Swanage Railway General Discussion

To me the issue is that there is no reason to run this service.

As a public service it would need to compete with the bus and that cost just £2. Maybe for a quicker journey people would pay double or triple, but even that leaves you needing to find a lot of customers on a daily basis. Maybe 100,000 in a year to break even if the cost are fully taken into account.

As an add on to a day out, it has a limited appeal for most potential Swanage Railway visitors who arrive by car.

As a way to arrive for enthusiasts it has a novelty, but as many railways will tell you from their experience of extending, that novelty wears off, and there aren’t that many enthusiasts.

So who is it aimed at? It is an expensive and distracting thing to run, and as far as I can see can never generate a surplus for the railway of any kind. Sadly it makes the Swanage less secure and sustainable.

It would only be worth running if an operating subsidy was available, but that seems unlikely.

 

Wareham is only worth running if its operated by another toc, and not directly by the Swanage railway, a peak sunday's only service terminating and turning round at Corfe makes most sence, if there is a Sunday Salisbury to Bournemouth summer service then thats the one to extend some services to terminate at Corfe, or a feeder from Bournemouth, that way the mainline TOC, can apply for the funding to run it.

 

There currently is no service Salisbury to Bournemouth any day, let alone Sunday. The first Sunday service from east of Southampton does not even arrive at Wareham until 11:03 and only warrants an hourly service even in the summer peak.

 

A concise and thoughtful analysis.

The other considerations are (1) the expectations of Dorset Council and other funders who have invested considerable sums of money in Project Wareham over the years (2) the expectations of the residents of the Isle of Purbeck who indirectly provided the funding that Dorset Council have invested and their view of the implied promises made by Swanage Railway of the restoration of the railway service between Wareham and Swanage.

 

But the railway is restored. The greatest value to the residents of the Isle of Purbeck is to ensure there is a flourishing tourist attraction encouraging people to visit for years to come. You don't achieve that by breaking the heritage butterfly on the wheel of a public transport undertaking that demonstrably has very limited attractiveness to passengers.

As for Dorset Council - I've made the point before that the investment made is water under the bridge: there's no way to get it back, and no politician in their right mind is going to go dredging up past spending to see if it delivered value for money. Local Authority budgets are in crisis at the moment, and we may well get to a point where many councils - even in comparatively prosperous areas - are doing nothing that isn't defined as a statutory service. Transport isn't one of those - and in any case, whatever spare pennies there are for a transport budget will go on potholes, because that is about the one council service that resonates with most voters.

Tom

 

The restoration of the railway was presented to the local population as a restoration of a service akin to that provided by the British Railways when it operated the service. The money invested in Project Wareham has not delivered that return. There is always a danger that not meeting the expectations of those who have supported the railway will eventually result in some form of backlash, it may not be a backlash as such but an indifference to the plight of the railway. The railway must start managing the expectations of the local population and Dorset Council / Swanage Town Council or it may find that support and understanding it had counted on may no longer be there. This is about managing risk' it may be a small risk but as we have seen over the past 3 -4 years risks that were once thought as being highly unlikely have in fact materialised.

 

Is there any evidence that DCC or its taxpayers actually still care? The remark earlier about the PCRP suggests that maybe there isn't much oomph left in the supporters.
The whole exercise was, sadly, flawed from the outset (which was decades ago) and the world has never quite aligned itself with the aspirations of the founders of the Swanage Railway.
Pat

 

I do not think there is any evidence but the point remains that whatever the obligations placed upon Swanage Railway by the 2014 agreement between the then Dorset County Council and Swanage Railway they must be complied with. The railway must not give anyone any excuse to take action against it for non compliance. As a simple example of what could happen, any failure may discourage Dorset Council from pursuing the negotiations with Perenco for access to the Furzebrook sidings with the vigour and urgency that Swanage Railway would like. Or am I to be corrected and that access to the sidings is no longer high up on the priority list?

