Good for all of you! Signs are important! They tell visitors what when and why and they can do it when there is no a volunteer or staff member nearby. They also tell the visitors that they are in amuseum not a railroad scrap yard.

The car may not look like much now; the sign can show and tell what is in store for it in the future.

They tend to have the print too small. Make them big. At least as big as the reccomendationss made for the ADA.

These days color printing is cheap and easy. You can use it well on a Diesel or a billboard freight car.

Ted

ted_miles@nps.gov

Ron, you're absolutely right that MOT's sign program was a major influence on IRM's sign program. Our 2'x3' signs use a horizontal format rather than vertical, and are often more haphazardly mounted (we tend to switch stuff around a LOT), but are fairly similar. The vinyl lettering on ours (I think it's 1" type) is rated to last 7-10 years outdoors, and indefinitely indoors. This means that we will have to be replacing signs on a regular basis, but OTOH it sounds like our "cost per sign" is considerably lower than MOT's. The main reason I would guess is that we actually bought a sign-making machine, and one of our volunteers (Kevin McCabe) gets aluminum blanks and writes and makes the signs himself. This lowers the cost considerably. When you've got 400 pieces of equipment, even $5 or $10 savings per sign goes a long way!!

Frank Hicks

frank@gats.com

Most of the signs at MOT are horizontal in layout as well. We use some vertical ones for special topics such as the milk car story, steam loco identification, diesel & electric loco classification, etc. The county parks dept sign shop now has some new equipment so they may be able to do signs for us at a great savings. When we did ones with graphics (photos or artwork) included they cost about $300 apiece.

Museum of Transportation
rdgoldfede@aol.com