Railway Heritage and Tourism

Global Perspectives

Michael V. Conlin, Geoffrey R. Bird, Michael V. Conlin, Geoffrey R. Bird

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781845414405
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

This is the first book of its kind to examine railway heritage in the context of tourism in a comprehensive, internationally relevant manner. It explores the challenges faced by developers and operators of railway heritage destinations including financial, legal and managerial sustainability in the modern tourism industry. These themes are exemplified by a variety of case studies of railway heritage in tourism from regions around the world including North, Central and South America, the Caribbean, Europe, and Australasia. The volume will be of particular interest to scholars of cultural tourism as well as researchers and practitioners of industrial heritage tourism, along with graduate and senior undergraduate students.

Part 1

Introduction

1 Railway Heritage and Tourism: Themes, Issues and Trends

Michael V. Conlin and Geoffrey R. Bird

Introduction

Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.

Theroux (1975: 7)

It would be difficult to summarize our fascination, love and even obsession with trains and train travel any better than Paul Theroux did in his seminal work The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia. As a child in England after World War II, one of your editors would sit for hours on pedestrian bridges spanning the great railway marshaling yards in Stockton, County Durham, England, covered in soot and grime and meticulously marking off steam locomotives in a trainspotting book. Growing up in Canada, your other editor remembers travelling from Ottawa to Vancouver in the comfort of a Canadian National sleeping car, venturing outside at whistle stops to have a good look at the engine pulling his family across Canada’s immense landscape. Beginning in our childhoods, like Theroux, we have had a fascination with trains and particularly steam trains, a fascination that predates the withdrawal of steam locomotives from regular service – at least in Europe and North America – but which seems to grow stronger the longer we move beyond their presence in everyday life.

This book, with its collection of chapters about heritage railways from around the world, seeks to understand and explain our relationship with these relics of another age. From both a practical and a theoretical perspective, the history, growth, challenges and future of heritage railways within the context of tourism will be explored. In doing so, the following chapters will consider the principal issues which define and challenge railway heritage and its relationship with tourism. They will look to some well known and some not so well known examples of railway heritage to illustrate these issues. In doing so, they will inexorably focus on what seems to work with railway heritage and, inevitably, what does not. The book will end with a summary of the key issues and some lessons about success and failure in the railway heritage field in the context of tourism, which may offer insights into how to make this specialized and costly tourism experience sustainable.

What is Railway Heritage?

Like so much of our world, things which seem fairly simple are usually significantly more complex than they appear. This is true of railway heritage and its relationship with tourism. Unlike some other forms of industrial heritage tourism, such as motoring heritage, the very scale and immensity of railway infrastructure militates against private ownership and operation of heritage railways. In this sense, heritage railways have a lot in common with mining heritage attractions. Many of the issues facing heritage railways mirror those in the mining heritage niche (Conlin & Jolliffe, 2011: 3–6), including but not limited to:

• preservation versus commercialization and the related issues of commodification and replication;

• the financing of heritage attraction development and the operation and maintenance of the attractions;

• skill retention and training in vanishing trades and crafts;

• land and infrastructure ownership;

• health and safety of employees, volunteers and visitors;

• and the now ubiquitous focus on sustainability in all its varied facets.

These practical considerations are critical elements in the development, maintenance and operation of successful heritage attractions and especially heritage railway attractions. But they are not the only considerations for professionals and enthusiasts, planners and volunteers. All of these practical considerations must be viewed through the theoretical and very real prism of the visitor and her or his motivations, expectations and experiences.

As a starting point for our exploration of this topic, defining heritage railway tourism will provide a framework for examination. Hudson in his discussion of railway hotels in Chapter 2 provides a framework to explain the role of hotels in the development of early railway travel and their current role in heritage railway tourism. In doing so, he highlights the expansive nature of the niche; it is not simply locomotives but the entire range of infrastructure that supports the building and operation of railways. Stefanovic and Koster in Chapter 3 seek to define ‘railfans’, Themes, Issues and Trends their characteristics, their motivations and, importantly, their impact and influence on railway tourism development. Porterfield in Chapter 8 explores the further commercialization of train travel by defining the unique culinary experience which is a large part of many heritage railway attractions. In varying ways, the other authors also provide examples of railway heritage which explain the movement and its role in tourism.

