WRONG. Only your organization knows ONLY what it knows without the advantages those not so limited may bring to the table.

This is your chance to create a small world dedicated to providing an experience of going back in time to visitors. Creating a world of any size is like producing a major motion picture or a season of opera, not like mechanics and earthwork. The mechanics and earthwork come along later in the process.

You are located in reasonable proximity to the industry standards of creating worlds - Hollywood and Disney. Failing to attract the best visionary talent possible to make your world a rich and vibrant one will cost you in the long run.......more than the cost of doing it as well as you can.

Trains are just moving metal....it's the context that makes for visitor impact.

dave

Very true about the outside opinion. While a museum's own people have a vision (and if it's like most organizations, they have several, not always compatible) an outside observer may ask the important question: "Why don't you have/do/see..."

This is not to say that you should hire someone without rail experience and follow every suggestion unquestioningly. That way lies madness (and accidents.) It's the educated but outside opinion you want, someone familiar with museum planning and rail operations but outside your group without an axe to grind. They haven't walked by the old switch shanty four hundred times or squeezed a big vehicle through the narrow alley beside that 1950s pole building, so they'll say "Wouldn't that make a good ticket booth?" Or "Does this really need to be here if you're not going to use it?" They can help you avoid mass face palming when you all realize that the track out of the pit didn't have to make that curve if you'd moved the edge of the parking lot, and so on.

I'd definitely look for somebody without rail experience but with an understanding of history, architecture, design and visitor experience. You have all the rail-experienced people you need to weed out the impossible ideas already. It's finding possibilities you can't even know are out there to even be weeded out that you need.

I'm fighting similar battles on two fronts now - one group has sketchy visions with a lot of small areas developed into action plans needing an overall contextual basis, but scared to move in ways that will build that basis and then pay for creating it, another startup that has a fairly undefined big vision and is already working on smaller practical plans for......something. I'm supposed to be the practical guy but there's a lack of imagination beyond the obvious, so I'm trying to push for big visions instead - I can be the practical idea-killer later.

Feedback loops and brainstorming can work wonders, but only after the possibilities both practical and impossible have been developed.

dave

I think there's a lot of good firms and individuals out there in the general museum planning business and you can research some of the best by finding out who did some of the best work at the museums you admire; certainly don't limit yourself to railroads only.

There's two areas where I've seen some pretty good professional planning firms 'fall down', and where we try to fill in the gaps - they seem to operate in a vacuum like the entire railroad museum concept is a fresh idea (expanding the visitor demographics to national proportions because they don't know the industry), and conceptually designing in a lot of things that simply won't fit in the design space and constraints available. We're not planners per se, but have built enough master planning teams around us to know the drill well. It can also go overboard where a big design firm only knows current UP mainline design standards and will design to 25' track centers for your static display yard, and then show concepts of 50' passenger cars in a row..., or jam the lead into the main line switch with no room for the required derail.

We take the position that you want to get some dirt and steel input pretty early in the process, as ignoring some of the environmental, structural, and geometric issues can haunt you for decades to come. I'm sure many of you can name off the top of your head some of the DUMBEST things you've seen done in planning and design for museum sites, I have my own top-10 list, names withheld. One of my favorites is putting the large stormwater management containment pond DIRECTLY in the way of where the only possible exit is from the site to ever connect to outside rail.

It's a team effort, and you're part of the team. Making sure that YOU are the client (and not the local government, or a deep-pockets funder, or a lead volunteer) is critical, or the lack of control and participation of the firm/team you work with from the start will haunt you.

You know, at the risk of being called negative, "the dumbest list" might be a place to start, especially if the best planner you can find turns out to have less rail experience that you'd like.
What if you were to walk the property (or view the Google Earth version, or what have you) with the planner and identify the things you absolutely DO NOT want? The list might be on the order of:
--nothing can get in the way of the NS main or our access to it, no matter how attractive the site would be for the special events building
--we need storm drainage, but it cannot have any impact on the neighboring shopping center's lower parking lot even though the seemingly logical place to put a pond is right over there below that last row of parking spaces
--the foundation for the old and unstable, but historically significant, tower cannot be disturbed in any way until we are able to decide whether to shore up or do a complete reconstruction...

...and so forth. The list of what can't happen may be as useful as the wish list of things you hope will. Some of that wouldn't necessarily be apparent to a planner who doesn't know railroading. As in most jobs, open, early and frequent communication is the key.

I'm amazed that the process is being viewed as one consultant to do the whole conceptual to reality transformation. No wonder most of our places are boring.

Starting with too conservative a set of parameters for a vision is death to the possibility of being pleasantly surprised. Even the most impossible ideas (and drainage ponds aren't part of large concepts, just of technical execution) can spin off possible byproducts that translate into better than what would have been thought of if the starting point was present realities. Fuhgetaboudit.

Think in terms of what visitors sensory experiences should be. What should the landscape include if they look from the station platform across the tracks? 1890? No parking lot visible then........or cel towers, etc. 1920? Lots of wires in the sky for urban areas, telegraph lines on glass insulators if rural. What should the ground have on it? asphalt or cobblestone or just gravel / dirt? Should the predominant smell be creosoted timbers or coal smoke? create a rich full context and then see how much of that you can actually create according to the laws of physics and operating conditions on the ground......not the other way around.

Stop closing your options off until you have something to close them off from....and then you can prioritize what of those things you want to provide and how.

dave

These prototypes



Became this design




The sidewalk in front of the visitor center includes sidewalk built to Washington DC specs, including granite curbing.

You can read the strategic plan for the South Cle Elum [WA] Railyard here:
http://www.milwelectric.org/download/index.html

Interpretive Solutions was the lead consultant. I'm not sure if they are still in business or not.

Paul

Paul Krueger
Seattle, WA

I have taken part in a number of different types of planning projects over the years, and can tell you that there are a number of valid approaches that, with the right people, can yield great results. Some of these approaches are very Top-Down, and others are more inclusive.

We are in a field of primarily volunteer-run non-profits that rely a great deal upon the financial support of their members and community. As much as people like to talk about "running things like a business," this is one area where the Top-Down approach widely embraced in private industry is not appropriate. I would strongly advocate for a process that is based on Participatory Design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design. This approach calls for the participation of a wide variety of project stakeholders, and could include members of the community, local governments, potential donors, museum leaders, as well as the organization's membership. Ultimately, the master plan would be produced by the planning consultant while working closely with museum leadership, but including the broader contributions of the community, guests, governments, and members will go a long way toward building support for the resulting plan. Also, developing the plan with the crowd-sourced wisdom of broader group of stakeholders should result in a well-rounded approach that is not dominated by one faction's myopia.

A well-designed master planning process could unfold over a number of months with regular meetings and smaller working groups focused on various aspects of the project. Larger events would occur to share results and gauge stakeholder reaction. The planning consultant would work as a facilitator and ultimately a synthesizer of this work. This process would still rely upon the guiding hand of the organization's leadership as well as the design abilities of the planning consultant to create a plan that is sensible, feasible, and appealing.

There are a lot of advantages to this approach, and if well orchestrated, it will foster the support and donations needed to begin implementation. Master plans are great for providing a compelling vision for a museum's future. Keep in mind that a master plan is not a set of engineering documents. Individual components of the plan will most likely be phased in and will require more in-depth design, engineering, and fundraising. Each of these projects will provide an opportunity to revisit some of the master plan's assumptions so that the vision can continue to evolve.

This is a topic that is of great interest to me, and I'd be happy to talk to anyone in our little circle here in more depth about it.

Thanks

Randy