I am reproducing Aarne Frobom's classic treatise from the September 1989 Trains Magazine criticizing railroad museums without clear direction and purpose. Originally published in 1989 when a second wave of classic equipment was available for the asking, the warnings are as relevant today as they were forty years ago.

Trains Turntable: The McRailroad Museum

Recently the Big Boy restaurant chain agonized over abandoning its Big Boy mascot as being too fat to be fashionable. The plump Big Boy statues are still outside many of the restaurants, which is unfortunate for the railroad-museum business. For the surplus fiberglass figures could become the emblem of another chain spreading across the country: the generic railroad museum. These institutions are as alike as that cousin to Big Boy, McDonald's restaurants. The Big Boy could have his red-and-white checked overalls repainted into pinstripes, and could be made to hold up a long-necked oil can instead of a double-deck burger.

Is there a McRailroad museum in your town? Here's how to tell:

It's a yard of equipment, arranged in no particular pattern, with a building or box car full of displays. Some or all of these items will be there:
• An EMD F-unit or Alco S-1, less traction motors or engine, from a railroad that did not run through the museum's territory
• Lackawanna M.U. cars
• A fireless steam engine from a nearby factory
• A Plymouth four-wheel switcher, with stripped gears
• Chicago L cars
• A Pennsylvania GG1
• A Toronto PCC streetcar
• A heavyweight Pullman, with insufficient interior hardware and linen to assemble even one section
• A camp car made from an old Pullman or troop sleeper
• A Fairmont car on a 10-foot length of track
• Many, many cabooses, with more due next week.

The box car or depot will contain:
• A collection of brakeman's lanterns, uniform buttons, spikes, date nails, timetables, insulators, or depot-platform paving bricks
• A steam locomotive bell, whistle, or headlight
• One each crossbuck, order hoop, telegraph key, semaphore head, station sign, baggage wagon, and book of dispatcher's train sheets.

There is likely to be one of almost anything else, from a collection of turn-of-the-century wedding dresses to a 1952 Nash. There is a railroad museum with a German V-l buzz bomb on display next to the 2-8-0, so anything is possible. But there are some things that you won't find at the generic railroad museum.

You won't find an average day coach. The museum may have the railroad president's business car, but it won't have a coach in presentable shape. Thousands of people left from the depot on these cars over the years, but if examples are on the property at all, the interiors are stripped or have badly stained Amtrak blue-and-purple seats. Upholstery material does cost money these days.

There will be no explanation of who shipped what on local railroads. There won't be a map showing tourists or local visitors how the lines relate to the geography of the area. There won't be anything telling what the railroad is or what it does.

There will be freight cars, but which freight cars will be determined by what the carriers were willing to part with for free, not cars that tell the story of freight haulage in the area. There will be one hopelessly odd freight car, like a pickle vat car or wine tank car, that one now-deceased museum director took a liking to.

No one will say what it was like to work on the railroad. There will be engines and cabooses, but no one to tell what it was like to fire a steam engine over a hilly railroad. No one will tell what went on in the caboose; the Pullman won't have any explanation of who the porters were, and why, and what their life was like.

What can you do if you've got a generic railroad museum on your hands? The easiest way to avoid becoming a link in the chain of McRailroad museums is not to start one in the first place. In 1989, anyone considering starting a railroad museum needs to as if there are enough of the right artifacts remaining to coherently tell the story of some part of railroading. If not, then any new institution won't be an educational device, but will be a field full of unrelated hardware for the amusement of some rail fans and no one else.

If it's too late, and the L cars are already on the property, you may be able to salvage the situation by concentrating on the part of the "collection" that seem related, and unhesitatingly dumping the rest. And even badly mismatched stuff can be made more meaningful by explaining it to visitors. This doesn't just mean hanging labels on the cars. It means deciding what message you want visitors to walk away with, and then drawing on your talents as a teacher, historian, and entertainer to get the message across.

This is how a real museum begins. It isn't easy, but if you succeed, it means you're no longer a generic railroad museum and one't need the revolving status of the plump boy holding the oil can. —Aarne E. From

Aarne H. Frobom, 36, is a transportation planner for the State of Michigan and direct of a volunteer museum society. HE lives in East Lansing, Mich., with several tons of machinery — three bicycles and a 64-seat coach. His August 1988 "Trains Turntable" was on train scheduling.

This post could possibly have been inspired by a post I made below: viewtopic.php?p=342481#p342481

But even if not, I don't deny that the museum in question could be termed a "McRailroad Museum". There is one thing to note about it though: the only remaining "Big 4" (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago and St. Louis Railway) caboose has been saved, and otherwise it wouldn't be.

Would that all these little McSeums still have Lackawanna cars... or PRR MP54s. In fact, aren't ex-Reading MU cars hard to find nowadays?

I see Mexico just got six converted SPV2000s. Hope they can figure out how to run them better than they did with the Amfleet cars ...

That first one is a pet peeve of mine. A clapped-out locomotive that originally worked on the other side of the country and ended its life at a regional grain elevator. Basically a scrapping candidate, but a donation ensues, and the museum paints it up in a local road's colors circa 1956. Historic, my ass! May run with a lot of work... for a while. Rinse and repeat until every board member has a different personal favorite that is their sacred bird.

I am constantly amazed at how few museum operations are consistently willing to cooperate with other ones in order to get memorabilia and records to their appropriate locations. When serious railfans pass away, their kids will go to the local museum and hand off dad's cache of DRG&W stuff that he collected because it seemed exotic to him compared to the local scene.

Don't even get me stared on the model railroad donations.

Not when it preceded your post by about 25 years.

