West Somerset Railway General Discussion

My obvious thought is to look at the WHR where your bum is on a seat for so long that I might wonder if I will still be alive when we get there BUT whats on offer is the ride.

I suggest trying to think of the BL - MD service in the same way ie sell the ride with Minehead as the icing in the cake, then have a 'inter resort' service along the coast to Williton/Watchet at 'popular prices' that the visitors will use to get around the area

 

It's not an enthusiasts wishful thinking. It is my thoughts from someone who's had sixty years in the business and been involved with several lines. I'm currently a director of one that has two years turnover in the bank so my/our approach isn't head in the sand and I'm also actively involve d in the operational management of another. In the past I've acted as Treasurer and Commercial Manager. As I've said, one size doesn't fit all. The IOWSR goes from nowhere to nowhere and has to provide something for Joe Public to do. That's not the case with every railway. Secondary spend is of no benefit if the cost of obtaining it is greater than the profit from that spend.

And your CV on running a heritage railway is?

 

Can I double, triple 'like' this please!?

 

Not everyone is the same. My wife, who is no railway enthusiast, will happily go for a ride on the WSR and look at the scenery and enjoy it. Take her on the L & B and, at its current length, she wouldn't really be interested becasue it is much of a muchness., even less so if I suggested a second trip, free or not.

Not a heritage railway but WCRC's Jacobite service is quite simply a train ride and its pretty well booked up all year. WCRC aren't in the business of extracting every penny through secondary spend and they seem quite happy with their business model, which is alien to the preachings of the consultant from the IOW.

 

Rather to my astonishment, I find myself agreeing with @PaulHitch on this occasion, at least as far as the NYMR is concerned. As @Steve well knows from the NYMR forum I see Whitby as a problem for the railway, as the tail wagging the dog, because Network Rail now more or less dictates the timetable and stock that has to be used between Whitby and Grosmont. A lot of the traffic is generated on two overcrowded trains in the morning and then the return trains later on. In practice, though, there seem to be far fewer passengers making the opposite journey, i.e. starting from Whitby and I would like to see more effort being made to generate more traffic in that direction. Clearly Pickering is nowhere near the attraction that Whitby is and needs some further help, even if it is just better promotion, In the eyes of many it is a "somewhere" and compared to BL it definitely is, but it just goes to show that if one end of the line is just a somewhere, that might not be enough.

 

The thing is, that once you have committed to run a particular service and the timetable is printed, then the vast majority of the costs of providing that service are sunk costs and that service is not going to cost any less whether it runs full or empty, apart from the additional fuel consumed pulling the additional weight of passengers up the hills. So every seat filled is additional income, unless the service is so popular that the passenger alighting at Watchet is preventing a passenger who wanted to travel to BL from getting on board, which is unlikely. Not only that, but passengers must join at intermediate stations, too, there's plenty of holiday accommodation all along the line.
In an ideal world, all seats would be sold pre-booked and all trains would run full to capacity, but, unless that can be achieved, it is always going to be the case that a seat occupied for part of the way will always be better than a seat that remains empty. Many many years ago, Network South-East had several weekends where you could go anywhere, all day for £1 on Saturday and Sunday. It made a profit for them because what it meant was that trains they would have run anyway were completely full instead of being almost empty.

 

Pickering is somewhere to while away a couple of hours if you are holidaying in Whitby but not a day out destination. The other jewel in the NYMR's crown is Goathland, which is still a much visited destination. It has the advantage of being accessible from both ends of the line if you don't want a 1½ hour journey each way and is somewhat cheaper, as well.
I agree with your statement that the Whitby operation is the tail wagging the dog but that is irrelevant to the current discussion.

 

Sorry but that is just what it is. Forty or fifty years ago you could hear people say of their lines things like "refreshments are a service rather than to make money". Rather inevitably the result tended to be a loss or, at best a very small surplus. Thankfully there is a bit more realism around now. Not universally though.

 

Give me 5 minutes, I have some popcorn to heat up!

 

I don’t think so. The further you get away from the heritage/preserved model I can see a couple of factors that need consideration. 1): kiss your volunteer base goodbye and you end up with 100% paid staff, and 2): you will start running a race against a whole different set of competitors.

Heritage/Preserved railways attract plenty of families - I don’t know where this notion has come from! Do you think parents enjoy taking children to a place where they are being pressured to buy some plastic crap at every turn: a la theme park?

Ultimately the market is only so big. Perhaps it is saturated and it is simply a case of sink or swim for some now. Some may sink, some may swim, but not all will sink. If you change the model you will just run a race against a different set of competitors in another saturated market. The more you change the model from heritage/preservation towards a 100% commercial entity, the more you loose in regards to volunteers, community involvement, engineering skills etc, etc. Imagine the business decision taken when an engine need an overhaul - steam outline with smoke machine and sound effects becomes a very real possibility.

