North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

You are absolutely right, and it is the type of atmosphere that has pervaded (contaminated might be a b etter choice of word) since Murray Brown was displaced as Chairman. There has been a general loss of purpose and sense of direction that has seen its financial performance slump directly, and a focus on financial objectives that have ignored the reasons why the railway is there in the first place, and what attracted the public to it. Until the there is a resetting of attitudes to it on both Boards the future looks bleak - and I suggest that the necessary resetting should include a lot of the key people being replaced by ones with a better understanding of what makes a heritage railway a vibrant entity.

 

There are still some that make all welcome whilst offering some more exclusive offerings for those who can afford it or want something for a special occasion
Certainly several of these in the south and yes they do offer some gimmicks to attract families now and then, but there are days you can visit where it is just sort of normal heritage running. Seems to work as a way of sustaining the line too




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A response of "please can we go back to the way things were" is appealing but ignores the fundamantal economic drivers that define how heritage railways can be sustainable in future. They have to adapt to customer demand and rightly or wrongly that is increasingly for experinces. The leisurely ride Sidmouth describes is no longer enough to attract current potentiall visitors.
Tom suggested I should be reminded of the NYMR's charitable purposes which was something of an overkill since I wrote the current ones but,to be fair, both he and Sidmouth make a fair point. It's sometimes overlooked that Charity Commission guidance is that the work of a charity must be accessible to the poor. Rather unhelpfully there's no definition of who the poor are but the general assumption is that means charges should be reasonably affordable. In practice it's possible for a visitor to experince quite a lot of NYMR heritage for free. As pointed out in a recent post for those that travel on a per mile basis the current £49.50 all line return fare is cheaper, after allowing for inflation, than the per mile charge in the early 1970's before the NYMR became a charity. To that extent the charitable obligation is being met. It can't mean that all heritage experiences have to be priced on that basis. If that were the case the likes of Pullman dining, footplate experiences etc. could not be provided economically. Travelling in a sixty or seventy year old Mark 1 is still an opportunity to experience heritage travel at a reasonably affordable price. Logically there's no real distinction between paying more for the additional experince of travelling in something even older and paying more for the other higher priced experiences..

 

I don’t quite follow. You seem to have argued both for and against premium experiences?

Surely the thing we all have to learn is that there is no magic bullet? Every railway I think has to run services and events that appeal to the widest possible audiences, and focus on widening the awareness that they even exist.

I have said it before, but there is a role here for an initiative by the HRA to publicise all nationally.

It is essential to appeal to a wider range of people and this means doing everything that you can and can afford to develop commercially. That’s also the only route to sustainable grant funding because that money will tend to follow what is possible.

 

I'm not suggesting diverting demand, but servicing non-Whitby demand and promoting non-Whitby demand. We know that capacity for Whitby is constrained, therefore growth needs to come from other sources. The existence of "internal" workings, which are designedly attractive in their own right, serves that commercial function, while also going towards the charity's legal duties to meet it's purposes.

It may be necessary to consider relative priorities, but the assumption that vehicles can only offer value if they are charged for at a premium seems to me highly questionable.

Where there are first class vehicles, I can well see the value in offering a premium service using those vehicles (and, again, taking advantage of shoulder demand to boost income for very low marginal cost). But (and @60044 will probably wish to burn me on a pyre of Mk1s for saying so), the TTOs are not that much of a premium experience over the Mk1s - their interest is above all historical.

 

I think you are on very thin ice arguing that the interpretation of historical is limited to the Mk1s, and that the older vehicles are sufficiently different that they justify charging at a premium.

I fully accept the need to live within means, but the questions are being asked the wrong way round - as revealed in your comment about Whitby and internal services. The starting point needs to be the museum aspects, and then the commercial need to be layered in as to how it's funded. Instead, as shown above, you are applying something akin to the "freemium" model of the likes of Dropbox, and looking to provide the minimum necessary as part of the basic price, and then upsell everything else. That's a path to ever deeper employeeisation of the railway, and away from one of the sector's key assets, the support of railways for love, not money.

