I know you've heard this from me before, but I have doubts about solving the planning sins of the past with a transportation system. Outside of special events, there is not enough transit demand (for lack of a better term) to make a streetcar or trolley bus loop worthwhile for moving a handful of people around the large empty spaces of a railroad museum. Orange Empire uses a historic diesel bus to move tour groups around during special events and a much smaller personnel cart for docent tours during regular weekends.

Making our museum campuses "pedestrian friendly" should be a bigger factor in our (more or less non-existent) museum planning efforts. People will walk a reasonable distance when the walk is pleasant enough and their goal is in sight. People will begrudgingly walk a few hundred feet to get from their car to a shopping mall, and then will walk the length of the mall without thinking about it. People walk for miles at Disneyland and other amusement parks.

Even worse than the auto-oriented space of a parking lot, the railroad landscape exists at an inhuman scale. Most of our museums have been laid out incrementally to organize, store, and sometimes display rail equipment in a reasonably efficient, but not very planned manner. Yard throats and turning radii force the already large equipment on to tracks spread over acres at some of our museums. Alternately, narrow ROWs force preserved equipment to be stored end to end over hundreds of feet.

The result is the creation of an industrial moonscape that often does little for visitor comfort. I am oversimplifying things. Many of our museums have attractively landscaped "park" areas for picnics and outdoor events, but these areas are usually a small portion of the museum not generally a part of the equipment viewing experience.

There are a number of things that could be done to make pedestrians more comfortable at our museums, and even get them to explore specific parts of the campus. These techniques include providing visual stimulation at the human scale, landscaping (more than just plants), street furniture, and ensuring that the not so dark arts of "wayfinding" are employed to ensure that people are oriented to the site and know where they are going. Retail architecture, theme parks, and, well, (non-RR) outdoor museums do all of these things.

Ultimately, the best solution might be to concentrate human-scaled features near the entry, and in an area designed to be pedestrian friendly. In most (non-RR) museums, only a portion is open to the public. The rest of the museum is devoted to storage, conservation, and administration. Furthermore, only a portion of the collection is ever on display. At our museums, the more distant portions of the campus can continue to be open for guided tours and special events, but the heart of the museum should be scaled to handle the visistorship of a more typical weekend. With good design, this can still be a large area.

All of this is dependent trying to find a middle ground between providing a unique experience with presumably vintage equipment as well as maintenance costs and utility costs figured in. With a one mile line I would think that heavy passenger loads versus dwell and waiting time on a one mile route ( depending on the # of stops) would not be a key consideration. Most attractions due have a certain wait period, Disney not excepted. I don't think it's a choice of either pedestrian or transport options when both can be configured into the equation, depending on what the aim is. A bit off the subject, but another consideration is the operating environment. I think of the UK in being in the forefront of this. In other words the environment reflecting the context of what is transportation of an earlier era. Crich in the UK is a wonderful example that can be learned from where you have all the options in one bag.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0c1rlJq3Zc

The issue here, as you said, is long range goals upfront when the reality is that most of these operations ran by the skin of their teeth at the onset, and I think long term planning was , as a pragmatic matter not at the front of immediate priorities. So..a lot of this was more preservation than attraction ( storage etc) and the layout of these museums reflects this..and the issue with what I can see is undoing what has been done which I cannot imagine being financially feasible after you subtract current preexisting costs, projects etc.. The benefit I see with vintage transit is that you kill two birds with one stone if you already have the equipment in having transport as an attraction in of itself rather than foot traffic which can be a dangerous liability if not executed correctly.

Don't take my word for it, ask Disney. Look at the early days of the Disneyland Railroad. The lovely Retlaw coaches, small scale traditonal passenger cars and the coaches that resembled stock cars. They were really cool, but lost capacity due to the aisle space, and worst of all dwell times were long due to everyone having to use the end doors.

There's a reason the use the full width seats open trolley style coaches now. Maximum capacity and fast load / unload cycles. They're not as nice looking, but they work better.

It's amazing what sometimes turns up when you're looking for something else, even if you don't always like what you see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fz3PgEQW5G0