A very slippery slope with a pit full of pastiche filled balls at the bottom to break your fall.

What is the definition of success for a preserved/heritage railway? Is it just a big fat bottom line?


And worth noting that plenty of theme parks don’t make it either.

 

They must really be doing something wrong…

 

I have to agree, in times of uncertainty, you have to protect your long term viability, by closing the section from BL to normal traffic, your running costs are lowered, plus then your PW dept can then set to upgrading the track, , but i would actually ask, can the WSR, As it stands today actually afford a 23 mile long line, this may sound harsh, but might it be better to abandon the line beyond Williton completely, theres more parking available in Minehead, than at BL, the intermediate stations dont offer much in the way of passenger numbers and you could offer a for frequent service as you are offering a shorter jouney time.

 

The railway enthusiast in me agrees with the first paragraph but I have to disagree with the second. I see a lot of railways advertising childrens events that have no relevance to railways (e.g. Peppa Pig, PAW Patrol etc), and they repeat this year after year so it must be worth doing.
And there are also the more grown up events that are not really railway related but still get repeated year after year (e.g. Car Rallies etc. One railway even had an annual Sci-Fi weekend).

 

I agree - and it takes me back to a very different world when I started aged 9 on the SVR (that wouldn't happen now for a start). It was the Michael Draper era, and I remember being very young and keen on all things GWR and saying something precocious and disparaging about the Thomas Weekend.

An old boy sitting there smoking his pipe in the Porters' Hut said words to the effect of 'the Thomas Weekend pays for you to play trains on all the weekends when no one comes.'

 

I’m not saying Railways shouldn’t be doing such things or try new income streams. But losing the core of what has been worked so hard for in the pursuit of commercialism would be a shame.

 

I agree with the core observation - the WSR costs a lot, but is (and has) struggled to generate the income required to be sustainable in the long term. I do however disagree with the analysis that follows, because it neglects a consistently reported data point - that the demand is very heavily weighted towards morning travel from BL to Minehead, and then a reverse flow in the afternoon. That is the reality for the WSR, and needs to be acknowledged.

I draw two major conclusions for how any business plan needs to develop new revenue:
1. The WSR needs to accept and acknowledge the existing demand pattern; and
2. The WSR needs to focus it's generation of new demand into existing spare capacity

I'll expand on that, with reference to family 35B experience with another railway that has a similar demand imbalance issue - NYMR.

I have been able to persuade the family to do a day out at the NYMR, including an 80 mile drive to be on the 9:00 train from Pickering. The sell is a combination of a trip on the railway for dad, and a trip round Whitby for the others. The railway only features in the itinerary if it is part of how we get to Whitby. Once we're in Whitby, it is competing with alternatives, and starts to look expensive, inflexible and inconvenient.

The implication of this is that, if the railway stops servicing that demand, much of it will simply disappear. And if it were, say, to stop running south of Williton, it may well find itself faced with a chunk of the old demand appearing at Williton, but being unable to service that demand due to the limited facilities - meaning that it not only lose revenue, but also generates bad feedback from disappointed would be visitors.

@Jamessquared has oft repeated the suggestion of using Watchet as a destination for middle of day trips. I agree with him - these are options that have only marginal costs to them, and using currently surplus capacity. But, having stayed in Watchet in the mid 90s and visited occasionally in more recent years, I don't think I'm being harsh when I say that it's no nirvana. If I want to visit a pretty village near Exmoor, there are plenty of others I might choose first.

I'd also like to touch on the implications of temporarily closing part of the line. Ignoring the awkward precedents set by "temporary" closures elsewhere (Caldon Low?), if that was done for anything other than a fully funded blockade fix, the fallacy of altered perceptions would bite. The demand loss I've referred to would hit, meaning that reopening would generate challenges to resuscitate demand, while intermediate opening for railtours would start to seem an expensive imposition for marginal revenue. Closure would easily become permanent in all but name.

 

There are two somewhat different issues here.
One is the need for additional revenue besides the fare box, which applies to almost all preserved railways, with very few exceptions such as the Kingswear line. Ancillary offerings such as catering are one obvious possible source which deserves consideration.
The other issue is the profitability or otherwise of such ancillary offerings. If they can be profitable in themselves that's great. If not, they may still be worthwhile to the extent that they increase the attractiveness of the whole package in bringing customers in, but that would need very careful analysis. Neither is likely somewhere like Minehead where there are plenty of other places for the people who have arrived on the railway to spend their money.