North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

I think the reference was to the Station Hotel. However, I tend to agree with the "rabbit hole" comment - the needs of working volunteers and hotel guests are distinct, and trying to serve both may mean that neither is done well. Not to mention that hotel margins are not so fat as to allow significant numbers of "free" room nights without creating conflict between running the business for profit, and running it for volunteers' benefit.

 

Er, this twist in the conversation is about the Station Hotel at Pickering!

 

Apologies I'd missed Steve's post including the Pickering Station Hotel. Nonetheless the hotel game is a very demanding low margin operating space. Whilst I agree a business could make a good go at creating a railway themed hotel experience, I don't agree that its the right path for the NYMR to take. It would require a lot of investment of both time and money which I don't think should be the right priority to go for with the current state of other areas.

 

As it stands,the Station Hotel is moving from being an asset into a liability as no maintenance is being done on it.

 

As I understand, the Station Hotel was bought by a Benefactor, and I understand that at present the Trust are undertaking an accommodation review / strategy (0ffices, volunteer accommodation, holiday accommodation). Makes perfect sense, with in IMHO:
Should mulberries (was a cafe before acquired now office accommodation) remain as offices, become a cafe again
Should existing Park Street offices revert to volunteer accommodation or remain as offices
Should Station Hotel become offices and / or volunteer accommodation or revert to pub / hotel (or indeed sold)
Should Grosmont Station House remain as visitor accommodation or become offices
With Snape remaining as volunteer / youth group accommodation as per Grant requirements (as Lineisclear inferred earlier “no Snape then no carriage accommodation and bridge renewal period)
Plus
What about exiting Goathland Station Masters House and carriage accommodation (the latter a mix of holiday and volunteer accommodation)? Ps I’ve heard the volunteer coach accommodation is not the best being a tad cold in winter)
What about the existing Grosmont volunteer accommodation
What about Levisham cottage volunteer accommodation and carriage holiday accommodation?
Maybe add Pig Farm into the mix

Makes sense to determine a property strategy first before spending a bean on Station Hotel (or indeed else where) in case money after bad. But Station House it was acquired in the first instance by a Benefactor at the time when it came on the market as a once in a lifetime opportunity.

ps determining a Strategy is no mean task as it ought to examine future liabilities (maintenance etc) , intangible benefits (volunteer accommodation and focusing staff accommodation together rather than spread across multiple sites), income generated (as visitor accommodation) and long term aspirations.

 

Thanks for the very informative reply. It certainly answers a lot of questions and it makes good sense to review all of the options available. I'd also suggest that any buildings that end up potentially unwanted could be leased/rented so the railway keeps control of the longer term but the building is used with money coming in, though without high investment costs from the railway up front. And because I love my two pennies I'd also throw in that the railway has a good 'little' earner in the current holiday accommodation (approx £1500 per week for each coach/house) and they tend to be booked a good way in advance during the season. I've wondered before why they haven't converted more camping coaches which could potentially be done if the volunteers were given better/warmer space elsewhere. Self catering is a lot less effort than being a hotelier and has much better margins. They can also be essentially shut down out of season where a hotel still has a lot of costs that don't stop.
With regards to the station hotel, if done really well pubs and hotels can make good money. But to do it well takes a lot of effort and money (Clarkson has just showed us the extreme (and rushed) version). I'd suggest leasing the pub part to a good brewery to be honest. Try and get some of the benefit without having to fork out a small fortune.

 

Personally and thinking as a trustee, I’d have wanted a strategy in place to allow me to assess whether the gift was an asset or liability before accepting a donation like that. I agree that setting a strategy is no mean task (I’m involved in the process myself), but the exercise was mentioned on here by @Lineisclear some time ago, and it’s striking both that it remains incomplete, and that the framing given is about selecting between options rather than asking what is needed, and why. I then see Snape referenced as a fixed point, when it is the property that above all begs questions about how it serves the railway’s purposes, and my doubts flood in.

 

You’ve never worked in hospitality have you?

 

I'm curious as to what part of my reply lead to that comment.

