Llangollen Railway

There's no saving in cost. A "passenger train with no passengers" would be a truer description. The trains are shown in our public timetable and if you turned up, you could ride. You still need loco crew, guards, signalmen etc, and the station staff are probably booked on in time in any case.

The only real operational difference is that our operating practice is that all passenger trains between September and May are steam heated for at least an hour before departure. (At the discretion of the guard - if it is already a warm day, they aren't, but the off shed times reflect the requirement to do so). The only concession we made was that the steam heating allowance for the first up train could take place while it was underway. So in practice, off shed, take water, hook on and go, and you get your hour of steam heat in the 40 minutes journey plus 20 minutes allowance at East Grinstead. Without that allowance, off-shed times - and by extension crew booking on times - would have had to be about 45 minutes earlier, which is not only very early, but also potentially made the days long enough to require a split shift.

As @Steve says - "the joys of running a heritage railway."

Tom

 

I guessed that would be the case - hence asking what the saving would be.

 

I'm sure that is how the old Timetable C used to work, with an early/late DMU from/to Carrog (although not based at Carrog, the DMUs were based at Glyndyfrdwy then).

 

the problem is that your first "proper" train (so to speak) is a DMU - if you are railway from a-b I'd guess that's the shop window for a lot of people.

Could you do anything clever with a diesel drag? if the engine takes x time to get up to operating pressure, could you have a chunk of that [y] being pulled along at the back? (and thus have the firelighter able to get up x-y later). might make oiling round more of a challenge though...

 

Hmm, I have doubts about this, it has been suggested to solve a similar problem in the GWSR and no doubt elsewhere. I could just about see it working for the last train back, but I think the first train where you're collecting punters from Corwen for their day out in Llangollen by steam train, it really does need to be steam. If its anything like the first train from Cheltenham to Broadway, it'll be the busiest train of the day. DMUs tend to work best at providing additional trains that make it feasible for people to stop off at an intermediate station. That way people can plan it such that their main trip is by steam, with a shorter DMU ride to explore an extra station.

 

In a word - no. The loco needs to be prepared by time it goes off shed. There's negligible saving in time to be made going off shed at less than full pressure (which in any case most crews will probably do, knowing they have additional time being their booked "off shed" and the actual departure time of the first train). Not steam heating was the one worthwhile time saving we could make for a train that carried very few or no passengers, and even that only saves you time in the winter, when our book on times are consistently earlier to allow time for heating).

The real cost issue with unremunerative mileage is what it does to mileage-based maintenance costs. For example, suppose you do 20 miles unremunerative mileage for 200 days per year - that is 4,000 extra loco miles (and maybe 20,000 extra carriage miles). If you reckon on getting an average of 8,000 miles per year per loco, that means your loco requirement is half an engine more. It's a cost of half an overhaul more in whatever cycle you work on (say half an overhaul every ten years). It means perhaps one extra P&V to do every five years. In carriage terms it is more brake adjustments and so on. So it costs money, but it might be operationally necessary. Finding that sweet spot - the smallest possible annual mileage possible, but not at the expense of dissuading passengers - is far from easy.

Tom

 

A digression, we are customers and the shift from referring to people who travel as "customers" rather than "passengers" has gone hand in hand with rather more focus on trying to understand what we want to buy, rather than what the railway wants us to buy.

 

yes, but it can also lead to losing focus (on NR) on trains. After all, if any customer's £ is as good as another, why not shut all these expensive railways and turn the real estate into shopping centres?

 

We are talking of heritage railways, recreating the past where those who travel are passengers and on the railway there are signalmen, firemen etc. Where did that term signaller come from? That’s a job in the navy as far as I’m concerned

 

Well, they do use semaphores !

 

Signaller has the advantage of being gender neutral.

With regard to location, is there any line that has its depots in the right place? SVR maybe? NNR? ELR? I tend to think it is a function of the way lines have been restored from somewhere to somewhere and most preservation MPDs are on new/converted sites that happened to be in the right place when the line was first being restored but not necessarily when it was finished.

Some lines such as say FR, TR etc have only ever started from one end (I don’t recall the Ffestiniog ever starting a train from BF for example).

 

Signalman is also gender neutral, during WW1 a new grade of lady signalman was introduced on the railway and lasted until the Equal Pay Act. They did the same job as their male colleagues but were paid less.

 

A morning train from Nant Gwernol would be, err, lightly patronised indeed

 

A past which, when the railway operated in that mode, saw progressive decline in rail use as customers chose to vote with their feet, and where BR managers could say with a straight face that passengers' convenience was nothing to do with them. Modern preserved railways are in a different environment, and need to remember that they are, commercially speaking, running in 2020 rather than 1960.

 

The FfR used to have an 'early bird' diesel hauled service starting at Blaenau Ffestiniog. IIRC, stock was kept overnight at Glan y Pwll.

 

I'm sure I'm not alone in starting a trip at Abergynolwyn when travelling from inland down the B4405 rather than driving the length of the railway to travel back to a place I've already passed.

 

No, they are not gender neutral terms.

 

We're going down the rabbit hole that is the 'Chairman / Lady Chairman / Chairwoman / Chair' argument. As the formidable Gwyneth Dunwoody remarked (in her capacity as Chairman of the Commons Transport Committee) she was not a piece of furniture. Which is worse, giving offence to the individual being addressed, or to the 3rd parties who always seem to have a point to make.
Pat

 

Yes they are, the man bit referred to species not gender. Same as dog where the species and the male of are the same.

 

No. They are gendered terms, hence the use of signaller which is a gender neutral term. Driver - not gendered, fireman - gendered. Do you see? Gender is complex and as @Robin Moira White has successfully argued recently a spectrum, it is for the sake of inclusivity it is sensible in the broadest terms to use gender neutral terms and allow the individual to use a noun of their choosing (gendered or not to).