Sorry, but it's not that easy... How do you determine whether they're really new riders, or simply folks who would have ridden the train anyway sometime during the summer, but decided to show up TODAY since you had steam, rather than next weekend or some other date.

When I was a kid, it was a family tradition to go to the amusement park once a year, and the zoo and the beach, etc, etc. Now, let's say that the amusement park had a "Ride the roller coaster for 1/2 price!" day. (Back when I was a kid, you still needed tickets to go on each ride...) I'd have probably went on that day. But I wouldn't have been a new customer, just an existing customer who went on a different day.

When you have an event like this, it's real hard to tell who's new, who's a "regular" and who decided not to ride since they hate crowds or smoky dirty steam engines or...

You can get a rough idea of the effect at the end of the season, by comparing total ridership to last year, but we all know that fluctuates from year to year too.

We could often tell the new/returning visitor count by looking at gift shop sales. For years, our total daily sales would average $1 per ticket sold. That is, if we sold 100 fares on a given day, we could expect $100 in shop sales. So on our two open house events (April and October), average shop sales were typically lower. The theory is that we attracted repeat visitors who came back on that day to specifically experience a higher level of car service with a larger variety of cars.

Your mileage may vary, I'd be interested in learning if others experience the same correlation with tickets sold and shop sales.

Wesley

The true railfan doesn't spend a dime on rail fare, they just take pictures from the sidelines.

Actually the true railfan has a heart and sympathy for the operation and at least buys one ticket and rides to help support it. Now rethink your thoughts about "true railfans" and reevaluate the amount of true railfans you know.

On that basis, I find them to be be truly rare. Most of the hardcore "railfans" that I have met fall into the category of egotistical self-important foamers with a false sense of entitlement. That's why I stopped refering to myself as a railfan many years ago. On the good side, they do tend to spend money in the gift shop, and a small percentage of them will show up and work on preservation projects and are thus converted from the "Dark Side"

True railfans wish they didn't spend $65 on that thirty minute VHS rail excursion video fifteen years ago from the gift shop.