Why Are Train Museums Not Transit-Oriented?

By popular demand…

Should I write about how train museums could be more transit-oriented?

— Sandy Johnston (@sandypsj) November 23, 2017

(79 likes!)

Here is Sandy’s look at how a genre of institution one would expect to be transit-oriented–train museums–in fact often fails that test. This piece is in part inspired by Cap’n Transit’s look at how many American rail factories are located in sprawly areas, in part by Trains Magazine writer Malcolm Kenton’s attempt to get to a rural museum without a car, and in part by my own musings and travels.

For the most part, the difficulty of reaching railroad museums by transit is reasonably understandable. Most American museums date to the postwar period, when a) railfanning became a serious hobby b) people had extra time on their hands and c) the rapid transition from steam to diesel locomotion and from dominance of rail travel to autocentrism set off alarms about the need for historical preservation. Often, museums–established in a mad scramble to preserve right-of-way and rolling stock, happened wherever they could. As a result, many are very rural. There are some, though, that are located in or on the fringe of major urban areas, and these could generally be trying harder to be transit-accessible. And there are others that could offer a basic connection to intercity or commuter trains, but haven’t even tried that.

The truth is, though, that if you read railfan boards (as I admittedly do sometimes), there’s also a serious suburban bias that goes with the generational territory of the folks who established these museums. Most of the founders became accustomed to transit and trains as a hobby or a profession, not an ethical or planning calling. For the most part, they think of accessibility in terms of cars. And surely NIMBYism and Euclidean zoning–as my friend and planner colleague Matt says, trains are “pretty much the definition of a nuisance”–have played their role. But enough speculation, let’s look at some museums! I’ve divided some thoughts I have into a few somewhat arbitrary categories.

Museums of My Childhood

Say what you will about Connecticut, it’s actually fairly rich in train museums!

• Despite living across town in Westville, I virtually grew up at the Shore Line Trolley Museum in East Haven (one of the nation’s earliest and most influential museums), including having a birthday party there. Located along a short stretch of preserved interurban right-of-way, the museum is a few blocks from (very limited) bus service at the East Haven Green. It’s a doable trip if you’re willing to be patient with CTTransit’s extraordinarily crappy service.
• The Naugatuck Railroad/Railroad Museum of New England operates out of Thomaston, 10 miles north of the end of a Metro-North branch in Waterbury. The bus that would cover the gap runs an extremely limited schedule and not at all on weekends, when museums do most of their business. There are some ownership and liability issues with making a connection, and service on the Waterbury branch is hit-or-miss, but the intervening line is operable and I’m frankly surprised no one has put forth the effort to make it work. It seems like a natural use of state economic development dollars in a downtrodden post-industrial area; it’s not too hard to imagine New Yorkers schlepping up to Waterbury to ride vintage trains.
• The Danbury Railway Museum is located in the historic Danbury station, around the corner from the end of another Metro-North branch, and right next to downtown Danbury. Bravo!
• The Essex Steam Train is the really infuriating one. Well-run as a partnership between a Friends group and a for-profit entity, it’s a high-profile regional tourist attraction with pretty deep pockets by train museum standards. And yet! The trains run from a station five miles north of the modern Old Saybrook station, served by Shore Line East and the occasional Amtrak train. Transit connections between them consist of “nope.” But there is still track connecting the stations–and it’s leased by the museum! Though not used in revenue service, it’s used for storing trains and moving occasional new acquisitions. There’s plenty of room around the wye at Old Saybrook for the museum to build a rudimentary station. Instead, the volunteer crews have been clearing brush to extend the museum’s operating segment north toward Middletown–a valiant effort, but perhaps making the museum transit-accessible would be a better one? How cool (and potentially lucrative) would the ability to market a cross-platform connection from a modern train to one hauled by (a Chinese-built imitation masquerading as) the last remaining New Haven Railroad steam locomotive?
• I’ve never been to the Connecticut Trolley Museum at Warehouse Point, but they do have a bus collection, so here’s to hoping that when the planned Hartford Line station at Thompsonville in Enfield, a short drive away, opens, the museum will offer a shuttle service.  
• I’ve only been to the Connecticut Eastern Railroad Museum in Willimantic once. Points for being near downtown and next to the Air Line trail I guess?

Now for some others…Many of these I’ve been to, some I haven’t, and I won’t claim it’s a representative selection. But this is my blog, so my selection and division of it can be arbitrary.

The Bad

• The Illinois Railway Museum might be the best railroad museum in the country. Too bad it’s 90 minutes outside of Chicago with zero transit access.
• National Capital Trolley Museum: more like National Spend All Your Capital to Get Here Trolley Museum.
• The Maine Narrow Gauge Railroad Co. & Museum is an interesting, and potentially illustrative case. Currently located right on the waterfront in a touristy part of Portland, it’s in the process of moving almost 20 miles north to exurban Gray, where they’ll be able to expand operations–but at the expense of having to put the question “Will I be able to take the train all the way from Gray to Portland? No.” on their website.

Has Potential

• Of personal interest, since my grandmother lives not far away, the Orange Empire Railway Museum in Perris is currently essentially inaccessible by transit, but they’re in the middle of construction on the kind of cross-platform transfer to real transit that I’d love to see more of, with Metrolink’s Perris Valley Line in downtown Perris. They can’t do much about the terrible schedule, but hey, this is what I think more museums should be doing!
  

