Swanage Railway General Discussion

I agree to a large extent and certainly the mainline link should be used to bring people to us but even Norden is quite remote from the population centres. Purbeck is beautiful in part because is is so unpopulated. It's easily an Hours drive from Bournemouth to Swanage.

Once you have committed to the expense of maintaining a mainline connection, locos to mainline standards and a mainline operating licence surly good business is to 'sweat your assets'. placing your product in a high population area also seems good business. I can't see that the market for a premium evening meal on a steam train is equally well served from Norden as it is in Bournemouth or Poole.

Our dining set is used from Friday to Sunday in the main season with occasional weekday cream teas. To fill it on a weekday evening we would need a bigger catchment than available in Purbeck. To me it makes sense to combine all these under utilised assets and use the national network at a time when there is underused capacity to take a premium product to a high population tourist area. It’s unlike a traditional charter operator that usually runs longer trains longer distances for the enthusiast market.

 

Ask any railway with its own boiler shop and they will agree, taking it in house was the most cost effective thing many have done, and of course, you then have full control to set the standard, , I can remember so of the disparaging remarks andy made over a contract boiler job that was done to I think the standard 5, whilst it was done to the standard required, it wasn't to his standard , and any commercial boilerwork is largely based on cost ,

 

Completely different, I'd suggest - adding Whitby adds a major destination to replace a "middle of nowhere " terminus at Grosmont, I'm not sure that Wareham hasthe same level of attraction to the visitor, and the NYMR has no designs on running further afield apart from the occasional trip to Battersby.

 

Upgrading a steam loco and some coaches for mainline use is a world away from setting up a TOC to operate them mainline yourself!

 

What about a tour operator hiring the Swanage main line stock & I include the DMU for a charter from

 

That would be for Swanage to decide if it is amenable to such an arrangement. The difference between that and Swanage operating such trains itself is that the risks (profits?)are transferred to the tour operator and not the railway. As I said earlier I'm not sure that tour operators will be knocking the door down very often to avail themselves of such an opertunity - the profit margin is likely to be minute, if it exists at all.

Peter

 

Again it depends on what the product is, what the market your aiming at is, an evening dining train, might be one way, its a niche market, same with the DMU sets, but that would be a different market possibly more suited to day out type operations, for example would a DMU tour from Swanage to Sheffield park be profitable, or even Swanage to Alresford ? depending on what pickup points would be of course it would have to be at a time when the wareham shuttle is being operated by the U boat,or 33 to free up the DMU sets.

 

Regardless of the "product", the costs of operating outside the Swanage Railway boundary, especially one off or occasional trips, will be horrendous. Hopefully you can make a reasonable return on internal operations, so why risk making a significant loss by running beyond Wareham. It just does not make sense.

OMG I'm starting to sound like PH! Sorry, but he is right sometimes.

Peter

 

I don't think we are disagreeing. As I said, the NYMR has no designs on operating further afield, but the work needed for registering stock for Whitby sometimes feels as though the tail is wagging the dog. I can't see how the costs running a limited number of limited capacity trains are going to be even covered let alone a profit made. Didn't the MHR find that running the Green Train was too much effort for the work involved? And that wasn't limited in capacity.

 

The green train became the tail that was wagging the dog. We were running usually 2 trips a week (we may have occasionally done 3, but I cannot remember) using 11 or 12 carriages and running to places like Canterbury, Ely and Yeovil. Furthest was probably Bishops Lydeard or Kidderminster. The majority of tours were to Canterbury or one of the other Cathedral Cities. This was a bigger scope than suggested above for a Swanage dining train, and bigger sets of carriages.

The issue is that once you have "mainline" trains they have to take precedence. The maintenance of the locos and stock always comes first against your internal locos and stock, and it must be completed against externally set timescales. Their timings dictate everything else. The result is that the operation and maintenance eats resources (people and money) like you wouldn't believe. The Green Train never brought much in the way of profit to the MHR, and the disruption it caused took years to recover from. The reward was insufficient for the effort required. The NYMR situation is very different. The Swanage situation is more similar to the MHR one. All you can say really is ... proceed with extreme caution.

 

I'd suggest that Wareham is a pretty damn attractive destination, and with the possibility of connecting services to Bournemouth and points east, or to Dorchester and thereby to Weymouth, or Yeovil, and thus pretty much all of south-west England, it could prove a major draw for the Swanage.

 

I'm sure that the relevant people at Swanage will do just this. We can speculate endlessly on this forum and debate the potential problems and possibilities ad infinitum but a robust business case will need to be made before 31806 takes any fare-paying passengers any further than Wareham in those green coaches.

