Preserving heritage railways through use

Heritage railways represent a unique form of cultural tourism, offering immersive travel experiences that combine heritage value, historical authenticity, scenic appeal, and community engagement. Operating heritage railways also contribute to regional economic development, cultural preservation, and the strengthening of community connections. This systematic literature review aims to critically analyse studies on heritage railways operating as tourist attractions, with a specific focus on the factors contributing to their success and sustainability, as well as the common challenges they encounter. Following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines, a systematic search was conducted in March 2025 across five electronic databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Academic Search Complete, Business Source Ultimate, and Inspec). The Critical Appraisal Skills program (CASP) was used to assess the study quality. A total of 23 peer-reviewed studies were included, and the evidence was narratively synthesised. Insights from various global heritage railway case studies regarding success factors and challenges were used to inform future recommendations for heritage railway operators, tourism stakeholders, policymakers, and government authorities.

This work studies the emergence of cultural economics, insofar as it is the associated with the industrial heritage, within the context of post-industrial societies. From this point of view we approach cultural tourism, one of the most dynamic tourist markets and an important asset in the most developed nations.All over Europe, Britain has the biggest extension of heritage railways, precisely the country where the earliest modern railways were built and the one pioneer in the Industrial Revolution. The outstanding development of this industry is possible due to the free supply of manpower and capital; something to be placed in the paramount development of volunteering and civil society in Britain. Since their very inception, railways have enjoyed a prominent place in the imaginary as well as the collective identity in Britain, where both the steam power and the Industrial Revolution are paradigms of advancement. Heritage railways are a cultural tourism activity based on a public good; the (industrial) railway heritage. British experience suggests that the Third Sector (volunteering) is the most suitable for the preservation and reuse of industrial heritage. The province of Huelva, due to the outstanding development of mining on the Iberian Pyrite Belt since the last quarter of 19th century, would amount, in the beginning of the next century, to almost a third of the railway extension of Andalusia, when its surface is just a 12 per cent. As a result of this, its railway density became the double than in Andalusia or Spain. In this province is found the only heritage railway of the former and one of the very few of the later. With this exception, the closing of hundreds of kilometers of railway lines has meant the loss of the ensuing industrial heritage; dismantled and sold as scrap, often after some years of neglect and dereliction.The ultimate causes of this situation are to be found in the low interpersonal trust of the local society, which translates into the lack of genuine volunteering and into poor public governance; both of them directly affect the preservation and reuse of the railway heritage. In addition, a collective identity diverging from the British one, with different coordinates, precludes the appreciation of the Andalusian industrial heritage’s cultural value. Also, the emergence of a new identity paradigm would amount to a challenge of the current status quo and the elites that support it, apart from being clearly substitutive as far as the allocation of resources is concerned. All those facts ultimately bring our work to the field of the New Institutional Economics (NIE). From the microeconomics point of view, it is apparent that for the current stock of preserved and reused industrial heritage the demand clearly out sizes the level of supply, this explains the commercial success of the only heritage railway in service.

The UK is home to a substantial number of heritage and tourist railways, which make a significant contribution to their local economies. They are mostly constructed on the routes of closed lines, and include large numbers of earthworks of uncertain construction and unknown strength. Recently, there have been earthwork collapses, most notably on the Gloucester and Warwickshire Railway during 2010 and 2011. The Office of Rail Regulation has also noted a number of safety incidents on heritage railways, all attributable to management failures. This paper describes an analysis of the Victorian earthworks on the Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway, a 8 km-long heritage railway in central Scotland. The analysis and risk prioritisation method used by Network Rail was found to be unsuitable for direct application to heritage railways, owing to the different operating context. A new system was therefore developed, removing some risk factors from the Network Rail approach, adding others, and modifying further ones. The new system was successfully applied, and the Bo'ness and Kinneil Railway earthworks were found to be generally stable and safe.