  The pocket track for OERM operations at Metrolink’s Perris station. Source: http://www.oerm.org/capital-campaigns/

• The Niles Canyon Railway has some tenuous bus connections to BART’s Union City station, but a 2.5 mile extension along existing ROW would make a walking connection possible. Should ACE ever deign to run weekend service, there’s also the possibility of a connection at the other end of the line in Sunol.
• The Trolley Museum of NY in Kingston gets points for being right next to the touristy Rondout area, but it would be helpful for transit-based tourists if they ran a shuttle over to the Amtrak station at Rhinecliff! Indeed, that trip is pretty roundabout by car, so perhaps the museum could strike a deal with one of the ferry companies that runs tourist trips out of the Rondout to make ferry runs.
• The West Chester Railroad occupies the outer leg of what was once a commuter line whose inner sectors are still served by SEPTA. As I understand it, the entire line is still intact, although not necessarily authorized for passenger use. With SEPTA re-extending the Media/Elwyn line to Wawa (sidebar–are there any other train stations named after convenience stores?) perhaps the time is ripe to extend the museum trips and make the connection. SEPTA’s 104 bus–a former trolley line that, should the agency choose to use it, could still have a dedicated reservation in the middle of the West Chester Pike–runs to the end of the line in West Chester from 69th Street Terminal hourly on Sundays, which is not too terrible, but not great.

Pretty to Very Good

• The Baltimore Streetcar Museum offers decent bus and LRT connections and is walkable from Penn Station.The walking path from the LRT connection could benefit from attention. Perhaps on weekends the dinky little LRT shuttle that serves the 1-stop Penn Station branch could turn around and run to North Ave. (which has a third track!) for a connection to the museum.
• The California State Railroad Museum has to be one of the best, if not the best, train museums in the country for actual transit connections. Very close to the Sacramento LRT, buses, and even the Amtrak station.
• The New York Transit Museum. Ok, too easy.

Connections to Intercity Rail

There are some museum operations–and in this case, I’m talking about more or less exclusively operating railroads–that have the potential to make connections not to urban transit but to intercity rail, but still don’t. You’d have to be making a special trip to make it out there, but at least it would be possible.

• Two somewhat similar cases are the former Maine Eastern Railroad operation on the Rockland Branch and the struggling Saratoga & North Creek in Upstate New York. Both could have, but chose not to, offered timed cross-platform connections to Amtrak (at Brunswick and Saratoga Springs, respectively), but chose not to.
• Somewhat similarly, the much more successful Strasburg Railroad–probably the country’s single most famous and influential operating tourist railroad–literally physically meets Amtrak’s Keystone line at a location known famously as Paradise, but neither operator has seen fit to provide a station (which would also provide access to the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania and several other train-related tourist attractions–that area is kind of nuts about trains).
  

  Amtrak’s testing of a Swedish X2000 high-speed trainset meets the Strasburg Rail Road. Source: https://history.amtrak.com/archives/x2000-making-test-runs-on-the-keystone-corridor-1992

So what are the good examples?

Generally speaking, it seems like train museums–or “heritage railways,” as they’re often known–in other countries do a better job connecting to actual transit than in this country. Some examples:

• The famous Puffing Billy Railway outside Melbourne is right across the street from a regional rail terminal.
• The Israel Railways Museum at the former Hejaz Railway station at Haifa East can be accessed by word-of-mouth (they’ll make arrangements with the conductors of passing trains if somebody knows somebody, which is like, the most Israeli thing ever).
• Thought the old collection of rusting steam locomotives I visited in Ankara when I was 13 is no longer there, the new museum is being arranged around the modern train station.

And a few suggestions from the peanut gallery:

I LOVED the London Transport Museum. It’s primarily focused on transit, but very well done and centrally located.

— Justin D. (@cznomad) November 23, 2017

The National Railway Museum in the UK is almost literally attached to York Railway Station https://t.co/vk9J40898J super convenient when taking a train from London

— Transit Plans (@transitplans) November 23, 2017

Off the continent: the Utrecht railroad museum is great: has its own NS spur line. https://t.co/aCvLZk0KwY

— Alex Block (@alex_block) November 23, 2017

Big regret while in Brussels last was not making it to the (very train accessible) Train World museum

— Kevin Schwarzwald (@ks905383) November 23, 2017

State RR museums in Sacramento & Roanoke are just steps away from both intercity rail stations & local transit options (Regional Transit light rail in SAC; Valley Metro bus In RNK)

— RAIL Magazine (@RAILMag) November 23, 2017

Oh, and there’s one more example to think about:

The Mattapan Line

By Derek Yu – DJY_2075, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25519303

Just kidding.

Conclusions

Most railroad museums operate on a pretty shoestring budget, and I’ve suggested a few capital investments that are most likely out of the range of realistic budgets. Is it the role of government to help out here? Maybe. There are certainly worse ways to spend economic development dollars. Train museums can play an important role in transit education, and making them transit-accessible is an important part of their future (there’s a crying need to bring in new, diverse blood while the postwar generation ages out), while keeping them inaccessible via transit sends the message that the history and technology featured there is just that, history, and nothing more. For transit agencies, working with museums could be both a way to connect to heritage and potentially a way to grow ridership on weekends. Is there a future here? It’s hard to tell, but many of the disconnects I’ve identified in my illustrative examples here are low-hanging fruit. Let’s think about how to pluck them.