Industry and professional associations also provide definitions of railway heritage. The European Federation of Museum and Tourist Railways (FEDECRAIL) defines heritage railways as including:

historic or preserved railways, museum railways and tramways, working railway and tram museums and tourist railways, and may extend to heritage trains operating on the national network and other railways. (FEDECRAIL, n.d.)

The Heritage Railway Association in the UK defines the niche to include heritage and tourist railways, tramways, stations and maintenance buildings, museums, railway preservation groups, rail cableways, and steam centers and cliff lifts (Heritage Railway Association, n.d.). These definitions and frameworks, drawn as they have been from the development of the heritage railway movement over the past 60 years, serve to remind us just how broad, complex and fascinating the world of heritage railways is. This perspective is well supported by the range of heritage railway attractions discussed in the following chapters.

The Origins of Railway Heritage

The origins of the modern heritage railway movement can be traced back primarily to the technological development of diesel electric motive power by most railroads in developed economies, a period which ironically parallels the switch from propeller-driven aircraft to jet propulsion, namely the 1950s and the early 1960s. During this period, these two major transportation modalities changed dramatically, both in terms of technology and, it can be argued, in terms of culture. Two early examples of a recognition of this momentous change and the consequent rise in interest in preserving the past for both modalities can be found with the preservation movement directed at saving the Puffing Billy line in Australia in the 1950s and the impetus to preserve locomotives and other railway infrastructure in the UK in the early 1960s. The Puffing Billy Preservation Society was founded in 1955 and over the past six decades has grown into a successful management structure which underlies what is arguably one of the world’s most successful heritage railways (Puffing Billy Preservation Society, n.d.). The development of the modern UK heritage railway movement was motivated in no small part by the Beeching report of 1963 – what was known colloquially as the ‘Beeching axe’ – which led to the demise of the steam era in the UK.

None of these frameworks and definitions, however, explains fully our fascination with heritage railways. There is a sense of nostalgia and romance associated with steam train travel that has not translated into modern railway travel. Collison’s discussion of the downturn in ridership on the Grand Canyon Railway (Chapter 12) can be linked, at the very least anecdotally, with that line’s move away from steam to diesel propulsion. As the following discussion shows, there is clearly more to this experience than vintage equipment, infrastructure and artefacts. As we have said above, these are important, and without them we would not have heritage railways. But by themselves, these collections of locomotives, passenger cars, stations and hotels, bridges and railway rights of way, documents and posters would simply be rich and interesting but nonetheless static displays of this specific aspect of our industrial transportation heritage. Underlying this broad focus on what are essentially management issues is another purpose of the present volume: to consider the meaning of railways to the human condition as a way to gain insight into why many are attracted to railways and, indeed, some might argue, entranced by them.

As this book demonstrates, the static display of equipment, infrastruc ture and artifacts is not sufficient to satisfy our fascination with this aspect of our heritage. We need to see the equipment in motion, we seek the sounds of the train whistle and the clanking of passenger cars being coupled, and we crave the unique smells of heritage railways and most particularly, the smell and sensation of steam. Above all, we desire the impact of the railway journey, if only for a short and fleeting time. It is this journey that captures the past for us and rekindles the nostalgia for rail travel that is the funda mental sustaining factor in this experience. In short, this final part is what fully defines heritage railways and explains in large part, our fascination with them.

