Steam & Excursion > CVSR to Resume Operating

 The Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad said this week it plans to resume operating on Feb. 3.
Since last October the CVSR has been limited to operating  between Rockside Road station in Independence and the Fitzwater maintenance facility.
The curtailed operations were due to erosion along the bank of the Cuyahoga River in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park where the tracks run along the waterway.

Pamela Barnes, the track was closed until potential safety risks could be better understood. She said the track was evaluated by a geotechnical engineer and park officials decided that train operations could resume.
The first operation to resume will be the Cleveland Dinner and Event Train on Feb. 3. That will be followed by an Ales on Rails excursion on Feb. 10 and a Grape Escape wine tasting train on Feb. 11.

The National Park Scenic is slated to resume operating on March 4.
However, Barnes said that depending on conditions operations may be modified.
Park officials said the track closure is a separate issue from a riverbank stabilization program being undertaken at eight locations in Summit and Cuyahoga counties.
In an unrelated development, travel website Travel Lens has named the CVNP as the second best national park in the United States.

The site ranked parks base on several factors including number of recreational visitors, entrance fee, distance to the closest city and percentage of park reviews that mention the word “beautiful.” CVNP received a score of 8.16 our of 10.
The study said CVNP had 2.76 recreational visitors with 35 percent of them describing the park as “beautiful.”
Topping the list was Great Smoky Mountains National Park. From the akronrrblog

pt199 Wrote:

> The study said CVNP had 2.76 recreational visitors with 35 percent of them describing the park as “beautiful.”

Presumably it was the 3/4ths of a visitor who described the park as beautiful.  The other two visitors caught one look at him and ran from the park screaming in terror. ;^)

Travel Lens actually says CVNP saw 2,575,275 recreational visitors in 2021.  They used Wikipedia as the data source for that figure, TripAdvisor and Yelp for their review data, and other "free" resources for the rest of their figures.  The cost of the "study" was presumably pizza money for the owner's kid to put it together.  Any wonder that 4 of the top 10 parks have a $0 admission fee?

https://www.travellens.co/us-national-park-index/

NPS visitor count statistics are online by location, not all that hard to pull.

One of the reasons that NPS likes the railroad as much as they do is that all the boarding locations are within the park.   So if you ride the train, for any reason, you're also a park visitor.   So considering that their ridership has been well above 100,000 for a long time, that's a good deal for NPS and the railroad as well.   You can argue about vehicle counters and other data gathering methods, but sold tickets are sold tickets are sold tickets.   It's one of the reasons that the 'Day out with Thomas' and "Polar" events are tolerated by NPS.   Bringing 765 into the park for specials counts as visitors even if you're chasing the train for photos and trip vehicle counters.

Each NPS site has a description of how they count visitors, and they vary wildly in methods and conclusions, it's not a standard basis.   They may count via remote cameras on a trail (which may pick up deer), highway vehicle counters * number of estimated riders, all kinds of location-specific methods.   Up to you whether you agree with the methods, but at least they are disclosed.