I just completed a new exhibit for History San Jose within the waiting room of the San Jose Caltrain depot. The exhibit, entitled "The Way to San Jose", focuses on various transportation methods. With Caltrain, Amtrak and ACE agencies calling at the depot, over a hundred trains arrive daily; as a result, the display will have high public visibility.

Despite operating a historical museum with several relocated structures for many years, a common comment made about the organization is "We never knew you had existed." This new exhibit space, and a similar space with the City Hall, is part of History San Jose's outreach program of sharing portions of the collection beyond its standard brick and mortar locations. Additionally, it is hoped to spark an interest toward seeking future visits to the formal museum locales.

Of hand, I recall CSRM taking the CP Huntington to the State Fair. The Nevada State Railroad Museum had a holiday display with a narrow gauge steam locomotive at a local shopping mall. For awhile, the B&O museum had the large Allegheny on display in the adjacent mall.

While most of us do not have iconic locomotives like a CP Huntington or Allegheny available for display purposes, we do have stories and smaller artifacts that can be shared in new venues. All it takes is some working within our respective communities to find venues willing to host such an exhibit. Furthermore, such a quest will push us to create general public vs railfan specific displays.

Think outside the box!

Ken

Our curator designed several exhibit panels printed onto traditional vinyl banner material, and use grommets for hanging. The panels are currently on display in the corridor at the Museum, but are intended to travel. They can be easily rolled for storage and transfer between locations. The effect is quite good.

Wesley

Going a bit OT from what Ken discussed, displaying materials that have an educational value on their own and feature or relate to equipment at other museums, and identifying and acknowledging the equipment at those museums, is a good way to enhance your own presentation while also helping out your friends and associates in the industry.

PC

We, along with several other organizations including VMT and N&WHS, are members of the "Virginia's Rail Heritage Regional Partnership". The partnership had a strong presence at the recent Appomattox Railroad Festival. N&WHS had a booth at the station, and we literally took 200+ tons of displays to the festival. The Link Museum was supposed to be there also, but their representative was ill. Estimates of the attendance at the festival have ranged between 10,000 and 20,000 people, with visitorship to the rail exhibits being estimated between 2000 and 5000. Regardless of the count, we met a lot of people and did a lot of "plugging" for VMT, Link, and our fall excursions. We've already been asked back for next year, and have had another local community contact us about possibly attending their big festival in late spring.
Below are links to photos of the event on N&WHS's Facebook page, and a recent thread here about our Appomattox "adventures"

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Roanoke-V ... 6048955449

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=30232

One organization I helped out some years ago had a set of easily transportable display panels that were ideal for an event like that. They were three sheets of 4x8 plywood with a cork board viewing surface for mounting the displayed materials. The edges were fitted with frames and the three display panels were stood up on end, making either a triangle arrangement or a wall of panels, and connected by inserting the pins in pairs of loose pin hinges on the edge of the panels. The backs had inset corner braces that also served as positioning blocks so you could stack them flat in the back of a van or Suburban. Setup and disassembly took just a minute.

One particularly appreciative audience for offsite presentations and displays promoting your museum is the Boy Scouts. In addition to providing a description of your museum, I would suggest doing a short PowerPoint technical program like "What's In A Locomotive" produced using one of your museum's preserved locomotives. You are likely to see many of the people in the audience show up at the museum in the days that follow. This particular approach also works very well as an outreach program for a tourist railroad. The general public is fascinated by locomotives and showing them what is inside a locomotive seems to be particularly well received. If you can't use PowerPoint or don't have an electronic projector then default to using color slides but I would suggest not mixing public outreach activities with railfan entertainment programs. Some railfan entertainment shows can jump the fence into the public arena, but a lot of them do not. Showing the entire roster of a particular railroad or every structure and siding on a particular line may be very popular with some railroad historical groups, but it usually doesn't attract much interest with people who are not already railfans.

PC

While not preservation related, yet in a similar vein...

Our local division of the NMRA, the Fox Valley Division, has operated a large 2-day train show for the public each spring for over 30 years in the nw Chicago suburbs.
The show is a combination of individiual and club model train layouts, museum, preservation, and historical groups, and vendors.