 

I would suggest that the business model pursued by the NYMR over the last three years was much changed from the old business model and has, without doubt, failed. That is why the railway is in the mess it is in. That failure must lie at the feet of those who have been running it and it is this that needs to change.

 

Hopefully any HRA initiative would only have Yorkshire involvement from the recently successful and solvent lines in the Leeds ,Keighley and Skipton areas …
I can’t think of any successful initiatives anyone with a Pickering involvement could promote .

 

I think you are rather casually transforming certain statements of opinion there and presenting them as fact. For example with dining trains - certainly they are more expensive than a regular fare, but that is because you get more - food. AIUI on the Bluebell, for internal accounting reasons, our Golden Arrow Pullman has the total price split into a travel component, and a catering component; and the travel part is simply our normal first class day rover fare. There is no supplement for the fact that you are travelling in a sumptuous 1920s Pullman. For regular traffic, we have first and third class fares, but they are simply based on what is painted on the door - to which end our LSWR brake 3rd is a considerably more opulent vehicle than a Mark 1 First Open, but the Mark 1 has the higher fare ...

My point about reminding you of your own words in the charity objects was to make the point that providing a heritage experience is not a matter of some value add experience: it is absolutely core to what your charity is about. If I visit a heritage attraction and get told I have to pay a supplement to experience the heritage - it isn't a heritage attraction.

Which comes on to a point about the actual cost of operating carriages. Your point about the Gresley's seems to be that they are expensive to maintain - but that needs to be seen in marginal terms, i.e. how much more expensive than an equivalent set of Mark 1s? (Particularly because in effect the LNERCA provides a subsidy, just as many "hired in" locos are in effect subsidised by their owning groups such that the daily hire fee doesn't reflect the true operational cost).

You've written elsewhere that the sticking point on the Teak set is the cost of re-tyring one vehicle. But if you are sidelining an entire set for the cost of one set of tyres, are you not just adding additional wear and tear to the remaining carriages? What happens when one of your Mark 1s needs new tyres - will you just set it aside?

So the dreadful question: is the result of several years of six figure losses that the railway has reached a point where it has no money to invest in maintenance, unless the need is so urgent that failure to invest would almost immediately stop the railway operating? So you are at the point where you will fix a bridge because if you don't the line will close, but you won't fix a carriage because you haven't - yet - run out of them?

Tom

 

With respect Tom the way the Bluebell choose to do is interesting but not necessarily a prescription that other heritage railways must follow.
Clearly many heritage railways charge extra for what might be deemed additional heritage experiences e.g. where higher fares are charged during a Gala.
The bottom line is that the decision whether to spend money on the teak carriages is a case of prioritising use of available funds. Of course spending on essential infrastructure will take precedence over spending on third party property which, unless it commands a premium, offers no financial benefit over the normal heritage service offering.

 

I do not recall the SVR charging different rates depending on which rake of coaches one travels on.

 

I’d suggest the normal arrangement is that a railway either accepts responsibility for overhaul of third party locos and rolling stock or that it pays hire fees to the owner but not both!

 

Quite apart from anything else you create an operational rod for your own back. (“Sorry, we had to withdraw the Gresley’s at short notice due to a wheel flat, but now we have scores of disgruntled premium passengers”).

On a similar note: when I visit Amberley, they offer a bus service round the site. Mid week it is often a 1960s or 1970s thing, but at weekends they get out the really nice pre-war stuff. But the price is the same regardless.

Tom

 

I’ll ignore the churlish tone of the first paragraph and focus on the second.

Prioritisation is obviously necessary, and it is not disputed that some categories of expenditure are more essential than others. However, the classification of costs against revenues raises very interesting questions that, were the Charity Commission more active, might merit enquiry.

In particular, what I note are the repeated assertions that added value (= higher priced) attractions are the way forward, with no reference to how additional costs can be covered by additional income. Given the very valid maths provided in the past by @Jamessquared, and the reputation of NYMR for using then discarding vehicles, I think the question of relative cost deserves more consideration than you seem willing to concede.

