I like the idea of a post-season rail jam, that sounds fun and doable, but most of us are burnt on the season when it is over so we really don't want to keep it going, but that might be do able.
As far as costs go there are more than you would think. We have to pay someone to prep the rails, i.e. clean, wire-wheel, paint, fix, then we have to have them set up the rails, then likely pay them to fetch the snow as well build the infrastructure that we would likely use to make the jam less messy and work with less snow. I say that we would to pay these people because there are likely legal implications if we use volunteer work, like if someone got hurt in the process. Which leads to insurance which we may have to get an insurance rider to cover the event which has a cost associated with it. I get that it doesn't seem like a simple rail jam should cost much but once you start adding things up, they add up quickly. Someone to work the rail jam, and supervise everything, having patrol on staff, office staff to field questions, or sell passes. That isn't to say that all of these costs will occur but you can see where they may come from.
That list is in no way complete or official, i'm just rattling stuff off, and it also in no way is what will keep us from having a pre-season rail jam. My biggest issue is finding enough usable snow, that will last 3-5 hours to get a rail jam going and sustained. I just don't know if we can find enough ice rinks close enough to make it fly.
If you will remember the Fountain Freestyle event we had at Fountain Square... that event took 3 Tri-axle dump trucks full of PNS snow to make happen and it still was barely enough... We can make up for some of that with efficiencies but we would still need a lot of snow for the kind of traffic we're talking about. One tri-axle dump truck of ice rink snow is a lot of ice rinks and a TON of work to gather.
Tad
