Covid19/Coronavirus Updates

The museum managers and volunteers have started building task lists and timelines that we believe will lead to reopening the museum at a point later than Memorial Day.

This planning includes:

  • Visitor traffic flow changes to improve social distancing.
    • A reduction in exhibits where we had extremely similar railcars/cabooses/locomotives/busses open for visiting
    • One way traffic flow through some spaces.
  • Installing new touchless soap dispensers in restrooms
  • Installing touchless hand sanitizer dispensers around the museum
  • Social distancing practices for the demonstration train ride
  • Educational programming is impacted
    • Summer Camp sessions for this year have been cancelled
    • 2nd Thursday program for both May and June is cancelled
  • There will be a temporary hold on hosting birthday (and similar) parties
  • There will be a temporary moratorium on riding with the engineer on our demonstration train ride
  • Museum memberships will be extended by the duration of our closure, ~3 months
  • There will be new sneeze guards/shields at both the ticket office and at the giftshop. For the safety of both our staff and visitors, we are asking/encouraging the use of cards over cash.
  • Our operating schedule will be adjusted to allow for additional cleaning and to improve staff utilization.
  • Health monitoring for staff & visitors

We are still evaluating and awaiting guidance from other sources on how to handle the miniature/park train.  There is no ETA on that aspect of our operation.

We appreciate everyone’s support and understanding.  As the museum is staffed largely with volunteers and many of the volunteers are in the vulnerable populations, there are changes on the horizon that will be above the minimum requirements for some facilities.

In order to make sure that we’ve accounted for our visitors and supporters concerns we are asking that you take about 10 minutes to fill out the linked surveymonkey survey.  Responses are anonymous and your feedback is important to our planning.

In order to make best use of the survey data, the survey will close at 11:45PM on Friday evening, May 22, 2020.

Thanks,

Randy 
Executive Director

About Randy Pirkle 54 Articles
Randy Pirkle is the museum's Executive Director Emeritus.

Be the first to comment

Leave a Reply