Off the Rails with Rowdy and Bethan
Join Mt. Rainier Scenic Railroad Executive Director Bethan Maher and Superintendent Rowdy Pierce and take a ride into the modern age of steam locomotives, cows, corn and incontinent Santas. This is an unvarnished look at the business of tourist steam railroads like you've never heard before.
Off the Rails with Rowdy and Bethan
Episode 2: The impact of politics and a weakening economy on tourism and the rails.
The impact of politics and a weakening economy on tourism and a heritage railroad.
Did you know that running our steam engine is significantly less expensive and more environmentally friendly to operate than our diesel engine? In this supersized episode, Bethan and Rowdy discuss this, regressive tax structures and how to make things roll in a remote and rural small community tucked at the base of Mt. Rainier. Oh and corn. Lots and lots of corn content.
Become a sponsor and help keep Off the Rails 'On the Air'!
Off the Rails is made possible by generous sponsors like Gilliardi Logging and Construction -- providing excellence in logging, land clearing, demolition, trucking and landscape materials for more than 40 years. Visit https://gilliardi.com/
Welcome to Off the Rails, the podcast where steam locomotives meet modern madness. Join executive director of the Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad, Bethan Marr, and Rowdy Pierce, superintendent, professional cat herder, and occasional cow negotiator. Together, they pull back the curtain on the wild, weird, and often hilarious world of tourist steam railroads. You'll get a front row seat to the ins and outs of this truly unique business. So grab your ticket, hold on to your sense of humor, and join us for a ride into the unpredictable world of steam. This is Off the Rails.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome back to Off the Rails with Rowdy and Beth, and I'm out right here at Scenic Railroad. My name is Rowdy. I am the superintendent, lead engineer, CMO, basically the lead cook and bottle washer of the whole organization, and I am here with Bethann. I'm
SPEAKER_02:the
SPEAKER_01:executive director,
SPEAKER_02:CEO, what have you. Can you look to your left for me?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I already noticed that.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, I'm gunning for some sponsorships and awkwardly enough, the only luck we've had in attracting attention from corporations has been from canned corn.
SPEAKER_01:That could be a whole episode in itself. So what are we going over this week? This week we are going over the economy, economic impact, and the funding paradigms associated with a tourist railroad. I'm just going to sit here and eat some canned corn. This was supposed to be you, girl.
SPEAKER_02:Delicious. Okay. Anyway. Yeah. So why do those things matter to a tourist railroad?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, so you could probably start off with the whole, what the tourist railroad success basically hedges around what the economy is doing.
SPEAKER_02:Tourism is right. Tourism isn't a necessity, right? Tourism isn't buying a gallon of milk for the kids at home. It's not putting food on the table. It's not putting gas in your car. Tourism is an elective spend.
SPEAKER_01:Yep. It's not your mortgage. It's not groceries. It is, as you said, it's an elective spend. If you don't have the money to spend on it, then guess what? You're not going to do it.
SPEAKER_02:So when we see these economic ripples, downturns, recessions, what have you, tourism is usually one of the first places where we feel that effect.
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Do we do a disclaimer that Rowdy and I are on different sides of the political spectrum, so we are bringing you an inherently apolitical, because we are a tourist railroad, but bipartisan podcast?
SPEAKER_01:I would say, because if you look at me, everybody would sit back and say that I'm probably a full-blown bleed-red Republican. I like to say that I lean just a little bit right of center, and we all know you're an independent. I
SPEAKER_02:am a I'm
SPEAKER_01:like, like hell you are. at ourselves because, you know, in a lot of ways, I grew up being pandered to, you have to keep up with the Joneses. I had to have a brand new truck every five years. I had to live in a big five bedroom, three bathroom house. You know, you weren't nothing if you didn't have property. So that's always been my obsession with having, you know, property. If you sit down and you look at all that in this day and age, I mean, I looked at buying a house here two years ago and the mortgage on it was going to be$3,500 a month for seven acres and a two-bedroom, one-bath farmhouse. That was probably as big as the building that we're sitting in. So if you look at how much money you have to spend just to live in this modern day and age, and the amount of money that you're being told you have to spend to live in this modern day and age, it's really, really, really, really hard to do that because, I mean, at the end of the day, my minimum credit card payments right now are$450 a month, and that's only on$5,000 of So what's going on with these folks that are$60,000 deep on a credit card?
SPEAKER_02:Let me talk to you about the cost of preschool.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Anyway.
SPEAKER_01:It's all that. When it comes down to it, if you don't have the money to be able to spend on going out and having fun, you're not going to go out and spend money on going out and having fun. And taking a train ride is exactly that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's not a necessity. It's an elective, right? For the most part, we're in the business of selling experiences, selling a good time in a family-friendly way, despite what you may see on the internet.
SPEAKER_01:Despite what you may see on the
SPEAKER_02:internet. Anyway, so I think that this podcast is a disclaimer. It does touch on politics because we work in a federally regulated environment where we see these ripple effects and ramifications of whatever's happening in Washington. We see the effect of the economy, local laws, local policies, whatever is going on right now about short-term rentals locally, that's going to have an impact on what we do. Do I have an opinion about it? No, not on this podcast. But the nature of the beast is that we
SPEAKER_01:touch on all of these things. If you look at it too, I mean, look at what the timed entry at the park did for us last year.
