Re: Williamsburg vs. Preserved Adventure

In reading the last several posts above I've become concerned that a misimpression may be forming. Just to clarify about Steamtown and actors/reenactors:
Nearly EVERYONE a visitor sees at Steamtown is a real working employee or volunteer going about his or her business. If you take the backshops tour you see real people doing real work, no actors. Same in the roundhouse.
Steamtown has had a few actors work on site during the summer in a pilot program called RAILS (Railroad Anthracite Industry Labor Stories). These reenactors play four roles: an irish trackworker, a hobo, a Lackawanna executive, and (if memory serves) a section foreman. The reenactors playing these parts do so at set times, in older period costumes, and they do their spiel in such a way that they could not be confused with the much larger number of "real" workers all over the site.
It really would be a disservice to generalize from the small (and in my opinion very worthwhile) RAILS program to the conclusion that Steamtown was littered with actors, or that most of the work being done was for show and not for real. The opposite is the case.