The Railway Visitor’s Experience

In their account of the relationship between landscape, tourism and meaning, Knudsen et al. (2008) argue that it is important to understand the attraction, those who are attracted, and the meaning they associate with a place. This theoretical perspective is adapted here in terms of railways as the tourist attraction, a product involving the train and associated buildings and artifacts as well as the passing landscapes that are viewed along the journey. This conceptualization allows us to consider the experience of the railway traveler as shaped and defined by the experience and the landscape, not only with regard to gaining insights into visitor motivations and product positioning, but at a deeper level: what does he or she strive to capture with this experience that is distinct from other heritage experiences? For the mindful tourist (Moscardo, 1997), train travel may involve nostalgia, or a flight of childhood imagination, as Frost and Laing explore in Chapter 4. As Stefanovic and Koster note in Chapter 3, there are many different personas of tourists attracted to railways, including those seeking nostalgia. In addition, there are passengers who enjoy the opportunity to live in the present, gazing through the carriage window while grazing on a sandwich from a backpack or something more sumptuous in the dining car, as Porterfield examines in Chapter 8. The experience involves physical movement, sightseeing at a leisurely pace and allowing one to dwell in the present. Traveling by rail provides the unique opportunity to do nothing but reflect while watching the world go by, no small matter in the 21st century, characterized by speed and detachment.

What is most distinct about trains is the journey itself, the seemingly effortless movement offering passing vistas that capture the sense of adventure that is travel. Flying from Singapore to Paris, one can leave in the late evening and 14 hours later enjoy a croissant and coffee for breakfast in France – quite magical indeed. And yet the gradual geographical and cultural transition from Asia to Europe, the essence of ‘the journey’, will have been missed. In his epic four-month round trip train journey from Europe to Southeast Asia, Theroux (1975) captured this contrast magnificently in The Great Railway Bazaar. Reading the book nearly 40 years since it was first published, one can skip through time to peek not only into the world of rail travel in the 1970s, but the places, vistas and cultures of that era. In short, rail travel is a mode of travel celebrating as much the experience of motion, the passengers aboard as well as the passing landscapes and peoples as it is about reaching the destination. This may well explain why heritage railways attract such a widespread and devoted following, whereas the fascination with propeller-powered aviation prior to the introduction of jet propulsion, while vibrant, nostalgic and significant, has never reached the levels of interest in and commitment enjoyed by heritage railways.

Railways as Heritage Tourism

As is the case with other aspects of cultural heritage and industrial heritage development, railway infrastructure is often seen as an economic panacea for destinations with depressed or declining economies (Hospers, 2002; see also Firth, 2011). Many railway sites have been rejuvenated or converted to alternative tourist use, such as bike and walking trails, a topic explored by Reis and Jellum in relation to the development of the Otago Central Rail Trail in New Zealand in Chapter 7. Issues relating to economic viability (Orbaşli & Woodward, 2008; see also Firth, 2011), market and product development and management (Hughes & Carlsen, 2010) and sustainable development (Landorf, 2009) abound in the field of railway tourism. This book examines a number of them: Collison discusses the recent ridership and financial challenges faced by the Grand Canyon Railway in Chapter 12; Yan and Xingcheng’s examination in Chapter 16 of the economic, social and political process currently underway with respect to the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway illustrates the complex web of interests and constituencies challenging heritage railway development; and Found’s discussion of myriad challenges faced in establishing the St Kitts Scenic Railway and its subsequent success in Chapter 17 are all excellent examples.

In contrast, other jurisdictions struggle to create or even maintain a foothold in establishing an economically viable operation without ongoing government support, leaving rail projects economically vulnerable to cutbacks. Conlin and Prideaux in Chapter 18 bring the reader’s attention not only to the early successes enjoyed by the West Coast Wilderness Railway in Tasmania but, perhaps more importantly, the urgency of continued government support for the project after a decade of what seemed like a very successful operation. Investment is a challenge, and without investment in infrastructure and maintenance there is little chance of establishing a railway as a tourism product. Such issues of economic viability and funding are directly or indirectly linked to the list of critical success factors (CSFs) drawn up by Hughes and Carlsen (2010: 21) for commercially viable heritage tourism sites. Their nine CSFs are:

(1) agreed objectives and clear concepts (for the organization);

(2) financial planning for budgeting, capital raising and price setting;

(3) effective marketing strategies based on sound market research;

(4) monitoring of proximity to major markets and visitor flows;

(5) effective human resource management, including paid staff and volunteers;

(6) planning for product differentiati...