 

With respect John, the Bluebell is making money.
The NYMR? Not so much

 

Long term readers of this thread will appreciate that I am a confirmed long-term critic of Lineisclear and his support of the management policy of the NYMR - which, in truth, he is largely responsible for. I am therefore pleased to see that others are now drawing attention to the defects, and downright flaws in those policies..

I make no attempt to hide my view that the NYMR's espousal of Whitby being the main focus of its services; I accept that it would now be hard to discontinue them (although there may be hope if service levels to Middlesboro continue to prosper and grow - perhaps the shortage of paths will lead to the NYMR being squeezed out) but what seems to me to be abysmal management is make little or no attempt to develop the Pickering-Grosmont services that fill the middle of the day. It also seems pretty abysmal management to me to claim Mk 1 coaches as acceptable heritage stock.

I am accused of "wanting things to go back to the way they once were". In some respects I do - I'd like to go back to the days when the NYMR was making an annual surplus, for example, and there was a slowly increasing number of locos, carriages and wagons being restored and returned to service, and the management were keen to see them available, and had plans to use them. Sadly, that's not the case now, and one is left with the impression that the management would far rather see them leave the railway altogether - and, sadly, I see that becoming more likely under the present setup.

However, I want to stress that I'm not a luddite - I want to see the NYMR develop and become the heritage railway I have always hoped it would strengthen into, and become a showcase of North Eastern railways, rather than just a generic steam railway. Am I alone in that, or does everyone else disagree and is happy for every railway to use more or less them same locos, BR carriages in BR liveries, together with uniform goods trains of BR wagons? What can I see at the NYMR, 280 miles from where I live, that for most of the time that I can't see at the MHR 30 miles away? Weren't most heritage railways, particularly the earlier ones, (and the NYMR came about quite early on) established to capture their particular local flavour? And isn't that local flavour one of their main attractions? So how well is the NYMR portraying and selling its charms nowadays? Not very well imho, which is why seemingly a lot of its passengers just use it to hurry through to Whitby. I think one has to conclude from that the NYMR is not doing particularly well in fulfilling its charitable obligations, which ought to be sad and disappointing to the person who wrote them!

My conclusion, for what it is worth, is that the current philosophy isn't working whereas the previous one did and attracted far more visitors so what the NYMR should be doing is trying to get back to being a more heritage focused railway and improving its own attractiveness as a destination, rather than rely on Whitby to provide it. As I have outlined, there's plenty of scope to do so and a lot of it could be developed with little more than information signage and co-operations and partnerships with other local groups, residents and institutions - it just needs a plan and someone to deliver it!

All very true, but a slight exaggeration about the amount of money being made by the NYMR in recent years, at least, where the true answer is (as Douglas Adams might have put it) "none whatsoever!"

 

That's an interesting post, and I really identify with the "opportunity to slow down".

Isn't that selling an "experience" though, albeit not packaged and marketed directly as such?

I think that is the beauty of a visit to a heritage railway is that the experience can be different for many groups of people, and the management and marketing people need to dial into that.

We have visited heritage railways in a number of functions;
- Happen to be passing through and spot a sign
- Couples dining
- Family Day out
- Bad weather fall back plan
- Enthusiast visit with enthusiast friends
- Volunteer

Somehow the marketing has to appeal to all of the above (and more) and that's not an easy task.

The NYMR does feel like it's very Whitby centric now, certainly on our last few visits more so.

I do wonder what level of consumer research has been done to understand what visitors actually want- would a heritage DMU satisfy the needs of Whitby travellers for example.

Would changing trains at Grosmont allowing a set to shuttle that section be viable operationally?

I'm certainly not averse to railways becoming hosts to "non railway" events, anything that increases footfall and expose more people to the railway *has* to be positive if managed correctly.

Chris

 

Is this assertion based on preliminary 2024 results of the Bluebell? The PLC made a loss in 2023 (the last filed accounts) of over £300k (although I think that was probably a creditable performance in the circumstances). It is difficult to analyse heritage railways in terms of conventional profitabliity and in the case of the Bluebell, theTrust and Society provide some cash support and it is possible the overall cash inflow of the "group" was positive.