The Western Mining & Railway Museum in Helper, Utah is one of the smaller railroad museums out there. In regards to railroad equipment it is home to only D&RGW 042 (Jordan Spreader), a Utah Railway caboose and a myriad of assorted Rio Grande Fairmont speeders. However, its small artifact collection is extensive.

During this past year the museum has begun an 8-year renovation plan to completely redo the entirety of its exhibits. This includes an expansion of the railroad wing of their three-story building. The reason was given by director Jim Boyd:
“Museum practices and policies have changed a lot. What was possible for a museum 30 or 40 years ago is not acceptable or not what is expected of a museum of the 2000s.”

Commenting on the fact that the third generation of descendants of Helper’s immigrant founders is now in their 80s, he said “We…are at the point where we are transitioning from remembrance to interpretation and education.”

In essence, the artifacts have lost their meaning to modern society and now must be re-learned and re-discovered. I imagine this is a problem that is facing a lot of museums these days. While the collections of artifacts may be comprehensive and displayed well, it seems that they are quickly losing relevance as the people who remembered them are dying off. The WMRM seems to be doing an excellent job with the development of a new, partially interactive exhibit (which will open to the public at the end of this month) focusing more on narrative storytelling using artifacts as props and less on the "here's an item and its history" presentation so common in many smaller institutions.

Are other museums struggling with presenting their collections to a consistently changing rising generation?

Your quote sounds eerily like this article I came across the other day (in the online magazine CityLab) about rural museums in Canada:
http://www.citylab.com/navigator/2016/07/the-disappearance-of-rural-manitobas-museums/493694/

"The country’s history, Bilcq says, is getting lost in the shuffle. 'The children of the original pioneers are now elderly,' Bilcq says. 'Our direct connection to their story is disappearing.'”

It sounds like there are a lot of small museums out there that are struggling with the same issue of making their collections relevant to a changing world that no longer remembers.

-Philip Marshall

I've been thinking about this off and on for quite some time, and I think it is even more of an issue for railroad museums than we may want to admit. We are now into the third or fourth generation beyond steam locomotives, small-town stations and passenger trains. The demographics of our country are changing rapidly, and there are entire cohorts of people today who have never even seen any of these things. How are they to understand what we are trying to preserve when none of it has any relevance to their lives, much less the lives of their parents or grandparents, which may very well have been in another country on another continent? How do we present our artifacts in such a way that we can help these visitors understand?

Think for a moment about how an individual from an Asian or central American nation, visiting the USA, might respond to a 44-ton GE towing a couple of E-L m.u. cars along a 5-mile line, or a PCC trolley gliding through the woods. Would their response to them be any different than that of the man who tried to "save" that buffalo calf at Yellowstone this spring? If we in the railroad preservation business do not find ways to interpret what we are trying to preserve to these visitors who have no connection to it, in just a few more generations, we'll join the ranks of the abandoned hospitals, drive-ins and hospitals so often depicted on TV specials.

Important topic - as it has been in all the times it has been discussed on this and in other fora........

We need to commit to the idea that it isn't about the things we treasure but about the story we tell using the things we treasure, Others don't treasure the things but do treasure being the audience of the experience of living in a good story told well - and this is where we need to start concentrating our efforts. Create a great mission statement based on the definition of the story you want to tell, and devote your resources to providing the best possible experience that tells it - remove everything else that has been cluttering up the place for 30 years eating up space, time money and energy. Think about the whole context of the place you set up as the stage on which you and your audience share the experience - it's more important than how many rivets are in that seam.

The dwindling number of historic technology based rail enthusiasts will always find their way to asking for a deeper immersion - and we should have a good means of taking them aside and sharing it with them but not to the detriment of the rest of the visitors who will tune out and take bad memories away to share with their friends. Stop building programming for us - build it for them. Hire writers and producers first, restoration professionals later once you know what needs to be restored for the purpose of the story. Always hire fund raisers before any other craftspeople anyhow........ but you guys know this already whether you do it or not.

I agree with brothers Lappele and Dave. A colleague once impressed on me the fact that the description for any exhibit or object should answer the simple question "why?"

Wesley