Interest in heritage railways has grown phenomenally in the last 50 years, with countries like the UK, Australia and US, noting the value of this interest to visitors, workers, volunteers, and communities; and more broadly, to conservation of historic artefacts and their environments. This paper explores visitor interest in heritage railways of Asia. The sustainability of heritage railways is dependent on visitor numbers; and so, factors which contribute to the appeal of heritage railways are worthy of investigation. This paper focuses on three heritage mountain railways, and examines websites and blogs to gauge the level of visitor interest, highlighting themes which shed insight into the appeal of heritage railways. The findings indicate that operators of heritage railway attractions need to engage a variety of initiatives to meet the needs of the leisure market and continue to attract visitors. Such information will inform continued optimism in the conservation of heritage railways for all stakeholders.

Cultural heritage tourism has emerged as both an important economic tool and marketing tool when seeking a competitive advantage in the tourism industry. This study examined the economic impact a heritage railway has on a regional rural economy, namely the Great Smoky Mountains railroad (GSMr), a member of American heritage railways. Findings revealed the GSMr has exerted a profound effect on the region. It has contributed significantly to the regional economy, and has provided excellent value for the services rendered based on visitor satisfaction ratings. It has helped to diversify the regions tourism offerings, enhance its uniqueness and revitalize its tourism industry. Results from this study will assist GSMr management in the future planning and development of its heritage railway train excursions and marketing strategies.

“Mathematical decision-making methods have not been previously applied to improving operations of heritage railways. We present a case-study demonstrating the use of mathematical optimization for a premier UK-based heritage railway company.”

This paper is based on the author’s doctoral thesis: Industrial heritage and cultural economics – British heritage railways and the Andalusian case, assessed at the University of Seville (2011) for his European PhD of economics. The work, originally in the field of Cultural Economics, evolved into the tenets of Institutional Economics. This empirical research is an enquiry into the nature and causes of the preservation and reuse of railway heritage from a comparative point of view – Britain v. Andalusia. We initially assessed the prospects of heritage railways in Andalusia and set up a comparative framework with the UK – where the industry is most developed in Europe. As the former were anything but poor we shifted our analysis on the underlying institutional features that hinder its development. Our methodology evolves form inductive to deductive and is close to the spirit of the old political economy. The results suggest that three factors impact directly on the preservation of railway heritage: public governance, volunteering, and collective identity. The first and second are quantifiable, whether directly or by proxy, and the third is non-measurable. The first two variables are dependable on social capital as measured by generic trust – the ultimate success factor in the heritage railway industry. Industrial heritage is a public good and as such externalities matter; therefore the private sector is ill suited to preserve it being the public sector and/or the Third Sector those to intervene on a free exchange basis.

In recent decades, the role of heritage railways has gradually shifted from transportation, economy, and trade to tourism, culture, and ecology. The heritage railway landscape is experiencing multiple changes along with a value ambiguity problem. There is a need to comprehensively recognize this landscape in order to promote the transformations and monitor the changes. Inspired by Landscape Character Assessment (LCA), this paper adopts a two-scaled identification framework of landscape character types and areas of the Yunnan–Vietnam Railway (Yunnan section) by integrating holistic and parametric methods. At the regional scale, the landscape character was divided by five natural variables: landform, vegetation, hydrology, soil, and geology. At the corridor scale, the landscape character was classified by five natural and cultural variables: altitude, slope, aspect, land use, and heritage density. At these two scales, k-prototype cluster analysis and multiresolution segmentation (MRS) tool were used to identify landscape character types and areas. The results showed that there were 11 different landscape character types and 80 landscape character areas at the regional scale, and 12 different landscape character types and 58 landscape character areas at the corridor scale. Furthermore, the composition, area, and distribution of these landscape character types and areas were described. The results of this study can form a database for planning, management, and evaluation of the railway.

Heritage transport is the focus of academic research less often than other heritage tourism types, especially with regard to volunteer motivation. Thus, the present study extends the literature by examining heritage railway volunteers' initial motivations for volunteering and their demographic profile. The associations between the key variables of age, gender and employment experience and volunteers' initial motivations are analysed. Quantitative data were collected using a deductive methodological approach to design a postal survey employing systematic sampling (n = 252). Five preliminary hypotheses were set up based on the findings from the literature. The data analysis procedures employed principal components analysis and descriptive statistics, and then a series of statistical comparisons involving chi-square tests, Mann–Whitney U-tests and t-tests. Key findings included six motivational dimensions: altruism, for me (work substitute), social/affiliative, instrumental (hobbies), for me (relaxation/change) and instrumental (skills). It is argued that an understanding of these dimensions, and the motivational differences with regard to demographic profiles, can help heritage railway managers to plan for targeted recruitment to address organisational needs and best ensure the longevity of heritage transport tourism attractions.

