Anyone else catch this news? It’s in North Adams, Mass. The budget is $65 million. Going to be quite a layout, for that amount!
http://cprailmmsub.blogspot.ca/2018/05/extreme-model-railroad-and-contemporary.html
John Longhurst, Winnipeg
I first became aware of this project about three months ago.
.
The plan to open in 2021 is ambitious. I hope they do well.
.
-Kevin
.
Certainly a daring endeavour!
Most of the estimated $65 million will go into the building and not the layout, which, IMHO, only serves the purpose of offering an additional “moving” interest, to a otherwise rather static display of contemporary architecture. The trains will be dwarfed by those towering 30ft. buildings - providing they are to scale.
One reason for commenting is to keep this thread alive. It this project comes to fruition, many wonderful things could things could be bestowed on our hobby…like growth! From what I see proposed with study contours and city buildings, this will take a lot more than just big bucks…mainly enormous amounts of talent and then some.
Something similar was proposed a decade or so back in Hollywood, Florida, but in not quite a Gehry structure…but an old train station. As I remember costs to refurbish building went way over budget, and major hobby shop that was involved went belly up. It would have been great as this project in North Adams could be.
Any talk of donations yet?
HZ
The Newseum (news museum) in DC almost went belly up with 800K visitors and a $26 ticket. Ft McHenry has 600K visitors/yr and Antietam has 300K and they are free.
I don’t see how a $65 mil MR museum gets a 25% return and 600K visitors a year.
Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg has 1.2 to 1.5 million visitors each year and is still growing. so far, they have invested $ 35 million into the “layout”, while the premises are rented in a historical landmark building. There is no doubt that the operation is profitable, but that profit would hardly support the cost of ownership of the building.
As I said earlier, a daring endeavour!
roughly $18 adult and $9 kid admission.
Hamburg is Hamburg, North Adam is East No Where…I’ll have to email you that bit of American vernacular
Wow, I guess, just had to check Google maps. Closest “city”, Albany, NY.?
Mike.
Actually I think it might be Pittsfield, Ma. I was curious also so I Googled North Adams. Seems like there is a lot going on in that area, including a neighboring college.
The corresponding German phrase would be “in the middle of no where”.
Miniatur Wunderland has turned into a tourist attraction of its own, each year drawingh hundreds of thousand folks from all over the world into the city. I am not sure whether a place “east of no where” will be able to rival that.
Let´s wait and see…
They’re not really comparable situations
The Newseum struggles because virtually everything around it is free. The Spy Museum has the same problem. They also didn’t help themsleves with picking out one of the most expensive spots around. Plus, maintiaining a large urban building isn’t cheap on its own, regardless of what you put inside it.
Antietam, for instance, isn’t free. Its $4 a person or $6 per car. Being largely a field, the operational costs for a battlefield are fairly low. The budget is just $3.5 million and spends about $5m (the difference is through various donations, the re-use of the admission fees, NPS funds that come from other sources, etc.). Conversely, the Newseum’s last known budget was $63m.
On the other hand, the Air and Space Museum (free) requested almost $600m over the next five or so years for renovations. It has some serious structural problems (built on the cheap and fast) that have caught up to it. But the point is: just keeping the building from falling over (literally) is going to cost 20 times per year the costs of keeping Antietam open.