To be somewhat fair about this in 2023, the number of such "museums" has shrunk somewhat. In today's world, the Lackawanna MU cars (or CN or SP commuter cars) are all at work somewhere hauling passengers, in restaurant dining areas, or scrapped; the fireless steamer got scrapped because of asbestos panic; the Chicago L cars were parted out for PCC parts and/or went to Windber; one or both of the two Pullmans got sold off to the Colebrookdale/Everett/Durbin & Greenbrier/etc., the Plymouth or GE 45-tonner is now operable and pulls a caboose train on selected weekends; etc.

The ones more guilty of the "McRailroad Museum" syndrome in 2023, in my experience, tend to be the local station museums administered by a local general history society (not a RR history bunch) that used to be led by a couple railfans that have "met their reward" a decade or two ago, and the heirs to the Pawdoodle County Historical Society haven't the necessary railroad expertise to do anything more than dust off the display cases with Bob's old lantern collection and Jim's model trains.

Have any of you offered to contribute your expertise and/or assistance to such a group? Maybe buy the paint for the Eagle Scout who takes on painting the caboose, and offer guidance to a proper paint scheme?

This is not to say that some significant rail museums are still not guilty of at least some aspects of this list; the Arizona Railway Museum in Chandler has a fairly nicely curated Arizona collection combined with stored private varnish............. and a Toronto PCC, and they only have it because, to cite them:

The temperature in Hell has dropped below 32 degrees, and it is steadily getting colder here --- Once again, I have to agree with ADMIV. Instead of throwing rocks at the efforts of "normal folks" who end up in the McMuseum biz, it wouldn't kill us to help out, or at least try to help out. IMHO.

It proceeded my post by four hours, not twenty-five years, and the Trains Magazine article we are all familiar with was from thirty-five years ago.

And is still valid today.

Maybe people shouldn't fill their tracks with more and more clapped out projects. I'm thinking of the land of way too many railroad mcmuseums too close together.... In the Mid-Atlantic within a two hour drive of Baltimore are what, probably about 12 operations, some differentiate, one of them is a scrap yard on rails and given it's track structure it's probably soon on mud... Another is stuck in the speeder years for almost 40 years...

I think generically, I've seen a general attention to focus by most organizations that call themselves 'railroad museums'. Some have closed, others have let stuff finally go to scrap, there's been some really good horse-trading going on that has rationalized unrelated collections into meaningful, and appreciated, artifacts.

But the community museums that still have 'railroad' stuff? OMG. Without naming names I can absolutely agree with that, more than a few that are really collections of COMPLETELY unrelated and unorganized 'stuff'; individually valuable artifacts but no cohesive purpose. Grandma's attic.

We have a local artifact musem that has minimal railroad 'stuff' but does have a 37mm antitank gun beside a Mercedes. A more distant one has a nicely restored locomotive stuffed in a room only slightly longer than it is, with absolutely no way to step back, and is mixed in with every imaginable local item that will fit in the same room, that was originally built around the parked locomotive!

One of my biggest regional sinners has really found new focus and legitimacy, and wow, did they ever fit the description above in the past.

The other side that hasn't been mentioned is when an organization finally just throws up it's hands and suddenly finds themselves with a loss of mission just in order to be financially survivable, you know who you are, you're now a semi-successful rock concert venue with trains still in the yard. Surviving, but....

And there really are successes out there, if you haven't realized that the Timber Heritage Society has made an EPIC transformation of the Samoa (Eureka), CA shop and locomotive facility of Hammond/Pacific Lumber, then the Heritage Rail Alliance certainly has, by giving them the 2023 national award. First time I saw it in 2000, there were trees growing...on the INSIDE of the buildings.

I also live not far away from a small town that is NATIONALLY known as the home of historic rail equipment I've found in other museums all over the US, and the community is absolutely clueless of their own rail heritage that everyone else openly worships. I still get a collective and inexplicable shrug. I think they'd rather be known for the moonshine distillery and home of political resistance.

There is absolutely no doubt many, if not most of us have over-collected, particularly from the perspective of the ordinary visitor, who cannot tell the difference between one locomotive (or car) and another, even if you attempt to explain it to them.

During the summer, our museum frequently operates a Rio de Janiero open trolley, which is very popular with the public. We get phone calls asking whether it will be running today. But they don't ask about the "open car". Or the "Rio car". They ask whether the yellow car will be running. They differentiate our collections solely by color!

Which reminds me of the following ditty, which can be sung to the tune of “Little Boxes”

There’s a green one and red one and yellow one and a rusty one
And they’re all there on the siding and they all look just the same
Every six months get another one ‘cause it’s not quite like the other ones
And they’re rusting on the siding and they all look just the same.

/s/ Larry
Lawrence G. Lovejoy, P.E.

Good one Larry. Ned
BTW Happy New Year.

At least they aren't made out of ticky tacky.......

Randy, you should have seen it when the animatronic pirates were there.

Rock and rail go together. There's one short straight section of track on the Loop that always made the train rock and roll. Not sure Ralph knew how to deal with anything not steep or curvy.

Larry, I was told in San Francisco that people chose their favorite PCC duplicates based entirely on the livery in which they were painted, but by principal color rather than name of line that used the livery.

To some extent, we need to meet them where they live in terms of appeal and understanding. We can find ways to do so without losing our mission and identity in the process if we're careful.

Wow that got me laughing.

Those little small town depot museums get stuck with every kind of donation.

If the museum and contents are owned by the municipality it takes a herculean effort to get rid of stuff that doesn't fit the museum's focus (if there is one). They can't simply throw it out or horse trade it. And many times, in my experience, the docent running these museums is hoarder.

There sometimes is a fine line between collector and hoarder, and people often start out as one and slide into the other over time and deteriorating brain cells.