If I may make a comparison, I live in an area whether one organisation has an essential monopoly on originating charter trains which have no more capacity than the Swanage Railway's main line set - Hastings Diesels' excursions with 1001. Judging by the long list of railtours which have been run, it looks like they are able to cover their costs. Obviously, running an extremely gauge-friendly DEMU on the main line is a much easier proposition than steam, but with Bouremouth/Poole not far away, it could be argued that there is a better catchment area on the Swanage Railwy's doorstep than Hastings Diessls enjoys. Once you have left St Leonard's, its quite sparsely populated up here in the High Weald until you reach Tunbridge Wells (that's one of the joys of living in this lovely area!)

I would expect that future main line workings beyond Wareham with the U and the green set may not be much like the Mid Hants' tours either - smaller scale affairs both in terms of the number of passengers and the miles covered. Anyway, we can be sure that apart from perhaps a one-off to gauge market response, nothing is going to happen unless the relevant people at Swanage are convinced they have found a model that will work financially.

 

Martin you tend to look at this issue as an enthusiast and I think we all know that most of the railtour market these days are not hard core enthusiasts. Forgetting all the cost and pathing issues yes Sheffield Park would have the option of the NT Gardens as well as the railway, so that may appeal to a few, but its a long way by rail from Swanage, either by the coast line or around the south of London so it becomes a long day, especially in a DMU. Not something I would sign up for! Alresford I would suggest very little to interest the general public for a few hours, plus you may have to go via Woking to get there. Your earlier suggestion of the steam centre at Yeovil is again only something that would mainly interest an enthusiast as there is nothing else within walking distance.
And remember anything currently mainline approved, or about to be, at Swanage has no catering facility.
I am sure the Swanage guys must have their sights firmly fixed on making Wareham work before risking diversification.

 

Martin - to my knowledge, I can only remember one railtour in the last five years of the "heritage railway to heritage railway" type that terminated at Sheffield Park, which was the Alresford - SP tour in October 2014. It had 400+ people on it, but there hasn't been a repeat since. Indeed, even tours with Sheffield Park as the destination from elsewhere in the country haven't exactly been numerous. All of which rather suggests to me that there is not much of a market for such tours - if it were otherwise, I am sure that the main charter organisers would have promoted more tours.

As for Swanage as a starting point, regardless of destination: a key issue seems to me the (relative) geographic isolation of Swanage: put bluntly, it is tricky to get to, especially for an early morning departure (i.e. a long drive from pretty much anywhere. For example, Google reckons 90 minutes drive just from Southampton which is comparatively close; getting towards 2 hours from Portsmouth; nearly three hours from Bristol). It feels to me that Swanage is a better destination for a charter than starting point. But assuming that to be true, any such charters aren't likely to be organised by the Swanage Railway.

The other point about a mainline operation is that by definition the locos and carriages aren't available for your heritage operation while they are out on the mainline. In fact, it is probably worse, because the exigencies of rostering probably means that more or less, a single day tour during the week means that you need something else to run the heritage line operation for the whole week. So the additional maintenance / availability overhead of running "heritage operation plus mainline operation", relative to just "heritage operation" is considerable.

Tom

 

I didn't say they wouldn't, and I wasn't speculating. The robustness of a business case is only testable in retrospect. It is the sort of thing that has to be tried (possibly for some time) before a business model evolves. This is fine, but the trick is being brave enough to try something different or pull out altogether.

There is no comparison between Swanage and Hasting Group. The business model of the Hasting group is entirely different. They don't have a railway to run. I think it is very difficult indeed to serve both a mainline operation (beyond the carefully limited type the NYMR operate) and a heritage railway. The needs are quite markedly different.

I hope for their sake you are right. As I am not a Swanage board member I have no way to form an opinion. Smaller scale does not necessarily mean lower costs (some are fixed), so there would need to be a balance found between length of run, catering, route and destination (all of which affect perceived value) and the price charged. I can imagine the price would have to be quite substantial for a mainline dining train to be profitable. There lies the problem. There is no point in doing this unless it is adding something to the core business (the railway). That is a hard trick to pull off. For the MHR it was great for morale and engineering expertise and brand building. As a business venture it was never going to add much to the bottom line of the core business, and we ran a lot of trains with a lot of passengers.

 

I think you can rule out the DMU and Mk1s for lengthy main line trips after 01/01/2020. NR imposes it's restriction on toilets discharging onto the permanent way.
I understand the intention is to lock toilets out of use on services to/from Wareham.
In the meantime, the Class 117 has only one toilet for it's three coaches [and the Class 121 'Bubble Car' has no toilet] so not conducive to lengthy trips!

 

Didnt Virginia Woolf use a rolled up newspaper ..........................

 

Personally speaking, there may be a limited market from Yev

Programme in comfort breaks

 

Perhaps all passengers must pass a 'strong bladder test'. What do you reckon?

 

Why don't we just convert Mk1s to carry effluent in on-board tanks for disposal in accordance with regulations? I mean, how hard can it be? What could possibly go wrong! ;-)