Dear Les,
The people story in railraod and industrial museums is inevitably interwoven
with another thread on this list concerning first person interpreters. A very
good example, and well received, in the UK is the newly refurbished and
reopened London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, London. Some ingenious
engineering meant that they could display their hardware with sufficient space
around it to provide much more of a people story with actors giving living
interpretations of specific parts of it (e.g. representing construction worker,
conductor etc.). I have not been lately and so do not know how well this is
holding up. I am still not entirely sure about their particular style of
interpretation but it is a distinct advance on the ghastly animatronic figures
with taped voices that were all the rage a few years ago. (The worst was the
figure of William III in the anniversary exhibition for the bloodless coup
of 1688 which gave him the English throne). The National Railway Museum in York
has also tried to improve the human and interpretative side of its rpesentation
but it does have a problem with the size and variety of its large exhibits and
the demand to see them.
The three major outdoor industrial museums in Britain, Ironbridge, Beamish and
the Black Country museum at Dudley, with reconstructed buildings and processes
all offer a very good impression of what life was like in the communities and
in the workshops. Some of the presentations are startlingly good; although
Ironbridge sets out to depict life in the first quarter of this century, some
of their reconstructions (pharmacy, village school, sawmill) are just a little
too much like the scenes of my childhood for comfort, and I am still on the low
side of 50.
So in general answer to your question there are certainly museums in the UK
setting out to achieve what you want to see and by and large succeeding. For a
view in the US which helpfully refers to many preserved industrial sites try,
if you have not seen it already, Bob Gordon's and Pat Malone's new book "The
Texture of Industry: an archaeological view of the industrialization of North
America".
As a final, small-scale example, the fire-brigade museum  in Mulhouse France is
frist class.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Northover,
Department of Materials, University of Oxford,
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