pa system ($325, has both 8ohm and 70 volt out, plus mic, & 2 aux line inputs). This doesn't cost any more than the usually crappy pa amp and multiple 8-ohm speakers with muffled sound that so many operations I have been to use, but the sound quality is consistent and excellent.

As I mentioned above, this system has performed flawlessly since installed, for an equipment investment of well under $2k (based on us already having a properly installed pa amp and speakers).

Interestingly enough, when we first looked into a GPS-based system, AudioConexus was one company we contacted. We were quoted $22,000 to set up the exact same scenario that we implemented ourselves.