There have periodically been questions asked about what ridership is across the industry and no one seems to have the answer. Because I was curious I started collecting ridership numbers several years ago for whatever tourist/museum lines I could find. I thought I might as well share the info. These are mostly based on online articles, news releases and reports. The link below is to a PDF of the results. Be warned there are more blank fields than filled in ones, but the data might still be useful.

If you have access to ridership numbers on any line, feel free to send them and I will add them to the chart.

http://spikesys.com/tourist-ridership.pdf

Christopher,

I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Dayton, School of Business, and I would enjoy assisting with any numeric analysis of this data. At the moment, your data set is still small, but hopefully my offer will stimulate more participation. It would also be helpful if the audience would pose questions or insights they would like to review.

The data would be more useful if it were monthly instead of annual. You might have more success in encouraging participation if the data were anonymous. There may also be those who are willing to share the data for analysis, but while allowing the final analysis to be public, wish that the source data remain confidential.

For railroads subject to FRA accident/incident reporting, this information is publicly available. I track the data periodically for benchmarking purposes.

http://safetydata.fra.dot.gov/officeofsafety/publicsite/Query/rrstab.aspx

Alan Maples