SPEAKER_02:Yep.
SPEAKER_01:That
SPEAKER_02:was great for our business.
SPEAKER_01:It was great for our business. It wasn't great for the park's business. was not. Not at all.
SPEAKER_02:So I think, you know, we don't exist in a silo, right? We exist in the real world that everyone else is living in. And that's going to be stuff we talk about. I mean, I think case in point, whichever, however you feel about politics and what's happening in Washington, we saw towards the end of January, beginning of February, a huge, huge downturn in our interactions on social media. And I was sitting there thinking like, oh my gosh, I haven't changed my what I'm doing. What am I doing differently on our socials? You know, I need to edit this. I need to tweak it. And then we sort of had the realization like, no, everyone's staying off the doom scrolling because everyone's so sick of the sort of like the political division on regardless of how you felt about what's going on. Right. So we sort of said, you know what, let's try advertising on podcasts. Let's try Spotify for a little bit. Let's shift it up. So it's elective media. So you're, you know, And we've seen that sort of come back, but everything happens in cycles. We've got to exist in the world around us. So the economy, economic impact.
SPEAKER_01:The economy right now, what is making it difficult to operate in the economy as it stands right now?
SPEAKER_02:You're quizzing me?
SPEAKER_01:I'm just posing that question to the room, I guess.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you can ask Tom right behind you. For those listening, there is a naked mannequin that's wearing a green giant logo. As
SPEAKER_01:a loincloth.
SPEAKER_02:As a loincloth.
SPEAKER_01:That way Calvin doesn't have to blur it out in posts when it goes on the YouTube. Try and gun for sponsorships here.
SPEAKER_02:Anyway, the story about canned corn in the railroad is a different story. However...
SPEAKER_01:It would become an occult thing.
SPEAKER_02:The economy. I mean, elective spending is one. Fuel prices. Everyone gasps when we tell them that it is more cost-effective for us to run a steam engine right now than one of our diesels.
SPEAKER_01:They don't understand how that could be.
SPEAKER_02:There's a few reasons for that, and I'm going to talk about it because it's not my wheelhouse. But... The cost of diesel out here, what's it cost to get diesel delivered here
SPEAKER_01:per gallon? It's$5.75 a gallon.
SPEAKER_02:Our steam engines run on recycled filtered waste oil, which costs...
SPEAKER_01:$1.75 a gallon.
SPEAKER_02:So there's an order of magnitude of difference there.
SPEAKER_01:Yep.
SPEAKER_02:People say, well, what about the staff and the maintenance and all of those things?
UNKNOWN:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:For the most part, I look at our staff as a fixed cost. I'm going to have those people on payroll anyway, doing maintenance work, doing restoration work. However, even when we factor in the costs of our staff time, a well-maintained steam engine, particularly on the territory we're running where we have 3% grades, 20 plus degree curves, is more cost effective for us to run than a diesel. Now, depending on what's happening with oil prices, what's happening in the Middle East, what's happening with Russia, those costs, you know, vacillate wildly. We see the effects of it.
SPEAKER_01:And used motor oil's cost has stayed, no matter what's going on with gas and diesel right now. Our used motor oil, we're paying the exact same for it today as we paid when we opened the place up three years ago. Yeah, it's far more stable. It's way more stable. And the reason being is because there's so much Yeah. to heat the building to go towards more of an electric alternative. So when it comes down to it, these guys come to us to say, we got thousands of gallons of oil to get rid of. How much can you take?
SPEAKER_02:Now, we're talking about the economy, but I'm going to talk about the environment for a second because people are going to say, well, they're giving that away. Isn't that terrible for the environment?
SPEAKER_01:Not the way that it gets burned in our steam locomotive.
SPEAKER_02:Right. We've had the studies done. It's actually a remarkably clean burn. So in terms of a win-win situation that is fairly, I'm going to say like, I don't know, economic volatility proof. That's not really a phrase, but a little bit more secure, something that's environmentally friendly, right? We're taking a waste byproduct, burning it in a fairly clean way. A well-maintained steam engine for us is more economical to run than a diesel engine. So that's one way, for example, to to go back to your question about how the economy affects what we do. So you've got that tourist dollar spend, right? That's an elective spend. You've got the price of fuel. What is the labor market doing? I mean, that's a huge one,
SPEAKER_01:especially out here. It's a massive one right now, and the economy plays into that, especially for us because, I mean, for those listening at home or watching us, where we are at is we are 14 miles from the base of Massachusetts. rainier, and we are about 50-some-odd miles from Tacoma. We are out in the boonies. We are out in the middle of nowhere. Because of that, the folks that work in this area, they can't afford to work for the tourist industry in the area. And what I mean by that is they can't afford to work for the Airbnbs. They can't afford to work for REI. They can't afford to work for all the little curiosity shops at the base of the mountain up to and including us. Now, we like to think that we pay a damn good wage. We do when it comes to everybody else, but when it comes down to it, we can't compete with going into town, making the hour commute and getting paid$50 to$60 an hour to do a job.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, the work from home paradigm, right? All of these shifts, even though we're in a rural area, if you have a job that allows for a hybrid work schedule, you're doing office work. If you have to make that drive into Seattle once a week to be making 80, 90 grand a year
SPEAKER_01:A
SPEAKER_02:lot of folks elect to do that. So employment, I mean, I remember when I started here in 2017, the gas station was paying 18 bucks an hour starting. And we had to hire over 100 seasonal workers for the Polar Express. So we were taking whoever had a heartbeat and a breath that could pass like a background check to a degree. Now, as the economy shifts, then, you know, So do employment realities, right? But those things all affect the business.