Last year, we set up a couple of displays at local area libraries for the month prior to the show. Most libraries (at least in the Chicago area) typically have several display cases availble for use. Very simple stuff, different sizes/styles of the model trains and modeling, photos of previous shows, placard info on the show dates and times, etc. Left show flyers with the library main desk and put up a bunch on their bulletin boards. All at zero cost other than the effort. Everything nicely maintained and locked up behind glass.

End result we enjoyed a record 20+% increase in attendance at last year's show.
Not all of that can be attributed to the those displays, but clearly they didn't hurt.
Even with 30+ years of putting on this show, it was an eye opener to many that so many people had no clue it existed, and is a perfect family afternoon out at a very economical entertainment dollar cost.

We'll of course be doing it again next spring for the 2011 show !
Simple ideas can lead to great results.

That worked for the locomotive builders too. The kind of display and selection of locations for viewing that John describes is a very close parallel to what EMD did to announce their upcoming open house events to the local communities back in the 1940s. They would get space in libraries and bank windows for a folding backboard with the announcement and some photos, and position a selection of their 1:48 scale ("O" Scale) desk models of locomotives around in front of it, up next to the window. This was done both in the Chicago and Cleveland areas. A highly effective and inexpensive way to get some attention and convey a message. Imagine how much attention you could attract for your event by showing some of the really nice "G" scale models that have been produced in the last couple years.

But I recall that we had a discussion on this board a while back about using commercial model railroad products in museum dioramas and displays and the concept got quite a bit of criticism. It seems like custom built models get a lot more respect in the preservation community, but if the only choice is between custom built and nothing, the result is too often likely to be nothing to display.

PC

...which is a perfect example of why so many preservation groups (notional or otherwise) never get anywhere. As the man says, "Think outside the box"!

Indeed, the builders usually only produced one engineering model of a proposed piece of equipment (if they did one at all) and a group's chances of getting one of those is pretty slim. Nowadays the engineering model is electrons on a screen, and relatively few people are doing completely custom construction of railroad models any more. Most of the individually built models you see are kitbashed using some commercial parts and materials.

Viewers outside the preservation community often will not know the difference between commercially produced models and custom built ones. But the recently produced and very highly detailed "G" scale models make an excellent attention getting display if you can get space on a viewing shelf that is at an adult's eye level (so they can see it over the kids that will be gathered in front). Put your event notice next to one of those models rather than on the bulletin board, a lot more people will stop to look.

And as I have mentioned before, some local libraries with speakers programs have produced excellent turnouts for their events by distributing flyers to restaurants and hobby shops, and taking out notices in the local newspapers, including on their websites. Those are relatively inexpensive ways to announce their events, just requiring the time and effort to distribute the information materials.

PC

How about taking your entire museum offsite?

For years, I thought it would be neat to have a steam pump museum, but knew the subject was too narrow in focus to draw any visitors, and I didn't have the resourses to incorporate it into a resteraunt or other mixed venue.

So, I decided to do the next best thing -- make the entire museum portable, to bring to engine shows, open house events at appropiate venues like the museum at Long Leaf and the pumping stations in Shreveport, LA and Waco, TX, and other venues. With the purchase of a "monster cart", and the restoration of one of my pumps, it is beginning to come together:



Until I can afford to add permenant pipework, the plugs are color coded -- yellow for steam engine intake, red for steam engine exhaust, blue (not yet painted) for pump suction, white for pump discharge.

More signage that is better fastened, along with further restoration of the remaining pumps is next. I also have a poster of steam pumps I put together; this poster will be displayed and maybe sold along with an updated version of my Surviving World Steam CDs to raise funds to cover costs.

Old Pueblo Trolley has a basic long term plan that includes restoring a 1940s transit coach into a mobile exhibition space. The coach was received without the seats and was already reclassifed as an RV, so our plan is to restore the exterior and driver's cab to original appearance, but use the passenger cabin for installed display units. This is only in the beginning stages of development and will take time.

Many railroads directly operated connecting bus services (B&O and Santa Fe owned their own buses), so this would fit in with the historic preservation mission of many museums. County fairs and regional antique vehicle shows are great venues to set up at and having a restored railroad motor vehicle would be a big attention draw.