Museum Summary - Wall Street Journal

This article appearing today in The Wall Street Journal, is a summary of several railroad museums. It is aimed at general audiences:

Fair Use:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/paradise-f ... lewebshare

...Gleaming in gray metal with orange stripes, the Aerotrain looks like a 1950s Chevrolet merged with a locomotive. General Motors introduced it in 1956 to attract travelers back to the rails with a futuristic, streamlined design, complete with rear tail fins. For a short time a scaled-down Aerotrain ran through the Tomorrowland section of Disneyland.

Today, the odd-looking train can be seen at the National Museum of Transportation in St. Louis, one of many open-air railway and trolley museums that have reopened to the public for the summer, often with limited hours and social distancing policies.

Good to see that some of these museums are reopening, and that they are getting attention for it too.

(And that trains aren't getting a bad rep in this article with everything going on with the virus. )

IRM re-opened to the public this past weekend. Advance reservations (had to prepay online) were around 175 people for the day, which at least is some revenue coming in... It should have been thousands, as this was one of the weekends that Day Out With Thomas was scheduled for...

On the positive side, non-members prepaying for their tickets will speed up entry to the museum. No more waiting in line. Members now have a permanent plastic card they can have scanned on entry, which is nice. Previously it was a paper card that didn't really hold up very well.

As a negative... the paper tickets that were punched by the onboard conductor and docents are gone. Every other seat was roped off, and it looks like plastic seat covers were installed on some of the equipment to facilitate spraying the trains down between runs.