SPEAKER_01:Well, and it's also not to get political in it, but there have been a lot of the folks that live out here in this area have, I guess you don't have to get political because you could talk about the economy in it because the timber industry is a massive driver of this area. And the people that work here work within the timber industry. With the things going on legislatively in our state, there are a lot of people that are just saying, I can't do this anymore. I don't want to do this anymore. I'm tired of paying the taxes. I mean, there's a few folks that live down here in the Valley that their property taxes have gone up$7,000 this year because of, I mean, just whatever that may be, legislature, politics, and we'll dabble in that but not get too terribly into it. So they all say, screw it, we're leaving.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but at the same time, you have a lot of other folks moving to the area because, I mean, we're halfway between Portland and Seattle. So that's me playing a It's not a super stable labor market right now. And the trends that we see in Seattle and Portland affect what we see out here, what we see out here in terms of tourism. It's all this giant ecosystem that affects what we do. On a day-to-day basis. Sure. So... I think fair to say that what we see in the economy has some massive effects.
SPEAKER_01:Right now, we're down, but it's not just us.
SPEAKER_02:No, no, no. So I think that's a great thing to talk about. Over last year, we are down about 20% of sales year over year. Now, there's a lot of reasons for that. One, last year was our first full year back in operation. I think people were really excited. They wanted to see sort of the quote-unquote new- or New York Scenic Railroad and they wanted to see what we're doing. We have not raised our prices. We always try and keep our prices in line with what it costs to go to the movie theater, what it costs to take your kids to the zoo or the aquarium, that sort of thing, because that's my competition, right? Hiking trails are my competition just as much as, you know, anything else. If I'm deciding what I'm doing with my kids on a weekend, right, they have a great Yeah. about that because the federal and state funding paradigms have changed. Employment realities in Washington state have changed. I mean, what else? Canadian visitors. I posted on one of the railroad groups and sort of asked for what was happening with trends across the tourist railroad industry. For us, for example, we get a lot of international visitors. Last year, It was between 15 and 30% of our visitors every single month were international. We had visitors from 32 countries. For the most part, it was Canadians, obviously, are the most prevalent international group that visits because they come down from BC, English, Brits, Germans, and then folks from India. Those are the big groups that we see. Now, border crossings... and I'm going to say this, I was called out on one of, like I said, I posted a question asking what ridership at tourist railroads are doing across the country. And I saw this morning, one person commented and said, well, you know, you're just being political about it. There's a lot of other realities. The fact of the matter is border crossings from BC into Washington state are down between 30 and 50% every month over what was happening in 2024 and 2023. You can't tell me that that doesn't impact our visitor numbers.
SPEAKER_01:No, it does.
SPEAKER_02:The international visitation, international tourism is down.
SPEAKER_01:And it's hard to talk about that and not be political because it always happens with politics. Yeah. At the end of the day, it always happens with politics. I mean, the stuff we face with the FRA is happening because of politics. It's hard to not dip into some of those conversations and not be political about it because, I mean, we shift with the political landscape.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, yeah. Regardless of whether you agree or not, the fact of the matter is other countries are issuing travel warnings for travel into the United States right now. You can't tell me that that doesn't have an impact. Yeah, it does. That is a fact that is not an opinion. My opinion is that it has an impact. The fact is other countries are issuing travel warnings.
SPEAKER_01:And then And the fact is that, I mean, of all the people who commented and messaged us on that particular question, every single person in the country had the same damn data, which was they're down 20% to 60%, depending upon who you were. I mean, there was one aspect of, oh, we're 5% year over year in growth. It's like, okay, everybody else is down, but the one's not. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:Well, we're seeing lots of, yeah, we're seeing very consistent trends.
SPEAKER_01:It's very consistent, very consistent. consistent trends, very consistent on, hey, the economy is playing a big factor right now. We're
SPEAKER_02:also seeing those trends. For example, I'm on the board of Visit Rainier, which is the local tourism agency. It's not just us. We're seeing those impacts and sort of those trends with all tourism and all elected
SPEAKER_01:spending. If you sat back and asked Eric right now if he wanted to be dealing with sold-out trains every single day, you know what he'd say? He'd say no. It's a lot easier to operate the way we're operating right now than it is to be trying to operate with those massive crowds that we saw last year.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, it's true and it's not. There is a beauty in knowing exactly how many people you're going to have on every single train for staffing for the sake of consistency and all that. But like we touched on the last episode, we grew too quickly and we bit off more than we can chew. So we are on budget. We're meeting our budget. We put together a budget for the year. We were much more conservative in our estimates as to what we're going to be seeing for ridership. And we're meeting our budget, which is great. So even though we're seeing a downturn year over year, we still feel pretty good.
