Tourist Railway and Tourism Community-Based: some connections for planning and management

Abstract

Rail tourism in Brazil is promising, enabling reflections about his relationship to the “community-based” in a perspective of the involvement of actors and organizations. In this exploratory study we selected ten cases of cultural and tourist trains for analysis based on websites research. These cases are from several states in Brazil and are operated by different railway technologies (steam, electrified). Based on the literature on railway and tourism, and community-based tourism, it was considered as axes for the analysis of Community – Based Rail Tourism (CBRT): (1) geographic location of the rail segments; (2) history as a representation of the past; (3) memory as a living link between the past and the present. The main contributions were achieved: (1) initial questioning about the CBRT; (2) analysis of some parts of the Brazilian scenario.