 

I think if there were good money to be made running pubs and hotels, more people would be doing so! You mention £1500 per week for "each coach / house" - but for how many weeks per year? Perhaps 20 to 30 - that's £40k per year and only with a lot of capital investment up front and a lot of effort to keep them up to standard for each new set of guests.

Don't get me wrong - I've had holidays in nice cottages and similar in various parts of the country. But when you find that absolutely delightful rural cottage called "The Cow Shed", you know you aren't going to be staying in a cow shed, but rather an ex-cow shed that has had a significant investment to fit it with all mod cons: that I would suggest is probably investment money the railway simply doesn't have, judging by some of the other discussions on here. You read the discussions about the painful decisions being made between investing in - say - track, locos or carriages, and it is clear there isn't the capital required to get an entirely different business off the ground.

This is one area where I have some sympathy for the current railway management, and I can see strong parallels on my own railway in a couple of areas being discussed. One is the desire for a land / spatial strategy - something we don't appear to have, and which has resulted in attempts to squeeze a quart into a pint pot when it comes to where to position storage, museums, accommodation, archives, offices and so on. The other concerns non-railway buildings: we have a number of former railway cottages and over the years we have floated various ideas for them (volunteer accommodation, let as houses, let as holiday lets) but it has now come to the point that it looks likely a couple will simply be sold, because the capital investment can't be justified to try them as holiday lets.

Tom

 

It's worth pointing out that Jeremy Clarkson is a terrible example
1) he had a lot of money in the first place, how much of the start-up cost of the pub was covered before he started is a question (even if he "borrowed" it from himself, it won't be at market rates)
2) he is very famous. That's why people come to his pub.
3) part of the purpose of the pub is to keep himself famous, so he doesn't need to make a profit to make it worth his while.

 

To be fair I don't believe i suggested the railway ran the pub/hotel. You can make money at it, as many companies do, but they tend to be chains. The smaller drinks only pub has very few good examples left, though there are still some out there. I suggested leasing that out to someone else therefore getting some benefit from any rent rather than using railway money to invest in it.

With regards to the holiday accommodation I was thinking about the Goathland coaches. If they were made into more camping coaches (there is already one there) then you'd get some economy of scale from having more than one on the site for changeovers. But I agree if significant investment were needed its probably better placed elsewhere. At least with them it wouldn't be the same at starting from scratch as presumably plumbing, wiring and some sort of heating already exist. But if the costs were too high of course there are other priorities.

 

I am sure this review of property was mentioned a couple of years ago, hopefully a conclusion / plan is imminent.

 

When I posted earlier, I thought it was months rather than years ago that I'd seen it. If years, and property is lying idle pending the review, then that raises significant questions

 

The Bosville Arms in Rudston is a community-owned pub which serves absolutely outstanding food and appears to be doing very well. Surely, with the right management, you could make a pub immediately opposite the start (or end) point of one of the area's biggest attractions pay its way?

 

You could say the same about the railway itself - with the right management

Peter

 

Now compare to how many don't succeed...

 

It’s not just a question of could you make it work, but also do you have the skills and management capacity to do so. There is an opportunity cost. Time and effort (and capital) spent developing a new non-railway business is time and effort (and capital) not spent on the railway’s core business.

It might be viable, and in principle I’m a believer in the need for railways to diversify their revenue streams to provide some kind of protection from cyclical downturns in other parts of their market. But there is also limited capacity and running a pub is to my mind something that requires specialist knowledge if you want to do well.

Tom

 

How to Run a Successful Pub

https://ebay.us/m/Kb00NP

 

I see two other issues. The first is buried under @alexl102’s “with the right management” - where is that manager going to come from, and are the other factors that make for success in play?

The second is about charitable purposes. This diversification is not part of the charity’s core purposes, so the diversification needs to be justified in purely economic terms, for how it will support the rest of the charity. That means making a return on capital (not just operating profit) that is at least comparable to what it would get from the bank, and assumes that this capital is available for reuse in this way. A look at the L&B thread, and the accounts of the Old Station Inn, shows that even with the right manager and capital made available, returns can be very marginal.