SPEAKER_01:Well, as we've said, is... This isn't going to last forever. No. It's going to be one of them things that, heck, as a startup, because that's what we are. We are a startup. This wasn't a hand-it-to-us plug-and-play railroad. This is a start-up business that used the name of the railroad as it's been. It's a startup. Yeah. So as a startup, if we can get through the next two to three years with the numbers that we're seeing right now and then it bounces back, we'll be fine.
SPEAKER_02:Now— What are some of the ways that we are looking into our organization becoming more sustainable? Let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, yeah, we've had long conversations about that, and we've decided that OnlyFans is out because none of us here are good-looking enough to do it.
SPEAKER_02:Excuse me! Well,
SPEAKER_01:you don't count. You're married. So one of the things that we've looked into— What
SPEAKER_02:about the cats? They'll sell feet pictures. The cats get a lot of play
SPEAKER_01:on the Internet. But we'll talk about the cats later. One of the things we've looked into is we looked into... Tobian
SPEAKER_02:pictures? Tobians?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:For the cats?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. You know
SPEAKER_02:that Monty is a floozy?
SPEAKER_01:Monty should have been named Adolph.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, so let's put a little disclaimer there. When we got the shop cats, we hired them, adopted them. They were not supposed to be friendly, and we just needed train killers to deal with rodent infestations because rodents kept eating the wiring in the diesel locomotives. So we wanted train killers, and because we're all really nerdy, we were looking for some of the deadliest people in history, and we initially proposed naming them after Nazi military generals that did a good... And then we realized that that was going to be a massive, massive PR issue, so we named them Bernard Montgomery and George S. Catton.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and the other day, Monty didn't get his way and literally walked through the door five minutes later and shredded a bird in front of everybody.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he proves his point.
SPEAKER_01:Monty
SPEAKER_02:wants
SPEAKER_01:to... He wants to kill everybody.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he wants to attack TSA.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, he's forcefully affectionate. Yep, and he stacks bodies under the lathe. Anyway... So to
SPEAKER_02:go back to the diversifying
SPEAKER_01:our income stream, one of the things we did very early on is we went after the rail cycles because everybody's going after rail cycles. On a spreadsheet, rail cycles looks really good. What have we found? They're a pain in the ass. The only place rail cycles do well is on the spreadsheet. They're a pain in the ass. Everywhere else, rail cycles just aren't good. It's a damn good product, but man, it's hard. It's not. Ugh. To do it to the numbers that you want to try to get to, it's almost unmanageable. And having talked to multiple people in the industry is kind of the same thing. So we went that way. Let's just
SPEAKER_02:put a pin in that. We decided that people are not the way to go. People are way harder to manage. Yeah,
SPEAKER_01:people are way harder to manage.
SPEAKER_02:Sustainability, other income streams.
SPEAKER_01:Other income streams. We have gone from being a tourist railroad in the eyes of anybody that really matters to being a short-line railroad.
SPEAKER_02:We bought the railroad. We bought the railroad. We bought the railroad from Tacoma Rail. We can control our destiny that way, too. We can control our destiny, right? It's always good to own your railroad, own the property. That's definitely going to be the topic of another
SPEAKER_01:episode. Thankfully, because of Tacoma Rail's lack of going out and doing any– you can't really blame it all on Tacoma Rail because technically WFM leased the railroad for a long time. There's a lot of marketable timber along the right-of-way. So we're going to log that off and send it off. That's it. And
SPEAKER_02:that does a few things. It pays for necessary maintenance on the railroad. We need sunlight on the railroad. We need ditching in the railroad to keep the water off it.
SPEAKER_01:We live in a temperate rainforest.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:We get 98 inches of rain a year. We live in a
SPEAKER_02:temperate rainforest that has an incredibly high fire risk in the summer. So it also creates a very, very healthy necessary fire break through some of the areas that we're working in. So I think logging has a little bit of a dirty, it's a dirty word. It has some negative connotations. We're definitely going to talk about that later on. Yeah. Because sustainable forestry, I mean, healthy forests are important.
SPEAKER_01:That's right. That's awful conservative of you to say there, Mrs. Liberal. Anyway, we'll get back to that. So we've looked into that. Now we're looking into doing car storage and bringing that online because there's a lot of money that can be made off of people parking
SPEAKER_02:stars on the road. The great thing about car storage is car storage almost... always, there's a need for car storage when there's economic downturns. When there's economic downturns, there's less tourists, but there's more cars that need storing. So these railroads will pay you to park their crap on your line.
SPEAKER_01:It's pure profit. Because, I mean, in the case of some railroads that I've talked to, they've had the same cars sitting on the railroad for seven years. They haven't had to move them except to go out and spray the railroad every now and then. So what that means is that if you're making$7 a car and you can do, you know, 100 cars,$7 a car is per day. So you're getting paid, you know, if you had 100 cars sitting on your railroad, you'd be getting, what is that,$700 a day?
SPEAKER_02:100 times 7 should be fairly easy math
SPEAKER_01:for you. Well, yeah, but I'm sitting with you, so I feel dumber.
