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It seems that you have to work harder than ever to capture the limited tourist dollars out there. I am familiar with the New Hope & Ivyland operation as my son works there on a part time basis. Paul Harland is on the phone all of the time in order to get bus groups to visit. You have to work hard to promote your special trains. The NH&I has been doing Halloween Trains for about four years now. They have gotten more popular each year, but the railroad works hard to put out a quality product so that visitors will tell their friends. The Christmas trains - Polar Express and Santa trains, continue to be very popular. These are the avenues that you must promote if you are going to survive in a difficult environment. Stay positive and work hard and be willing to try something new from time to time!!

If you are located in a major SMSA and draw much of your audience from nearby, incidents which restrict peoples willingness to travel could give you the best numbers ever. This happened to a tourist railroad in Florida after 9/11. High gas prices seem to have an equally positive effect according to what i hear from them. dave

Actually, ridership on the Sumpter Valley Railroad in Oregon has been up slightly. I wouldn't say that 9-11 hasn't been having a huge effect on tourism lately, I believe the current economy is more prohibitive to having expendable income. Thanks, Taylor Rush, SVRR

The DIRECT effects of Sept. 11 were short-lived. On the Cumbres & Toltec, there were some cancellations, primarily tour groups relying on air travel to get to the area. There were also fewer reservations made because of the instinct to "hunker down." Ridership was recovering nicely by late September, but military action in Afghanistan led to another dropoff. We estimated that we lost 4,000 riders (56,000 instead of 60,000) because of these events.The INDIRECT effects - economic uncertainty, military action in Iraq, etc. - have been both longer-lasting, and harder to quantify. But I doubt that these effects can be blamed for the fortunes of an individual attraction. Smart marketing and advertising decisions by an outfit that understands both its target market, and offers the products that customers want to buy, can cancel them out. On the other hand, an outfit that doesn't understand what business it is in, or that makes ineffective or counterproductive advertising decisions, can foul up its bottom line far more than 9/11 ever did.White Pass is a great example of good location and good business judgement combining and leading to record ridership. Nevada Northern is in the opposite boat, no pun intended, in the location category. I can't imagine a worse place to put an attraction, and even the best management and a huge ad budget won't make it the money tree that WP&Y is. Short of pulling up the rails and moving the whole operation to Las Vegas, that is. ;)Nor have I seen any indication that RRMPA's visitation is "struggling." I would venture a guess that its fortunes track closely with the region as a whole - neither it nor the railroad across the street are the primary draw for most customers. RRMPA (and Strasburg) offer a far different product than Nevada Northern or WP&Y - they are much more an "impulse buy" for people who are in the area for other reasons. As the attractiveness of Lancaster County (and the Metroplex economy) goes, so will SRC and RRMPA - I'm sure Dave and Kurt hope that the "20th anniversary of Witness" promotion is a big success.JAC

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Seems strongly evident that the railroad attractions who have prospered in terms of growing thier visitorship are those who have offered some form of "action" in this ever faster world we live in. The fortunate ones are also those that happen to be located in a healthy "tourist" area (i.e. the Strasburg in Lancaster County,the NH&I in New Hope) and have learned to market themselves by effectively using thier assets in a creative way,so as to compete for that demanding discretionary tourist dollar. Constantly declining visitorship #'s at attractions that are either located in non-tourist areas(i.e. Steamtown-despite spending over $50 million dollars in ten years has seen its visitorship decline from 150,000 to under 50,000) or are strictly static in nature( nearly all the static rr museums report consistent declines over the past decade-some more than others) are strong evidence that to attract a growing audience and support there must be 1. action-preferably steam and 2. aggressive and professional marketing. Numbers never lie! Ross Rowland

I'm constantly watching ridership results and it certainly isn't consistent across a national or regional or market basis.One factor that is pretty clear is that those operations that are seeing significant gains are doing so by special events - Thomas, Polar, whatever else they can come up with. Some of the numbers are truly impressive. It gets scary when such a significant % of the year comes from an event, because if something happens......I talked to a lot of people at TRAIN2005 and I've come to the conclusion that there's a lot of 'sympathy' for the guy that says 'man, my ridership is down like 15%', to which he gets a sympathetic response from the guy next to him 'yeah, we're having a tough year too' when I know that guy 2 is actually up about 5% if not more. But he doesn't want to make guy #1 feel any worse than it already is.Knowlege is power, and you want to resort to any tactics you can to get attendance results from local or regional attractions to determine if it is 'just you' or everybody in your market.