SVR General Discussion

I have been a director in both situations and having all locos owned by third parties is very risky. Like @lineclear I think a blend is best. I would also say that I understand that there a number of groups on the SVR who are to all intents and purposes no different to if the SVR themselves were the owners.

One issue with many loco arrangements is that they have hidden the real cost of sustaining the railway, especially where run and overhaul or overhaul and run agreements have existed. It has been too easy to over extend the company in other directions because of the availability of locos that in some cases only became a cost later, maybe never.

 

as you say it maybe several years, certainly it won't get done in a Flash

Jon

 

Creative thinking and hard work...but it's becoming harder to do it with steam on the front and still make a sensible profit

 

Not wishing to revisit the reasons why it was necessary, this approach has at least got some form of photo charters back on the menu at NVR - we can build from there in the future

 

Hopefully the loco will be Blessed with a return to steam one day then.

 

The timetable for the Spring special events has dropped... Even those have only one loco in steam making just two round trips. And if bought on the day, it is seven quid cheaper to visit the line with double the amount of steam traction. What a sorry state of affairs.

 

Will the railway be offering hot water bottles to passengers? April isn’t always all that warm and I assume at least one of the diesel trains will be loco hauled? How much of the SVR stock is ETH / how many of the diesels have working steam heat ?

With coal at £500/ton I suppose running this way is maybe £3000 / day cheaper, but that only works if the takings aren’t reduced by £3000 or more, and there is no long term effect on people returning. It’s a pretty brave bet on people not really caring about the steam part of the ride, and whilst I think that steam is much less essential to many visitors than it was, this looks a bit too heavy with diesels to me. And if there is a train or two without heat there might be some very unhappy passengers.

 

How do you work out £3,000 per day cheaper by not running steam?

Some years ago (2017 I think) I worked out that on the Bluebell, we used 63lb of coal per mile run. (That is everything, i.e. included lighting up etc). A figure of 70lb per mile was given for the WSR, which I think validated my number as being probably reasonably typical for larger railways. (Basically, total coal consumption for the year divided by total steam miles run).

Let's suppose, at a worst case, the SVR is at the same level as the WSR, i.e. 70lb of coal per mile. That means steaming a loco to do a double trip (64 miles) uses 4,480lbs of coal - exactly two tons. That's a £1,000 in coal at your price of £500 per ton.

Diesel consumption has been given at 1 mile per gallon on several threads: that means 64 gallons. I'm not sure what price railways pay for fuel: can they use red diesel? If so, at say £1/litre; £4.50/gallon, that gives a diesel fuel cost of £288 for the same diagram.

So the fuel saving to me is nearer £700 per day by swapping steam for diesel; not £3,000. I can't see where else you make savings - infrastructure, carriages and general business costs are all the same, so that only leaves the murky world of comparative hire fees / overhaul costs, but I can't see their being enough difference in those to make running a diesel loco £2,300 cheaper per day than steam.

The £700 per day saving in fuel by running diesel over steam is wiped out if about 25 passengers decide not to travel as a consequence.

Tom

 

3 tons per day per loco not used. I was going on MHR daily consumption, sort of. I wasn’t being scientific about the calculation. I think we are saying the same thing though, that you don’t need many people to decide to not go, or given the level of repeat visitors at all heritage lines, to decide not to go again, for this to have been a false economy.

 

I believe the SVR have at least one diesel with steam heat facilities available to them. Steam heat operation will also draw diesel enthusiasts out. This may offset the reaction of some to diesel operation.


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Indeed so - and I tend to the view that the cost comparison between steam and diesel is rather tighter than many people suppose, and therefore the risk of it proving a false economy hinges on much smaller numbers of passengers changing their habits than is often supposed.

Tom

 

The 40 is steam heat, I don't know about any of the others. It was certainly the regularly rostered diesel over the Christmas/ New Year running.

 

A reasonable estimate. The last published figure I have was for 2018 which was 58,132 miles and 1,900 tonnes, equating to 30.6 miles per tonne, so a 64 mile round trip would equate to 2.1 tonnes or 2.3 tons. I don't know if the SVR's water usage is metered - if so that might be another additional cost of steam over diesel. However I fully agree with the general point that the saving may be offset by lost revenue.

 

There is a lot to consider here but in general railways that have struggled in the past have been able to get out of that situation by optimising the train service.

You could easily get into a situation where you can run a diesel service that barely breaks even because it is lightly loaded, but also run a steam service that is profitable because it is popular. Then you're just adding to the maintenance burden of rolling stock and infrastructure as well as other costs, whilst also not actually making any money.

The margin on your steam service might not be as big because of the additional loco cost, but it might be more likely to turn a profit simply because it is more popular.

The other thing to consider is that you need to get really good at marketing now. You need a proper strategy and you need people who can implement it. People have less money to spend so you need to make sure they are spending it with you. Expensive gimmicks like painting engines purple is not really cutting it. Not least because it is very difficult to measure the return on that investment.

 

I think that those who spent their COVID grants well and wisely are likely to survive best, remembering that some were for improving IT , websites etc to add to marketability coming out of COVID.

 

As others have said, one diesel loco with steam heat (D306). There's only a handful in the country sadly. April's weather is a lot more varied than most other months. Some years you can have snow, others have record breaking temperatures in the high 20s.

I don't understand the logic in using diesels on event days like that, especially not the Open House weekend. It's meant to be a showcase for the railway, letting people see stuff they wouldn't normally be able to. On the one hand you've got all the workshops open showing off their handiwork, @olly5764 doing guided tours of the Engine House off his own bat, etc. But then they've disincentivised people from coming by using diesels on what could possibly be unheated trains. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

 

There is a lot more nostalgia for diesel traction and tolerance of it, even interest in it from ordinary visitors. BUT, a cold snap could be very adverse, and whilst I could see one diesel to fill in the otherwise long gap, this looks a bit desperate.

 

Can't quite put my finger on why but a steam trip seems more soothing than diesel and our dog likes steam trips ! Maybe for the same reason.

 

Isnt the Class 46 D182 due to come back to the SVR as well? - I thought that was the plan for the winter but then it returned to the MRC for repairs.