UNKNOWN:What?
SPEAKER_01:Anyway, so, you know,$700 a day to do nothing is... I mean, but that's every day. That's not a business. You make money. And the 365 days in a year, that is decent money. But what can you do with that? You can go out and you can use that money to pay for maintenance on the rail. To
SPEAKER_02:reinvest in the infrastructure, right? We're not operating on all 32 miles of the railroad we just bought. We're operating on about 14 rail cycles, operating on a little bit more. But if we can generate income on out-of-service track, I mean, short up some, but generate income on out-of-service track, right, we're able to to reinvest that into the infrastructure. Yep. So car storage
SPEAKER_01:is one. Because, I mean, we want to talk about it. The state of the economy has done what? Has made the price of railroad ties go up. Yep. Well, tariffs. And tariffs and all that. I mean, but that's the economy. So now instead of paying$60 for a brand new railroad tie and$35 for a good relay tie, you're now paying$75 for a good relay tie and$90 or$120 if you get it inside the United States for a brand new tie. So that shift can hurt. The biggest expenditure in our budget every year next to payroll is what? Maintenance. Maintenance of way. It's not the damn steam load.
SPEAKER_02:No, no, no.
SPEAKER_01:It's the trap. It's maintenance of
SPEAKER_02:way. Which, I mean, whoever decided to build a railroad over a swamp using river rock, I'd love to talk to them. But anyway, our railroad, I mean, it just wasn't built to last, and it hasn't been maintained as such either. So we're not just catching up on two or three years of deferred maintenance. We're catching up on 40 years and just some crappy construction
SPEAKER_01:decisions, too. Well, we're catching up on the Milwaukee Road.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Anybody that knows the Milwaukee Road knows that the Milwaukee Road didn't spend a lot of money on their track. But that's a good place to get you going on your tangent about funding. Yeah. And the lack thereof of funding. Okay,
SPEAKER_02:well, I'm going to take a deep breath, have a drink, and then, you
SPEAKER_01:know. You're probably not going to hear very much more from me. Do you want some canned corn to snack on? No, no. So go over, because I know we wanted to do this on a whole other episode, but just go over right now the problems with funding. For specifically
SPEAKER_02:tourist railroads?
SPEAKER_01:For specifically tourist railroads, because you can go out and get funding You can only sell so many
SPEAKER_02:cat feet
SPEAKER_01:pictures. For a tourist railroad, you fall in between a gray area and a crack.
SPEAKER_02:If I just keep talking about the cats selling their feet pictures, you might just do the whole thing for me. You've heard enough.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, but I can't remember it.
SPEAKER_02:All right. Anyway, so tourist railroads fall in a gray area for funding. Historically speaking... I'm going to press pause. put the car into reverse, back up. Railroads in the United States are fuckity. Someone's going to have to beep that out, sorry. Time stamp that one, Calvin. Railroads are giant monopolies, basically. You've got a few class ones, right? They're privately owned. In a lot of the rest of the world, railroad infrastructure is maintained by the government. In the United States, the highway system, for example, is maintained by the government. Arguable, but that is how infrastructure works. In the United States, railroads are all privately owned, which creates a whole lot of issues, quite frankly. One, private companies are paying to fund the maintenance of the infrastructure, which does mean that it needs to be highly regulated because for-profit companies, I don't know if anyone's learned this in history class, aren't always the best stewards of safety and good decisions.
SPEAKER_01:The bottom line.
SPEAKER_02:Right. Hopefully, they're good stewards of the bottom line. But it also means that railroads control their territory, the geography on where they work. It makes competitive pricing a little bit more difficult. There's a whole lot there. But folks need to understand that railroads are paying for the maintenance of the tracks that they are running on, which is different, for example, than the trucking industry does paying over the highway system. So because that's a really difficult paradigm for railroads to operate under... This infrastructure costs money. Bridges cost money. I mean, weed spray, all of that maintenance that sort of you do for roads, you do for railroads. It's not exactly the same, but it's a pretty good comparison. So there's been over the years a lot of different funding paradigms, not so much for the class one railroads and the big guys. You know, there's some tax breaks there, that sort of thing. You know, 45G tax credits we can talk about. you know different programs that cut down the tax burden but for short line railroads and again short lines are those railroads operating freight sort of that last mile commodity to the class ones there's been these various grant programs and tiger grants Chrissy grants that happen at the federal level they're administered by the DOT or the FRA and the idea is whether it's a There's various programs. There's match programs. There's grant programs. There's bridge infrastructure programs. There's all of these things. And they have these qualifications and metrics. One of the qualifications usually is you have to be a short line railroad. There's funding out there for inner city, urban transit. Usually that's owned by government municipalities. So you have to be a municipality.
SPEAKER_01:And where do tourist railroads fall into that? To
SPEAKER_02:do it, exactly. And tourist railroads generally don't Don't fall into any of those categories. And here's one of my kickers is short-line railroads. So much of this funding criteria is based off of taking trucks off of the road, right, which helps preserve the infrastructure, you know, the roads that the government's paying to maintain, all of that nonsense,
SPEAKER_01:environmentally friendly options. They don't have to spend as much money to maintain it, and they shift that burden of maintenance off onto the private companies.