 

I tend agree that this has to be carefully managed and presented, but I don’t think that after the delivery of two seasons of running it can be argued the railway hasn’t tried. I think people will understand that the world we now live in is very different to the one in which promises of a regular summer service provided by the SR was a prospect, and I agree with @Jamessquared that the council will not want to lose the heritage and community asset of the SR which is probably worth north of £10m per year to the local economy.

 

Wasn't it termed a 'trial service' rather than the restoration of the BR service?
If so, the trial has happened and the results are not looking good. End of trial.
No point flogging a dead horse.

 

Do agree with frequency at Norden as said: plenty of studies to bear out higher frequencies do attract more passengers if it can be reliably done. To me every 45 minutes actually seems a bit sparse for families at risk of traffic delays and all the distraction to punctuality that children can present.

What would it take to run a shuttle from Norden to the terminus and return - possibly with only one stop or a speed restriction raised/ removed - in-between a train every 40 minutes? Certainly on summer weekends, bank holidays and known busy days - the Polar Express cannot be yet known.

 

Go back a few hundred pages and there is an explanation of the issue of raising speed limits.
In short if you go faster than 40km/h all the heritage railway derogations cease to automatically apply.

But let’s be realistic. The SR and pretty much every other heritage railway faces multiple existential threats. We have to allow boards and managers the space, and give them the support they need to meet those challenges. That includes not continuing to demand that they flog dead horses like mainline shuttles that have no prospect of viability.

 

Actually just what I do myself.

 

But the Swanage Railway has not yet published the results of the trial.

The wording of the Save our Railway lists it as one of the 2023 successes.

There has been some problems, but the Save our Railway Appeal says the work on bridge 11 took more money than expected. This would have had to be spent even if the trial did not take place.

A lot of people, especially those making a day trip to the railway and Swanage from Hampshire, Surrey and London by train, welcomed using the heritage train (rather than a bus) at Wareham.

Hopefully the results will be published and a viable way of running the Wareham service again in 2024 can be found.

 

I didn't say they had been published.
I said it doesn't look good.
I'm sure "a lot of people" did welcome the service, but at the end of the day that "lot" of people need to be paying enough to cover all the costs of running the service along with a contribution to the maintenance costs of the infrastructure. From everything that has been said, it appears that is not the case.

 

The use of the word trial appears, AIUI, in the 2014 agreement between Swanage Railway and Dorset County Council.

The use of the word restoration or the phrase to restore appears frequently in many communications issued by both the SRT and SRC over many years.

Dorset Council may (though I think this is unlikely) say to Swanage Railway how much financial support do you need to run the Wareham service and the figure quoted by Swanage Railway is too little with the result that Swanage Railway falls into further financial difficulty. If Swanage Railway says that it will not operate the Wareham service again, how might this affect Dorset Council's motivation to obtain access to the Furzebrook Sidings for SR. Is access to the sidings still needed if SR conducts asset disposals as has been suggested by the SRT?

 

I would be very surprised if the council saw these two issues as being linked in that way. If the land is required to secure the future of the railway I think they will still be motivated

 

The line needed to be restored in order to run the trial

 

Yes agreed but the phrase "restore the line" (or similar) was interpreted by many as "restore the service" as evidenced by comments made on social media and elsewhere.

After all why would you restore the line if not to operate services along it?

The concept of operating a trial (but for what purpose) seems to have only been advanced since the 2010s.

Many locals interpreted the statements made by Swanage Railway to mean that a service between Swanage and Wareham would operate in much the same way as the former BR service had,

 

That may all be true, and this is an issue that will clearly need to be messaged carefully, but saying something like “ since the SR was formed it has rebuilt the line, and it was originally the intention that part of the future service would be to operate a public service all year round. DCC and SR have trialled this over the last couple of years. The conclusion of this trial is that with all the changes to costs, patterns of use and car ownership in the last 50years the conclusion is that a public service to Wareham is no longer viable without a public subsidy that cannot be justified in the present circumstances “ is going to cause very little more than a tiny ripple, especially if connected to some wording around the value of the SR to the local economy and the far more useful job it CAN do of taking people off the road in the summer using the Norden P&R. I could be wrong, but this doesn’t seem to be that warm a political potato