This came up in a chat I was having the other night with one of my friends and colleagues. Within the past few years it's becoming clear that there's a significant shift in the demographic of those visiting heritage railways; (at least the one I'm currently a volunteer at) where there once was mostly people who remembered the age of steam, and the romance etc of it all, we see more visitors who are the type who grew up in the late '70s and through the 80s who now have families and just want a day out to see a real life steam train - perhaps it's things like the Hogwarts Express and Thomas the Tank Engine which gets the young ones interested.
More than once I've had to explain that we don't use dispatch bats (which a family the other weekend were quite disappointed about!), and various other bits of modern technology that this generation almost seem to come to 'expect', from a railway, in the same way that the older generation would expect the more traditional methods. Likewise with the oft argued thing on hi-visibility clothing; the majority of people growing up in more recent times *expect* to see it on a railway and don't really have a problem with it in my experience.
Obviously a heritage railway is still a heritage railway, and for the time being at least, it should be kept as best as possible that way - but I don't think any heritage place should be of the opinion that solely because something is modern, it shouldn't necessarily be included - an example being the Halo handlamps. They're significantly lighter and safer than their older counterparts (albeit less drop-resistant
) meaning they're much easier to use. I do struggle to see the need for specifically a dispatch bat on a preserved railway though (and I have seen them used) - even just for the basic fact of what does it achieve that an 'all right' handsignal wouldn't? You're unlikely to have excessive train length to proclude visibility, and with only a few exceptions crowds on the platform are unlikely to be massive enough to justify using one.
At the end of the day, if a need's been identified then fair play - it wouldn't be my place to judge.
Jon