SPEAKER_02:Correct. But But one of the things that I believe needs to be considered in these funding paradigms is the economic impact of tourist railroads. Now, economic impact, what do I mean by that? Is everyone who's coming to ride this railroad is putting gas in their tank to get here. They're probably stopping across the street for a burger and fries, right? They might be getting a toy for their kids. We know that well over 70% of our visitors drive more than three to get here. So there's a good chance that they're staying in a hotel overnight.
SPEAKER_01:Especially during the Christmas trains, which happen at night.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. So there are economic impact metrics that are sort of commonly accepted. Tourist agencies, economic development agencies put these together. So they know, for example, what the average cost of a hotel room is, what the average daily expenditure per party is. So we know our average party size is between two and a half and three three and a half people, depending on what event we're doing. So we can calculate what the economic impact of our operation based on a few things, based on visitor spending and based off of our gross income, because we are a tourist attraction that has an operating budget, which means that we are paying people, we are buying food, we are buying merchandise to sell. Our brunch trains, we have a local restaurant, Copper Creek, that caters all of those. So that That's business for them. We're buying 80 meals or whatever every day from them that we operate. So they're hiring people. So that has a ripple effect. So we know that our economic impact in 2024 was about$9.5, almost$10 million. I believe that economic impact should be factored into infrastructure funding decisions because the economic impact of a tourist operation, while it may not truly be a transit function, is high grader, and particularly in supporting rural areas and rural economies. We know that the gas station has been very open, that their business increases over 30% when we operate.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that was one of the main reasons why they opened Scaleburger back up, is that they were on the fence about even opening Scaleburger back up because of the amount of people that they would have to then try to go hire, which in our area, we know they can't hire very good people, and it sucks. They did it because they... saw what the railroad did for the gas station. I mean, look at what the railroad did for Frank was he was starting up. Yeah, the LB Market. The LB
SPEAKER_02:Market's a beautiful store.
SPEAKER_01:The only reason why the LB Market made it through its own winter, the first winter, is because the railroad started up and we were buying$1,500 a day worth of hot chocolate from him for our first. Cider. Yeah, cider. We couldn't do hot chocolate. And every year, it's been year after year, His days are, he brings in the full staff for the store on the days. He staffs
SPEAKER_02:according to what days we operate, which means that there's an economic impact there. So that's what I mean by economic impact. Now, people are going to argue that's not truly transit and transportation. However, here's my argument for that is this. I know you are sighing. You are leaning back in your chair. You have heard this before. Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad stopped hauling freight 20 plus years ago, or this rail, the rail line itself.
SPEAKER_01:The railroad, yeah. Stop hauling freight about 25, 30 years ago. And people
SPEAKER_02:deem that that wasn't ever going to be a reality. We are actively working on pursuing freight operations because there is a need for it from the mills in Morton. The operation of Mount Rainier Scenic Railroad has maintained the infrastructure that would have been lost otherwise. So, you know, give me examples, other places that railroads have been ripped up or fallen into disuse that would now be useful. Like, I know you Well,
SPEAKER_01:I mean, the perfect example is Oregon Coast Scenic. Yeah. I mean, Oregon Coast Scenic, if they would have been allowed to really run over the full length of that railroad in certain ways. I mean, we're dealing with, you know, Mother Nature in that one.
SPEAKER_02:But even like light rail operations,
SPEAKER_01:like up by Seattle. Oregon Pacific and Eastern. Oh, I mean, if you get into the Seattle, this is where I'll get up on my soapbox and start to, you know, really go after it, is because where I grew up down in Oregon, we had the first rail to trail. We had the first one on the Oregon
SPEAKER_02:Pacific and Eastern. is going to be a whole episode. It's going to be a whole episode. Everyone knows I've been there.
SPEAKER_01:But if the OP&E were still around and were still able to do what we're doing, the town of Cottage Grove would absolutely love it. And the town of Cottage Grove didn't want to see it go away. They just said, hey, we're going to make money off the railroad in a different direction. But if you bring that up here, there's a railroad that ran from Puyallup down to Orting out to Enumclaw and around. Now, had that information infrastructure been preserved in a way, you could run commuter trains on that right now and take cars off the road. Same with the line that goes up through Redmond and out that they're actively tearing up right now. I mean, that's short-sightedness because at some point in time, they're going to sit back and say, man, we got a traffic problem. Light rail, self-propelled cars, there's lots of options now. The same as when they ripped the Milwaukee Road main line up in the 80s or the 90s when BN did that. If you really sit down down and look at the way that they want to move freight right now, the Milwaukee Road mainline would have been perfect because it absolutely bypasses every major metropolitan area, and it would have been a through type of thing. So to get to your point, yeah, there's infrastructure everywhere that if you could have been allowed to sit back and say, hey, let's run something on that, like a tourist railroad, then it would have been preserved to, in our case, we got three major mills that are sitting back and saying, how do we get the railroad open to where you can move freight?
