Friends of Fledborough

Your distance estimates to other railways are a bit out. According to Google, the Midland Railway Centre, the Great Central Railway and the Lincolnshire Wolds Railway are all about 45 miles away from Fledborough. Barrow Hill is a bit less, about 30 miles.

 

Those are fair, but given how close High Marnham is to the A1, you also need to consider that the competition will extend as far as the NYMR or NVR, but that you are talking the 45 minutes plus to just about any of the above - if you start from Fledborough. Of course, the other side of that coin is that Fledborough is no great metropolis, and will have to draw people to visit - again, something that will need careful thought.

 

There are two things to consider - what draws the volunteers, and what draws the customers. The GCR, for example successfully draws volunteers, but does not draw the volume of customers that its location suggests it should. I wonder whether this scheme will be able to attract sufficient of either to really make a go of it. As has been said, the days of cheap equipment of any kind are gone and market rates for rail, sleepers and rolling stock are daunting for new schemes without deep pockets. I wish you luck in pursuing your dream, butt I think that if you have the energy and drive to make things happen it would be better applied to an existing railway like the Northampton and Lamport that could certainly do with it.

 

Oh indeed - the distances may all be around 45 miles but the travelling times by road are all just over an hour - the same as the travelling time from Fledborough to the NVR. I used to live in Lincolnshire; I know how remote it can feel sometimes.

However my main point really is that I am not sure I would support a proposal whose proposer states basic facts such as "you can put a pin in Fledborough and draw a circle and find no railways in 75 miles" which are clearly wrong, and take 5 minutes to show to be wrong. It leaves you wondering what else is wrong too.

 

oh oh. Think man from Delmonte - he say no...

 

That was my thought when I read that post.

I'm not a complete monster. I do feel a bit sorry for the latest protagonist of 'WIBN' when they pop up here, all full of enthusiasm, emoticons, Facebook pages and yoof spelling, only to be met with the increasingly jaded regulars on NatPres who have seen it so many times before not giving it the full "Yay, what a brilliant idea" that the poster probably assumes they'll get from a railway preservation forum.

However, all such WIBN protagonists would do themselves a huge favour by taking just a few minutes to look back through posts on this site and see what has been said before. There has been so much sensible advice given out over the years on these types of thread, by those who have been in the railway preservation world for years, but still they come - and obviously not having bothered to do even the most cursory homework on previous NatPres threads.

More than anything, before putting enthusiastic fingers to keyboard, I would suggest that such protagonists ask themselves one very simple question... Why am I really writing this? What comes across to me loud and clear on all such WIBN threads is the underlying - perhaps even subconscious - motivation that what the protagonists really want is 'their own railway' (or, to be cynical, a 12":1ft scale train set), to be realised at somebody else's expense. All other justification and perceived 'endless possibilities' spring from that.

Witness previous threads where the protagonists have continually moved the 'goalposts of justification' in order to 'prove' that their vision makes sound commercial sense... despite the most cursory scratch on the surface without the rose-tinted railway enthusiast goggles on clearly demonstrating that it does nothing of the sort.

Making a case for reopening a railway for no other fundamental reason than the fact that it is a railway is the stuff of enthusiast dreams, but it can never be anything more than that - a dream.

 

A few other realities to consider:
* The initial team involved with any new project will have to fund everything out of their own pockets, as they will have no external funding and no revenue. This may last for years.
* That team will need to put in hours of hard work before their project gains significant recognition from funders, National Rail, owners of rolling stock, or other external people.
* They are likely to face lots of set-backs along the way, and need to both resilient and prepared to change their original plans.
* They will need to face the commercial reality that visitors will expect a certain standard if they are going to visit the site and pay money. A cab ride in a scruffy diesel along 100yds of track in a featureless location isn't going to work.

Richard

 

Whilst I wouldn't describer their diesel as scruffy, the Yorkshire Wolds Railway seem to be showing that they will!

 

And that a small, well conceived, well positioned, and creative project can do something interesting with very limited resources.

 

Doesn't that apply to all heritage railways?

 

No.

PH