Happened to be going by Scranton on Tuesday ( 4/11 ) with a little extra time so paid a short visit to Steamtown. Arrived there at 12:15pm and I was the 3rd. car in the parking lot.

Did a quick walk through the exhibit shop areas and encountered 1 other person.

The place looked nice and all the outside exhibits were in decent shape.

The very polite Smokey in the ticket booth said that work on the 3713 was waiting on additional " fund raising" and for now is stopped.

When I asked him when the next steam excursion to the Delaware Water Gap would be he said " I don't think you'll ever see that again as it's just too demanding on the locomotives and the staff".

Your tax dollars hard at rest.

Ross Rowland

If you've been there once, there is nothing worth seeing or doing there again, especially if # 26 is not running. It's pretty depressing, especially with the yard full of decaying equipment getting worse every year, and a roundhouse full of idle locomotives, some of which had operated fairly recently. Glad to hear that something that made it out of there, CN 5288, has a good chance at running again. I can only wish the same for some of the other equipment they seem to have no plans for.

John

"Instead of 'our railways' it seemed to me that they were far more likely to become nobody's railways under nationalization. They would fall into neglect and decay just because they had become political pawns about which nobody felt responsible and nobody cared."

-L.T.C. Rolt, "Landscape With Figures"

Coming up next:

An Atheist's Review of a High Holy Catholic Mass

A Teetotaler's Review of Wines for This Summer

A Flat-Earther's History of the Moon Landings............

Wouldn't that be the same for any static museum? B&O, RR Museum of PA, California State RR.... etc.

I would say no. Steamtown was never meant to be a static museum while the others always basically were, but this is what Steamtown has become, and shows no signs of improving. It was supposed to be a living, breathing museum of operating steam but is nowhere close to that now. There seems to be a total sense of apathy there unlike other places that have work and projects ongoing.

John,

That's your interpretation of what Steamtown was meant to be, perhaps the current leadership has a different vision and different priorities. Maybe they want to copy the museum model more and keep operating steam for special events only.

And there is plenty of work and projects ongoing at Steamtown... they just finished up a major cosmetic rebuild of the Big Boy I know that.

No, that was actually the stated interpretation of what Steamtown was supposed to be, on their website and in the museum. "Feel the heat from the firebox, the smell of smoke and steam.." etc. It is obvious that the focus has changed but not for the better. Yes, the Big Boy cosmetic restoration was nice, and commendable, but what I'm trying to say is that the same pieces have been the only ones kept up for display for the last forty years. When did anything different (the Jubilee, Maine Central 519, CN 47) ever see any attention? It's basically stagnant. No new locomotives restored either, and those that did run have been allowed to go dead. What is the draw to go now, if you have seen this all before?
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John

The essential mission statement problem of NPS vs. anthing like Steamtown is that NPS was organized to prevent people from loving something to death. Niagara Falls was loved to death, through unbridled commercialization in the 19th century. Muir's wish was to PREVENT something like that from happening elsewhere, save it, allow access, but prevent the public invasion from ruining something that needs to be kept 'as is'.

NPS was never intended to spur visitation, local economic development, or business growth. It was to preserve, not to promote. The fact that a national park could indirectly do that wasn't lost on politicians, however, but it's not in the mission.

Whatever you think about Steamtown, there is precious little original fabric to promote. It really was intended to be an economic shot in the arm for Scranton, politically promoted from the start. That conflict with the underlying mission of NPS is at the heart of it, it doesn't make everybody evil, lazy, or misguided, but while visitor counts help justify existence, recognize that advertising national parks isn't done - at least by NPS. An ideal park doesn't need advertised, it needs preservation and protection from the invading hordes. Think Yosemite.

I've seen this in most states, not just Steamtown, where excursion railroads are somehow managed as parks, and attendance and positive cash flow is simply not the management focus at all. We see that here as survival, it's often viewed by them as commercialism rather a necessary activity to generate enough income to sustain the activity. Understanding that mission split is really critical to determine what comes next.

Compare that to the Forest Service, that from the get go, recognized that a sustained harvest, not necessarily preservation, was the mission. Yes, there is wilderness, but the vast majority of national forests are managed timberlands with private industry.

Randy is correct. Steamtown's creator Cong. Joe McDade saw the opportunity to marry a bankrupt private sector collection of steam era equipment sitting in Scranton with a brand new Federally funded entity that would create a good number of year round high paying ( by Scranton standards) jobs for his district that then ( 1991) and now needs all of those they can get.

In essence it was created to be a significant job corps for Scranton and from that perspective it has been a total success. The annual federal cost has risen over the 28 years since it opened in 1995 to where now it receives $ 6MM annually.

Annual attendance has steadily declined from a high of 250,000 in 1995 to now where it is around 45,000. I would guess it is one of the highest cost per visitor parks in the NPS system??

From a steam lovers perspective it has obviously been an abject failure. Precious little of its annual multi million dollar federal stipend has been spent on equipment with the vast majority going ( as intended ) to payroll.

It is what it is and at least it does show a few folks every year through well done displays what the magic of steam is and how crucial the steam locomotive was to the growth of the nation.

One can always hope that by some miracle it will revise its approach and start devoting enough of its annual stipend towards steam restoration/operation, so that it will be in reality what it says it is on its website!!

Hope springs eternal. Ross Rowland

Eight months from tomorrow will be ten years since Kip Hagen's untimely passing at the age of 62. A very sad event at the time, but even more so for those who once saw the great potential of the site in Scranton and who now understand more fully with each passing year the impact of the loss of his guiding hand.

That is the heart of it right there. Many of us remember the potential that was there when Kip was at the helm, and the progress that took place on the 3713 project even under Deb Conway. It's disheartening to see how far things have fallen since.

John

I try not to be too judgmental of organizations and situations with which I'm not intimately familiar, but the fact that it's going on five months since an apparently catastrophic HVAC failure and 80% of the facility is still closed to the public speaks poorly of how the place is being managed. Heaven forbid you advise visitors, to a partially outdoor attraction in the Northeast, to wear a coat in the middle of winter. I'm not an industrial heating technician, but such a long downtime seems excessive and a little hard to explain.

That's about the size of it.

I suspect that individuals interested in buying Steamtown for .10 on the dollar (or less) are creating a negative buzz to pressure a privatization through an invented crisis.

It's not that there won't be train rides.

RBMN has a new station in Pittston and the Grand Opening Excursion to Jim Thorpe on May 27, 2013, is sold out.

Phil Mulligan