SPEAKER_02:One of the most beautiful things about our railroad is that, I mean, the railroad, okay, well, you know, just to be my liberal woke self, right, the railroad is built through Nisqually towns. The railroad initially hired Nisqually guides after they'd been relocated, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But all of these towns are built around the railroad, right? The railroad runs through all of the, you know, areas where there were mills, where there were logging camps. Morton is built around the railroad. The railroad goes right into one of the mills. Even though the depot's been moved, it's sitting at the end of town. It's a perfectly intact, walkable downtown. So we're using what we're doing, the infrastructure that really built the town. We're just repurposing it, right? The commodities that we're carrying are different, but it's still generating income and it's still connecting communities and it's still doing work
SPEAKER_01:for the town. What happens when you talk to any of the business owners in Morton. And you say, hey, we are proposing bringing 250 people to town. 250 people that aren't driving. We're going to roll them in on big steel cattle wagons. We're going to drop them off. And all they're going to do is they're going to spend money.
SPEAKER_02:They're going to shop in your shops. They're going to eat lunch. They're going to grab ice cream. They're going to get back on that train and go
SPEAKER_01:home. And go home. And there's not going to be 250 cars that go along with them. You know what every single one of them say? When can we do it? When can we sign up? And there's a bit of a, you go back to how you can throw it back on the tourist industry is that no one really sat back and looked down the road and said, hey, let's do that because that's marketable.
SPEAKER_02:Going back to my funding paradigm though, right? Economic impact matters. And I wish that economic impact was considered in these qualifications. Infrastructure retention matters, right? This country operates in these cycles and shifts. So So I think that as tourist railroads, one of the things I would like to see us do is, you know, I've created this economic impact sort of matrix. Well, our summer intern created the program that you just, you pop in your local CVB's economic impact info. You can download your, you know, reservation data. We know where everyone's coming from because we collect their zip codes when they buy something with a credit card. So do most tourist railroads using a reservation system. You run that through your automatic expense. sell sheet, if we're able to create sort of the national impact, the national economic impact of tourist railroads, that's going to be a really high number. And my guess is it probably rivals what some of these short-line railroads are doing. Because it's just, it's apples and oranges in a lot of ways. So I would love to see railroads work on this initiative and do some sort of, some lobbying, some cohesive lobbying to say this is a fairly simple change in both your federal in your state funding paradigms to include economic impact. We've got some really, really good, very real data that we can use, and we need to be speaking with one voice to say, hey, what we're doing matters. What we're doing connects communities. It creates jobs. It retains infrastructure. We are being good neighbors. We are being good stewards. Please consider us in what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. I mean, you know, the Christie aspect of it not being able to be used on a tourist railroad is just, to me, it's, you know, why is it that these other railroads can go out and buy four brand new locomotives off of a Chrissy Grant, but I can't go out for a Chrissy Grant to rebuild a steam locomotive? It's my primary source of motive power, even if I was a short line. You know, there's a lot of it that I think that tourist railroads were put in this little box at the end of the 80s and the 90s.
SPEAKER_02:They were hobbies.
SPEAKER_01:And they were hobbies. And, I mean, there was a railroad in this state that you walked in and he would hand you a 1949 northern pacific rule book and say study that because that's what we're working off of
SPEAKER_02:yeah
SPEAKER_01:and you it's like but it's 20
SPEAKER_02:yeah
SPEAKER_01:2019 i
SPEAKER_02:mean and i see that right like i mean i've got kids i see what my kids like what they do that's my market is my four-year-old yeah right not my i mean and it's like my my four-year-olds, it's grandma and grandpa and the kids riding, and it's, you know, that family time and those memories, but, like, man, like, sink your teeth in, get them while you're young. I know it sounds a little crazy, but, like, you know, do the thing. Kids like trains.
SPEAKER_01:Kids like trains. Kids like trains. And to keep trains around, you gotta have money. And for what we are, I mean, because you could get into the whole entire conversation of what's the difference between us and Snoqualmie and all that. We're more of a railroad that has a museum on the side of it. Snoqualmie's a museum that has We barely have a museum on the side.
SPEAKER_02:I have a tremendous amount of respect for what they've done with
SPEAKER_01:that museum. Yeah, but in that, he is able to go after state funding that we can't go after because we are a railroad.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they've, I mean, Richard Anderson has done so much work to legitimize that museum and their archive, which I would love to talk about that some other time. But, you know, it's this gray area. If the bulk of your business is hauling people back and forth on six and a half miles of track or 14, however many it is, there's a funding gray area at the federal level and at most states. This is a fairly simple, I mean, nothing simple when you're dealing with bureaucracy, but it would be a fairly simple change to allow for the qualifications to be amended.
SPEAKER_01:And there's absolutely no reason why it cannot be bipartisan. A hundred percent. There's no reason why both sides of the aisle can't agree on this because I mean, you're serving the red side of the aisle by saying we want to help support the timber industry. Supporting industry and jobs. And all that. And then you're supporting the blue side of it by saying, hey, we want to teach about.
