While we know many fans would show up to ride a "correct" train or railroad I don't believe the fans will ever pay the bills. The railroad simply must market to the masses.
ARRRGGGGHHHH! (sorry John, I can't help it)
Don't mean to pick on you, but this is exactly what I was addressing above in my posting about moving beyond Marketing 101. I can't say this strongly enough: the railroad does
NOT need to market to the masses. No niche product or service should adopt such a strategy and, in fact, doing so is simply a recipe for failure.
What drives so many to this kind of conclusion is that most here are unknowingly doing a very simple market segmentation, dividing potential customers into Railfan/Not-Railfan. Because you believe that railfans alone can't fully support the RR (true enough)your simple segmentation leads you to the simple conclusion that the RR must go after everybody else and appeal to the masses. This is not true, and is in fact not even possible, let alone practical.
There are more meaningful segmentations out there than just Railfans and everybody else.
I could write a book here, and in fact have written and deleted at least two and I haven't even scratched the surface, so I'll quit... that is after one final comment to something Don Richter writes above:
My personal opinion - for the time being - the C&TS needs to take the safest course, and anything that even hints at greater fiscal return for the C&TS is the way to go. That means approaching operations from the point of view of a businessman, not a curator. That also means a greater emphasis on branding and marketing.
Don, while I agree with your comments about acting as a business, I disagree with pretty much everything else. In order to run as a business and most particularly in order to focus on "branding and marketing", real marketing that is, you
cannot be following a course of whatever '...hints at greater fiscal returns'. Following such an approach will leave you in exactly the state the RR's currently in: surviving year to year, and only then because of heroic efforts on the parts of some amazing people and large infusions of public money.
Marketing is not advertising. In order to do
real marketing, the RR has to decide what it is and what it wants to be and then get solidly behind that vision. I strongly believe that history can be a core part of that and a major competetive advantage (and not just to traditional "Railfans"), but I'm more than willing to see that tested by some solid market research leading to a good business plan.
No matter what, though, in order to survive, the RR desperately needs a strong business plan based on something much sounder and longer term than whatever will maximize today's revenue. Everything else follows.
Scott