Are Tourist Railways "welcoming" enough?

A good example of how we see things differently and what is a plus point for some is a negative point for others.

 

On the parking front, I don't expect tarmac, but I do prefer a surface that doesn't make me look like I've taken the dog for a long walk by the time I get to the station.

My pet bugbear about parking used to be Belton House (NT, a couple of miles from me, and a great place to take kids). Parking is in a field with sandy soil (it's part of a deer park), and the NT couldn't keep up with traffic, with the result that it started to look like a WWI battlefield. The bumps were fine, but the mud...

They've now done a decent job of reinforcing the grass and soil with matting; that and a more assertive policy about parking are starting to correct 10 years or more of avoidable damage.

 

If it helps the car park at Cheltenham isn't tarmac?

 

Middleton's previous Marketing Manager more or less abandoned paid advertising in favour of using the 'net. Traffic figures didn't soar but they didn't go down. What did happen is our marketing costs dropped dramatically, which positively can affect the bottom line just as much as an increase in visitor numbers does. We now have a new marketing team who want to (quite rightly) grow the traffic figures. However, I can't help but think that paying for adverts in newspapers, obscure TV channels and, worse, railway magazines, is largely throwing money away. One of the problems is that it costs the same for a small railway to place an Ad as it does a big railway. If your marketing budget is (say) 10% of turnover, such an Ad is significant for the small railway and a drop in the ocean for the big one. I'm not in marketing, though.

 

Rather than pay for an advert though most local papers - and radio stations are run on a shoestring so a press release costs nothing

 

Well worth doing, especially if you have the right personalities to differentiate yourselves and cut through the noise of all the other people issuing press releases.

 

Rather than rely on adverts, leaflets or press releases to do the marketing work for you, the marketing teams needs to get involved in some serious networking and personal contact with the people who bring in visitors, and visitor research. Local tourist information centres, other attractions, talking to visitors about how and why they visited. I know of one heritage railway which found it that their core market came from a totally different geographical area than they expected, so they changed the focus of their promotional work. Personal contact with tourist information centres and other attractions helped to get word-of-mouth recommendations, rather than just having a stack of leaflets in a rack.

 

If you look at the ABC Circulation figures for local newspapers you can see that they are pretty much all losing huge numbers of sales each year. The Worcester News for example - a daily which covers Worcester and South Worcestershire - had a circulation of 7130 last year. Waste of money advertising to those levels of circulation.

http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2...abc-league-but-all-dailies-see-sales-decline/

 

You're preaching to the converted with press releases, editorial content, etc. We likewise have done market research and discovered our passenger base was not exactly where we thought it was. Middleton also gets a significant number of repeat visitors.

 

And why is that? Because of word of mouth or social media. which brings us back to trip advisor. ..

 

Of course the skills needed to carry out this kind of analysis are often belittled by some on here. It takes alsorts to run a railway. .....

 

Then you have missed a great deal in my opinion! However, as is so often the case, a site such as Toddington could never be restored to say, its 1930s condition. It never attracted the numbers of passengers it does now and was never home to any locos (the recently demolished Malvern Road shed did that job). There was also a large fruit packing shed where the David Page now is and that didn't last long after the BR strike of 1955 after which the local fruit growers told BR just what it could do with its Fruit Ds. Everything went by road after that.
The 2 photos show what Toddington "car park" looked like when I first volunteered there. The 1st photo was taken in 1983 and shows the old "Dowty Shed" being re-assembled, long since gone. The 2nd was taken in March 1984, shortly before opening to the public. Car parking as and where you could at that time. There are 3 Class 14s and a Merchant Navy in the 2nd photo. No class 14s there now. A shame really, I liked them and they have Swindon pedigree. Lest we forget eh? For my part, regarding this business of "welcoming heritage railways" I doubt very much if the paying public would be attracted to a new heritage railway like Toddington was if things were like this today. Back in the early 1980s it was a little different and we all thought that we'd be at Broadway by 2000. This hobby/interest/obsession/fascination does teach one patience. Personally, I prefer the clean tarmac car park, which once was Toddington Navvies' Camp.

 

Re. the highlighted phrase, you might be pleasantly surprised - I certainly was at Fimber Halt last year on a visit to the Yorkshire Wolds Railway. More effort into putting down a clean level surface, but still quite basic in its operation. And, back fully on thread, I gave them 5 stars on TripAdvisor!

 

It's on my list to visit now that I live not far away from the place. The Wolds Railway website certainly gives the impression that it's not trying to be anything other than a basic attraction on the road to the Wolds. I will certainly visit when they reopen later this year. Spookily enough, their BR Mk 1 BG coach came from the GWSR!

 

It's well worth a visit when in the area, though for a short(ish) visit, not a full day! Some of the country near there is wonderful, too - especially the road up the side of Fairy Dale, at the south end of Burdale Tunnel.

 

What is this Trip Advisor?

 

A ratings / advice site for hallucinogens...

Tom

 

As used by those who went to North Didcot poly for their PhD, perhaps?

 

Fred seems to do a fair bit of 'referring to' the WNXX forum too...

Just to put a bit of perspective on all this, I am a self-employed marketing/PR writer whose main client for the past 10 years has been a major global corporation. Said corporation has been around for many, many years and, over the past year, it has set up a completely new department solely devoted to marketing via social media.

Press releases are only as good as the writer who produces them (which is why people pay me to do it). However, with the widespread advent of social media, people are getting less fussy about correct English and in-depth content. What people want now is the written (or picture) equivalent of a soundbite that they can digest in seconds from their smartphone.

Anyone over the age of about 25 reading this who doesn't work in the marketing business will probably disagree, but trust me it's true, because I am currently having my professional legs taken out from under me by it.

Like it or not - and I bloody well hate it - social media is the future of communication and marketing. I take real pride in a press release or advertorial, I have absolutely no professional interest in churning out short snippets of text for the short-of-attention. But it's a case of adapt or die - which is precisely what I am having to do. Very, very reluctantly...