Institutional Foundations of Heritage Railways — The High Cost of Low Trust in the Preservation of Merit Goods

Industrial heritage is a public good and either the public or the third sector have to intervene on a free exchange basis to ensure its preservation. Also, it is a merit good and has to be protected regardless of the collective preferences. The paper is an empirical inquiry into the nature and causes of the preservation and reuse of railway heritage from a comparative point of view: it tries to answer the question of why this heritage is not preserved in Andalusia (Spain). The results suggest that three factors impact directly on the preservation of railway heritage: public governance, volunteering, and collective identity. The two first depend on social capital as measured by generic trust