This paper falls within the greater framework of doctoral research focusing on British Sicily as a case study in first globalisation with railways serving as a guide fossil to localise and characterise indirect rule by way of de-facto economic primacy, soft power and informal imperial intervention. It also provides the historical grounding to a tentative effort tailored towards the designing of a transnational pilot project focused on the retrofitting and revitalising vast sways of deserted and disarmed narrow gauge railway networks, lines and stations stations in Italy, Malta and Brazil dating to 1850-1914.

Assessment of maintenance strategies for railway vehicles using Petri-nets

A large body of research shows that police officers hold more conservative political orientations than the general population, both across countries and over time. Studies seeking to explain this phenomenon report inconclusive findings. This paper studies two possible explanations: self-selection of politically conservative individuals into the police force (selection hypothesis) and growing conservatism over the course of police work (occupational socialization hypothesis). We focus on Germany, a police force with an authoritarian history and extensive modernization in the past decades, thereby representing an important case study for the long-term interplay between conservative political orientation and police service. For our analysis, we are relying on longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), a large-scale representative panel study of German households, covering the years 1984–2020. In line with previous research, our results show that the police force differs significantly from individuals in other occupations as well as the general population, reporting more politically conservative attitudes in left–right self-placement and stronger identification with conservative parties. Furthermore, we find evidence that selection effects contribute to attitudinal differences in party orientation.

Cultural heritage in suburban landscape planning: A case study in Southern Norway

A railway vehicle is a complicated mechatronic system. Its mechanical structure and connections are key influences on its performance. When a railway vehicle runs at very high speeds its dynamic performance becomes of considerable interest. Therefore, the identification of the design factors that significantly impact on the vehicle’s running behavior, such as safety, stability, comfort and reliability, is a key step towards vehicle design optimization. The optimal design of a railway vehicle is difficult to perform using existing methods due to the complexity inherent in rail/track interactions. Thus, performing a sensitivity analysis of a railway vehicle can be seen as a bridge between performance analysis and an optimal design. This paper presents a sensitivity model that can be used to analyze the performance parameters of a railway vehicle in terms of variation of its design parameters. First, the railway vehicle is described as a multi-body system that can be broken down into its component parts and then, the dynamic behavior of the system is investigated. To simplify the model, a spring/damper connection is used in the classic Hertz nonlinear elastic contact model to represent the force in the normal direction at the wheel/rail contact point. Finally, based on the adjoint variable method, the equations that constitute the sensitivity model of the railway vehicle are derived and analysis software is developed. A case study shows the reliability of the proposed approach.

A wide range of museums and related organizations preserve and present Britain's technological heritage. It is not possible here to mention all of them, let alone to give each the attention it might merit. Instead, I will examine in some detail those undertakings that illustrate various approaches to museum provision and operation. The largest museum in Britain concerned with technological material is the National Museum of Science and Industry, consisting of the Science Museum in London and its outstations: the National Museum of Photography, Film, and Television in Bradford and the National Railway Museum in York. The Science Museum was founded in 1857, and because of its long history has been able to amass large collections relating to power technology, transport, communications, and manufacturing, all of which combine to serve as a prime taxonomic record of industrialization in the United Kingdom.' Recent collecting has concentrated on significant post-1960 material. Together with gallery updates and redisplays, new permanent galleries, and Technology Futures exhibits, this is improving the representation of modern science, technology, and medicine throughout the museum. The National Museum of Science and Industry is classified as a museum. Such museums by definition receive the bulk of their funding from central government and hold collections of national and international significance. Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, unlike England, have museums of their cultures: the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh, the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, and the Ulster Museum in Belfast. They do not specialize in the areas of science, technology, and medicine on the same scale as the National Museum of Science and Industry but do consider them as part of the whole range of subjects that constitute