Hi All,

I just read an article pn MSNBC.com about great interactive museums. Some great museums were listed with most being geared toward children and all having interesting things to do, but one thing was lacking. There were no railroad museums listed, but there was a wooden boat museum listed. Why is that?

Stuart

Great Interactive Museums
gnufe@apex.net

I guess that MSNBC is part of the vast "LIBERAL" media conspirascy!

Our local PBS station in Philadelphia is doing a one hour program solely on the PRR. They just completed one entitled "Workshop of the World" that featured the PRR and Baldwin.


v-scarpitti@worldnet.att.net

I ahte to say this, but I think that MSNBC may have been justified in not including any railroad museum in their report. The reason I say this is that most railroad museums are not truly interactive. Having a historically correct train operation does not make a museum interactive, standing by itself.

Out of all the museums and tourist/"historical" railroads I've visited, I have seen only TWO exhibits that could be classified as interactive. One was an exhibit that showed how the gradient of a track affected a locomotive's ability to pull a train. The display had two tracks side by side. One was flat and the other went up a grade. After reading the the display card, you pressed a button and two small electric engines would run down the tracks. I think that this display was at the Baltimore and Ohio museum at Mt. Claire. The other exhibit was a cross section cutaway of a 567 prime mover at the California State Railroad Museum. It had a nice display card and was wired so that when visitors pressed the button, a small electric motor operates the driveshaft, cams and pistons allowing the visitor to see how the prime mover works.

envlink@voyageronline.net

> Out of all the museums and
> tourist/"historical" railroads
> I've visited, I have seen only TWO exhibits
> that could be classified as interactive.

Steamtown's technology museum has a pretty large complement of interactive exhibits, including a large operating HO recreation of operations in the DL&W Scranton yard, an interactive display on how a steam engine works, and a video display on firing a steam locomotive among others.

The exhibits you remember from Mt. Clare are long gone; they were leftovers from the old, old B&O Public Relations Dept. exhibits. The B&O Museum's new permanent exhibition is vastly superior from the point of exhibit design and interpretive merit, but it includes realtively little interactivity (there is a bit).

Some of the nicest kid-centered displays I've ever seen in a railway museum are at the new Electric City Trolley Museum acoss from Steamtown in Scranton. They have a giant table-top map of the Scranton Wilkes Barre valley on which kids place wood block mines, towns and trolley cars, creating their own communities and transit systems. It's kinda like Fischer-Price with a teaching purpose--WAY cool.



http://64.225.91.166/Briefs/November2000/001117.htm
eledbetter@mail.rypn.org

This is exactly what I'm trying to get at. An exhibit that the public cannot interact with has very limited educational potential. More museums need to keep up with the technology available that can be employed in a display function. One of our local Chattanooga history museums was using a fairly complex animatronic robot made up as a paperboy in it's permenant display. That was more than ten years ago. The last time I was in Huntsville, Alabama their local railroad museum had a similiar robot manning the old depot's ticket window and a couple of additional robots in the agent's office that interacted with the ticket agent robot. These robots were programmed to interact with the visitors much like a their human counterparts would have in the days of passenger trains and were used to give the visitor some idea of what they were about to experiance. I'll have to pay a visit to the Steamtown site and see what their exhibits look like.

envlink@voyageronline.net

I saw some computer driven interactive things at Indianapolis Childrens Museum in the basement near Reuben Wells but there were too damn many kids in the way to try them out.

Dave

irondave@bellsouth.net

There's no shortage of railroad-related topics that would make outstanding interactive museum exhibits or teaching tools. Just off the top of my head:

How about a simple hump and classification yard, in which children have to throw switches to classify colored freight cars as they flow over a hump. Machine gives them a raspberry noise if they send it down the wrong track or overfill a track. Could be kid- and gravity-powered with simple mechanics and electronics.

To teach the idea of a boiler as a heat reservoir, how about device where kids shovel coal to keep an electronic "steam" gauge up, as the "engine" moves over the railroad. The "guage" is actually a scale attached to the "firebox" which slowly drains the "coal" back into the tender.

Obviously this could be made as complex as you want, up to a full-size locomotive simulator (and Kevin and Honest Nick would be pleased to fix you up with as much of an 0-8-0 as you want for this purpose). An intermediate level would be to have the "engineer" operate the throttle to get the train up and down hills, while the "fireman" struggles to keep up with both coal and water without popping. This could be largely electronic.

You could teach mechanical advantage, and the difference between an 0-6-0 and a 4-6-4, with an exhibit about matching the steam locomotive with an intended job.

How about a toy CTC or operator's board to demonstrate dispatching? How DO you get trains to go both ways over a single-track road, anyway? How many model boards and interlocking machines are gathering dust in railroad museums with visitors staring dully at them for a few seconds?

Heat content of coal, factors of adhesion, harvest traffic rushes, air brakes, the labor intensity of steam power, train handling, all of this stuff could be demonstrated graphically. What about a combination of a brakestand and a big TV screen behind a cab window, where a kid big holes it, there's a loud exhaust, and -- nothing happens. The train keeps moving for another half mile down the televised track? I'll bet every kid who does that will never run or drive in front of a train.

