I'm taking a survey of operating heritage railways. Is your boarding location located somewhere the postman will deliver mail to?

I'm dealing with social media, and "Google Plus" is designed to force every business to use their street address, and requires they be able to take mail there. (They actually test that by sending you a postcard.)

Google is using this as a "litmus test" to distinguish real businesses from fake ones, so yay on them. However.

Some of us have a boarding address that is different from our business address, and you don't want that address on your social media, because you don't want people going there to board the train. Or alternately, our business is not staffed Monday-Friday, so we take mail at a PO Box. So I'm trying to get a sense of the trends here. Thanks for voting.

I've tried to vote a couple of times, but keep getting an invalid choice.

The Travel Town Museum foundation receives all its mail at a PO Box. US mail sent to 5200 Zoo drive, Los Angeles, 90027 (the physical address) ends up at some City office elsewhere and sometimes eventually makes it back to us. But at least that address works in GPS. I know a lot of museums that don't even have a physical address that these features of modern life understand. For those museums, may I suggest you determine your GPS coordinates and post those on your website too.

Greg

What is the problem with the site's "poll" or "vote" setup? Every time I've tried using it, for this or any other poll, I get that "invalid" message.

RMNE uses a PO box, but mail addressed to our 242 East Main Street address gets placed by the PO into our box.

When someone Googles or MapQuests or GPSs for directions to 242 E Main St, they are carefully directed to the middle of the Rt 6/E Main St highway bridge, 20 feet above our station and 50 feet north of it. "Can't get there from here."

Howard P.

Google actually has Humans that correct their maps.

Contact them to have corrections made.

Wasn't asking that, Hudson. This is a general query about railroad museums, not about Google's maps project. I'm thinking more about their Plus Business pages, but even more than that, generally.

The survey feature is broken.

About 20 years ago our Museum purchased an on-site locked mailbox - a larger version of the cluster boxes used at townhouse communities and other residential settings - so our business address = our mailing address.

My current non-profit employer still relies on a PO box instead of on site mail delivery and I am quickly working to fix that so our business address is the theatre where we operate and not a PO box.

Wesley

Branford Electric Rwy. Ass'n. - Shore Line Trolley Museum has at the boarding location both a mail box that we empty and a business office that is staffed most of the time that we are open.

Since the 1980s Pennsylvania Trolley Museum has had all functions at the same physical address, 1 Museum Road, Washington, PA 15301. For the early decades of our existence we had a split personality; a P. O. Box in downtown Pittsburgh and the museum itself 30 miles away at Washington. This led to confusion of exactly what and where the museum was. Folks in Washington, seeing the Pittsburgh address, discounted us as "out of towners." Integration of PTM in the Washington County business community and our acceptance by local political bodies required that we "relocate" to our physical address. Having mail sent to a PO box also led to some screw-ups when the mail was not collected promptly. Supposedly we lost a chance to preserve an Altoona & Logan Valley "Master Unit" when the time the company held it for us expired while their notification letter gathered dust in our PO Box in Pittsburgh. So the lesson is, be what you are where you are and don't try to behave as anything else.

A good idea also because having your PO Box in the same city allows a useful addressing trick.

Wyle E. Coyote
123 Undeliverable Avenue
P.O. Box 456
Springfield, CA 98765

If address lines conflict, the Post Office delivers to the last one. The PO Box.
The visitor (or FedEx driver) will ignore the useless PO Box and go to 123 Undeliverable Avenue.

You cannot do that trick if your PO Box is in a different town.

Yes, we can accept mail.

I worked with the local county and renamed the private street serving our site. So, we have a county assigned address of:

750 Depot St, Campo, CA

We do get mail at this address.

A comparison argument should be made with theme parks. Often the mailing address is nothing close to where a guest would buy a ticket and enter the attraction.

A number of years ago, HVRM was told by the post office that we needed to have a mail box where mail could be delivered, even though we had long used a PO Box. So, they gave us an address and we put out a mailbox. Unfortunately, the mail box didn't last long as it was destroyed by a passing car. It has never been replaced and mail continues to come in to our PO Box. The one good thing is that we at least now have an address that folks can put into their GPS to find us.

Les

Hoosier Valley Railroad Museum
507 Mulberry Street
P.O. Box 75
North Judson, IN 46366

We can receive mail at the entrance to the park, a half mile from the boarding area (34600 Ardenwood Blvd, Fremont, CA 94555) but use the PO box normally.