Swanage Railway General Discussion

Yes but this is a very specialist activity and requires knowledgeable and skilled staff to deliver the experience expected and demanded. That is not to say that it cant be done but SRC would need to say that this is something that they are going to do and resource it accordingly.

 

Enough of the problems, how about the solutions.
The timetable should be one that's easy to understand, and relatively understandable
early season, have one engine in steam, on Saturdays, 1 steam, + diesel ( loco, or dmu) sundays,
re introduce printed timetables and distribute them too every hotel, camp site guest house and b&b in the area, with ideas for days out around the railway using the railway as the way to get there,
run a trial DMU evening service to corfe, in partnership with the council to advertise the bars, pubs restaurants, possibly offering discounted fares, if the council can grant aid it, but as ever it has to be advertised,with offers to make people staying in the area think, lets do it,

 

Agreed - in an ideal world. But I suggest that the constraints of where the railway operates to need to be borne in mind, along with a view of how price sensitive demand is. Sadly, there's a reason why the Swanage, and many other, seaside branches died in the first 25 years of BR. Do we know, for example, what the correlation of Swanage Railway ticket sales is to local holiday bookings - do the trends align, or is the railway suffering particularly? Ditto re. other local attractions.

Which takes us to @martin1656 at post #9422 - these are all good ideas, but do we actually know that they're the right medicine for the problem? Is there any analysis that tells us that this gut feel - which I share - is actually appropriate to Swanage's issues?

 

Indeed it is something that would need to be done properly. However the rewards are potentially quite high. When we were looking at wedding venues, it was quite normal for the price to be double or tripled once the word wedding was mentioned, compared to booking the same venue for some other event.

If an experienced wedding planner was employed, then a few weddings could cover their salary as well as generating a healthy return for the railway.

I’m sure this is one of the options the SRC will consider, alongside others ideas. It will be interesting to see what the new commercialised Swanage Railway ends up looking like.

 

Trust me, this is not the money for old rope that it appears. If that experienced planner is hired, their salary will be added to the cost base, and will need to be backed up with investment to create an offering that will appeal to couples. I'd be pleasantly impressed if that delivered a return before 2025, assuming all goes well - and that's assuming that preferred suppliers are used who bring all the kit to the railway, allowing things to be done without investment in assets.

 

Not many certainties in there that I can see to encourage confidence. Does it not occur to you that one of the reasons why many venues charge higher rates for weddings as opposed to other events is because of the higher costs involved? What's the going rate for an experienced wedding planner?

 

So a cost of employment that will probably be £40k+...

 

But if you are making significantly more than £25k / £40k a year from wedding bookings then it could be worth doing.

All I’m saying that although it might be necessarily happen, this is just one of many ideas that the Swanage Railway should (and probably already is) at least consider.

 

No higher costs in the venues I looked at. It was simply venue hire cost, nothing else included, which jumped massively as soon as you said it was for a wedding.

 

The NYMR used to do weddings and actively promoted them. However, it pulled out of it several years age. I wonder why if it is as lucrative as is being suggested? Or was it simply that it wasn’t?

 

Absolutely - but both @Pete Thornhill and I are saying, from our separate experiences, that this idea is one that needs to be looked at very carefully because the reality is a lot tougher than the headlines suggest, especially if there's no capital available for speculation.

Because people will pay more for weddings* than for other events.

* - not sure I get this; we had our wedding celebration in the old school opposite the church, and did it so simply as to make any wedding planner weep...

 

Maybe it wasn’t for the NYMR. It’s just one of the many options that the Swanage Railway needs to consider to see if it would work for them.

 

It seems to me that the obvious example of how to make some money is the 'fish and chip' train

The railway provides the seats and someone else does the hard work of selling and organising.

Polar Express ditto

 

Interesting to note that other railways in SE are holding there own, Bluebell apparently expected to better their forecast for 2023 and KESR doing quite well , see AGM report as per the KEsR thread. swanage meet regularly with these so I would hope they are taking note of the good things these are doing.

 

It is challenging to correlate local holiday bookings with Swanage railway ticket sales due to a lack of robust visitor data. Visit Dorset endeavour to collate visitor data but it is usually published considerably "post event". Furthermore 1) the vast majority of visitors to Swanage are "day trippers" 2) air bnb owners - who now appear to form a considerable % of the bed stock - do not tend to provide data for obvious reasons.

I wonder when and on what basis the fare levels were actually set. Judging by changes over the past few years it appears that the fare levels were set "donkeys years ago" and are simply increased based on some form of "assessment of inflation and cost increases." No account is taken of elasticity of demand.

Other local attractions do not usually publish their visitor numbers for analysis. However The Tank Museum has C200K visitors per annum proving the enduring fascination with warfare.

With reasonable bounds it is a good idea. Arguably the F and C is the best because it uses existing services which would be running anyway. However you have to have very robust and accurate cost data so you ensure that the fare / price you quote to the third party not only covers your costs but gives a suitable profit margin on top because you are foregoing running a similar event yourself. The other disadvantage is that the PE and F+C customers are not your customers so you can not collect their data for targeted marketing of future events.