The recently created Center for Railway Tourism has teamed with ticketing software vendor WhistleTix to produce the first comprehensive survey of tourist railroads and railway museums. The goal is to compile basic information on the industry. The results will be compiled and analyzed by the Center and made available to the industry and public later in 2013.

The survey is available online at railwaysurvey.org. It can be completed online or printed out and mailed as a hard copy.

Aaron Isaacs, editor
Tourist Railroads & Railway Museums

A couple interesting questions:

How do you keep me from filling this out on behalf of an institution to which I have no connection?

How do you affirm that the information submitted is from an authorized spokesperson or official?

Is there anything to keep either an authorized official or a "rogue" disgruntled member from providing grotesquely exaggerated numbers, either positive or negative?

I just attempted to fill this form out as a brazenly fake operation in Podunk, Pennsyltucky, and so far I'm deep into the survey...... (abort, abort...)

It might be useful to have the appropriate parties add some verification, such as the ARM/TRAIN membership number or the code off their newsletter mailing label. Jes' sayin'.

I'm more interested to learn that there IS a Center for Railway Tourism. I'd expect that it would have been in England, they do so much more of it per capita or square mile.

Aaron, for those of us not directly involved, please tell us more about what it is, what it's for, what it's doing, and who's doing it.

I'd hesitate to dismiss numbers from operators who are not members.

dave

The Center is real enough. It's a new department at Davis and Elkins College in Elkins, W.Va., and is being run by James Porterfield, a railroad writer known in more recent years for a column in Railroad and Railfan on dinner trains, and for a book called "Dining by Rail," a history of railroad dining car service.

http://www.dewv.edu/center-railway-tourism

http://www.jamesdporterfield.com/

That would only reach ARM/TRAIN members.

As we learned from our prior experiment, one way to get it right is "make it a Wiki". The cure to the problem of anyone being able to edit it, is let EVERYONE edit it. Vandalism gets crowd-fixed.

Having paged through the survey, which can be done anonymously without filling out data on each page... I took note of the pattern of questions being asked.

Awful lot about events, ridership, marketing techniques and ticket sales. Nothing about vast areas of practice and academic relevance, not so much as whether you're for-profit or not!

Doesn't look like the handiwork of a school or even TRARM. It appears to me like a sales lead generator for Whistletix.

That would be well and good, but I don't like seeing it fobbed off as something else.

This seems like nothing more than WhistleTix harvesting information on who to sell it's products and services to, maybe the stated goal of the survey read "to compile information for WhistleTix to sell it's products".

It's unfortunate that some people jump to conclusions and assume that someone else's motives are suspect. I talked to Eric Housh of WhistleTix about the survey and I assure you his involvement was motivated by an honest desire to see the industry learn more about itself. There are a number of marketing questions on the survey because marketing is important to museums and tourist railroads. We all want to learn about the methods that work best.

Like our mothers taught us, "If you can't say something nice about others, don't say anything at all."

Aaron Isaacs, editor
Tourist Railroads & Railway Museums

I think all they need for a distribution list is their membership roster. This won't give them more names.

First step towards gathering data that could be of use to all of us? Maybe....some of us? Certainly.......but only if we put it to practical use.

Let's see what information develops.

dave