SPEAKER_02:Well, the environmental impact of 200 people on a train is so much less than 200 people hiking in the same area. It's accessible, right? It's folks that are, you know, differently abled and wheelchairs, all of those things. They can get out into the woods and see what we're doing. Like this is an inherently supportive industry, though. It supports workers. It supports skilled trade. There shouldn't be that much to complain about, I wouldn't think. But again, I think sometimes the tourist railroads are our own worst enemy. We need to be talking. We need to be creating some of these cohesive
SPEAKER_01:solutions. We could have a whole episode on just how the tourist railroad industry is its own worst enemy.
SPEAKER_02:So, tourist railroads, here's your warning when you start hearing from me and poke, poke, poke. Hey, I'd really like to see your ridership data. Can we put it in the system or whoever, you know, maybe the Heritage Rail Alliance, maybe the Shortline Association would like to sort of take this project on. You better believe that we will be actively lobbying everyone. Here's the thing. We're not just talking about it. There's a lot of work happening behind the scenes to try and create buy-in so that we are actually putting these words to action. Yeah. So if it's something you're interested in, you know, reach out. Our website's got a contact us form. Submit it there. We're, you know, now. Obviously available on the internet, even whether we'd like to be or not.
SPEAKER_01:All righty. Well, I think we covered everything that we were going to cover there. I think so. Pretty much. I mean, you want a little bit more canned corn? I don't want any more canned corn. I
SPEAKER_02:don't think you had any.
SPEAKER_01:I didn't have any.
SPEAKER_02:Green Giant. This is seasoned with sea salt. It's whole kernel sweet
SPEAKER_01:corn. So the whole corn paradigm is also a, you know, the reason why Green Giant reached out is because Del Monte went bankrupt right after they sponsored it. Some folks probably don't know why canned corn is a thing at all. They don't, and that could be a topic for another
SPEAKER_02:day. We're superstitious, and our locomotive always gets a can of corn
SPEAKER_01:to start the weekend. It started with Dick Yeager. I got corrected on it. The first person I heard it from was Doyle McCormick. But it started with Dick Yeager at the Brooklyn Roundhouse, which for the folks that don't know, the Brooklyn Roundhouse is where the 4449 and the 700 and the 197 used to be. Big choo-choos. And something was going on with the 700, and it wouldn't come out of the– they couldn't get it to move. There was something going on with it. And Dick Yeager walked by and said, it's just a big pig. Sprinkle some corn out of it– out in front of it, and it'll come right out. And so it became kind of a joke up here in this area of if he had a Baldwin, Baldwins are pigs, and if they weren't really doing– if they weren't behaving, just give them some corn. Well, I took that to a different level and got a little superstitious when the– 70 broke down one day in 20, I think it was 18, 18 and it broke down. They had a massive issue with it. And I went in the, that was the, you fricking pig. I ran in the break room and there was this little bitty, it was a travel size. It was a small can of Del Monte whole kernel corn. I took it out and I threw it in the seat box. And for the rest of the year and all of 2019, as long as that can of corn was on the locomotive, we were fine. When anybody took, the can of corn off the locomotive, we'd have an issue. So we
SPEAKER_02:made the mistake of posting that on social media
SPEAKER_01:once. Yeah. And while we were shut down, somebody threw away the can of corn, the lucky can of corn. I think Nick Ozerak has actually got video of me having a complete freak out in the shop because there was no can of corn on the 70. So I went down to the store and bought another can of corn. And then we've just been running with this can of corn joke, which is actually kind of coming, becoming a cult thing. So
SPEAKER_02:last year during the Christmas trains, apparently this is come up on one of our YouTube videos. And we always collect money for the food pantry during Christmas. And this little boy got so upset when his mom put the can of corn in with the food pantry donations. I think I was conductor that night. And he was just like crying and sort of verklempt over the situation. And I realized what was happening. And I look at him and I go, buddy, was that corn for the engine? He goes, yes. And his mom didn't have a clue what was going on. His dad was laughing because obviously he's been watching the YouTube with his dad, which questioned But so anyway, we tell these stories on the internet. And then at one point, Del Monte sent us a case of corn. Del Monte had the whole bankruptcy thing. Green Giant commented. Now we've got Green Giant corn, which is picked at the peak of perfection and seasoned with sea salt. It's USA grown, non-GMO, no preservatives. So anyway, we keep getting- Deliveries
SPEAKER_01:of corn. Milwaukee, Dickies, White's Boots. Where are you guys at? Anyway. Anyway, tune in next time as we go over more. I think next time is going to be a recap of the Heritage Rail Alliance Conference. Yeah, I think we'll probably be recording after we get back from that. I think we're actually recording right before we go to that. Are we? Well, we'll find out. We'll find out. So one of them is going to be– It's going to be my first time going to an HRA convention, so we'll get Rowdy's full opinion on the HRA convention. And
SPEAKER_02:if we have to redact that at all, we'll talk
SPEAKER_01:about it. It's probably going to be a lot of beeps and a lot of what the heck and all that. But anyway, so tune in next
SPEAKER_02:time. Tune in next time. Off the rails. Rowdy and Bethan.
SPEAKER_00:And that wraps up this episode of Off the Rails. A huge thank you to our totally real, definitely not made up production crew. Sound design by Microphone. Catering by Cornelius Cobb. Track maintenance provided by I'm your host, reminding you to keep your hands inside the train at all times, because around here, things always go off the rails.