If this sounds expensive, and it is, a little, remember that there are about a hundred times more sources of handouts for educational resources than there are for sandblasting and painting old box cars and coaches. We will shortly begin work on a C&O heavyweight combine using proceeds from an educational grant to turn it into a mobile classroom. This car would still be sitting if we waited for a grant to make it a rider car for the 1225's crew.

Aarne Frobom
The Steam Railroading Institute
Michigan State Trust for Railway Preservation, Inc.
P. O. Box 665
Owosso, MI 48867-0665

froboma@mdot.state.mi.us

Aarne,

That was my whole point in starting this thread. I'm happy that I'm not the only one that sees this. Preservation is great, but education is great too. I like to see things in context and be able to do things at museums. I've had more fun going to railroad yards looking for old rusting equipment and being able to climb on it around it and through it (with RR's permission of course :-) than going to musuems and seing rusting equipment scattered about with no context or relevance to the geographical location. To keep history around it is better to make the public aware of its value and this is done by education. For instance: a steam locomotive has value besides its scrap value. It is evidence of a bygone technology that has been mainly replaced by diesel electric. Show people this and give them a reason to respect it and it will stay around for many generations. We are nothing more than custodians for machines and with the proper care and respect, they will out live us. I think it's a shame that not one RR museum was mentioned in this article, while a wooden boat museum was. We're missing the point and alienating the public, by being a secret society. I have some ideas, but I'm not going to list them. I am willing to discuss this more on an individual basis. I'm no consultant and this is not my job, I just like old stuff and like to see it saved.

Stuart

Great Interactive Museums
gnufe@apex.net

The RR museum of Pa in Strasburg has a "children's room" with a lot of model layouts, it also has a rather involved sequence of learning projects on various 8x11 laminated flipcards that the kids progress through to earn some sort of badges. (I only saw it once, so the exact details are rather fuzzy, sorry.).

I do remember they had a simple hands on switching layout, and even a nice little (though not quite so interactive) demonstration on garden gauge live steam (They were using american-ized Mamods, though now I suppose starting with a Ruby would be simpler).
A cab mock up that lets them sit in the hotseat, and yank levers (with or without cab ride video, or piped in sound effects), while usually not truly interactive, is always popular, at least with my kids.

There really is never anything new.

I have vivid recollections of the "CandO" Special which was a mock-ed up Engineer's side of a steam locomotive cab with a movie screen using the "trans-lux" reprojection method of a short run. It traveled the east coast and was exhibited at Gimbels in Philadelphia, I would guess about 53 years ago. A voice would tell you when to open and shut the thottle and apply the brakes.

When the "run" was over your picture would be taken and mounted in a metal frame which you were given to take home as a rememberance.

That was "Interactive" learning long before the advent of high tech!

I also believe that there was Talgo information as well as the famous HOG ad1

Did anyone else have the opportunity to benefit from Chessie's PR effort?

v-scarpitti@worldnet.att.net

> I ahte to say this, but I think that MSNBC
> may have been justified in not including any
> railroad museum in their report.

Why not join Hume Kading and visit Orange Empire Railway Museum on April 28 or 29 and see our brand new Signal Garden where you can push buttons to actuate several working crossing and signal artifacts-no train required.

Last Fall, visitors thrilled to pull the ropes attached to seven different steam whistles connected to our shop compressor. For good measure two multi-tone air horns were also hooked up. Add to these ringing trolley bells, pumping a handcar or turning a narrow gauge turntable "armstrong" style and that makes a reasonable case for OERM in the interactive department. We are just beginning and the sky is the limit. Too often we as rail museums show the public our "whole wad" at an annual rail fair. Introducing interactive displays throughout the year (AND PUBLICIZING IT) will bring them back aside from the rail fair.

wyld@oc-net.com

Erik,

I like your article entitled "Steamtown Makes Connections" in The Readers' Platform of Trains May 2001 issue.

Stuart

gnufe@apex.net

> Steamtown's technology museum has a pretty
> large complement of interactive exhibits,
> including a large operating HO recreation of
> operations in the DL&W Scranton yard, an
> interactive display on how a steam engine
> works, and a video display on firing a steam
> locomotive among others.

Erik,
What makes Steamtown's HO layout of the Scranton yard particularly interactive?

Most RR museum scale models that I have seen are better described as dusty dioramas with small typefaced signage. IMHO, not very interesting to the non rail geek population.
Ken


ken.middlebrook@nsc.com

> Erik,
> What makes Steamtown's HO layout of the
> Scranton yard particularly interactive?

When you press a button to launch the sequence, a while series of engines shuffle through the yard while a taped narration explins what's going on--how engines went to the roundhouse between runs, why engines needed an ashpan and a coaling dock, what the oil house was for, etc. The narration is keyed to which engine is doing what at that moment, and if memory serves me spotlights highlight they engine they're talking about. It's a pretty nice recreation of the bustle of a mainline steam terminal with explanations of what its all about.

Steamtown roster
eledbetter@mail.rypn.org

> Last Fall, visitors thrilled to pull the
> ropes attached to seven different steam
> whistles connected to our shop compressor.
> For good measure two multi-tone air horns
> were also hooked up. Add to these ringing
> trolley bells.....

While some of these ideas are good, this one sounds like the perfect recipe for either insanity or murder.