North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

I'm amused that the readership here on NatPres is such that someone can use a term like "bimodal distribution" in a post, in the full confidence (and rightly so) that their readers will understand it! This place is definitely not the average social media site!

(Speaking of social media, as one of the people who created the Internet, when I look at social media these days I often feel like we made a serious mistake in so doing. Kind of like what Gutenberg would have thought, if, after inventing moveable type, it was primarily used to create bad comic books.)

 

I thought the website says
"Our Day Rover Tickets give you the freedom to explore our entire 24-mile line, between Pickering, Levisham, Goathland, Grosmont, and Whitby stations. Travel all day long with the option to hop on and off wherever you like."

So where is the minimal opportunity to "view all the heritage stuff"? And what is that beyond the sheds at Grosmont and the stations?

 

As a vendor, I agree. The question is what that does to your ability to sell tickets given the impact on the value proposition to prospective customers.

I am planning a trip to another railway in a few weeks, which I've not previously visited. It has, to judge by it's website, gone down the road of selling experiences rather than travel. That is its privilege. But the effect on those who want a "traditional" visit is to undermine that market, and actively deter. I don't know how it's working for that railway; to judge by the reply to my enquiry, understanding customers is not their strong point.

But the question for NYMR is how trying to sell different products will affect the existing market, and generate net additional revenue. I'm not convinced by what I'm seeing.

 

But you might be persuaded by the extensive market data and analysis of trends and opportunities in the hospitality sector which is available to heritage railways and can help guide their marketing plans. It's not necessarily a case of serving the existing market for timetabled services and adding different products but of moving more to special events and substituting sale of experiences which do not neccesarily involve end to end operation over the whole line.

 

The Sponsor a Seat seems to be an initiative that I have not seen before.
I also like this phrase "We’re starting off with the chance to sponsor seats in our beloved Mk1 carriages,"
Having said that £300 for one seat in a bay of 4 for one year is really just asking for a £300 donation really I felt, that just happens to come with a small brass plaque.
I know it is different but £250 gets you a brass plaque on a plank of Swanage Pier for 25 years, the purpose being the same preservation.

 

I might, and I have to respect those with much more detailed data than I have access to. But whether we are talking of additional products, or replacing existing products to replace the old, the imperative remains - that the new products generate net additional revenue.

My suspicion is that, in the transition to events and experiences, there will be a loss in the traditional "turn up and go" market that will be hard to make up - especially where holidaymakers are a core constituency, and make decisions at short notice. The poster-child for the experience/prebook model is the Ffestiniog; it is noticeable that it has much more flexibility to scale what it offers to match to demand than just about any standard gauge railway, particularly given the constraints of the Network Rail owned section.

A final point. The Coca Cola company are known for their excellent understanding of their markets, and had done huge amounts of market research before launching "new Coke". Yet it was still the most almighty flop, and had to be pulled. Analysis and insights are valuable, but may not be the whole of what is needed.

 

These days I look at things more simply than when I was younger. I have today been to the Bluebell for their anniversary gala. I had a good time, and it appeared that so did many other visitors. I am not going to visit the NYMR this year. I didn't enjoy it much last year; the timetable didn't work well for me and my wife. Disregarding the pages of comment by more knowledgeable commentators above, it just seems to me that the Bluebell makes the most of what it has, but the NYMR doesn't.

 

For the sake of clarity, were the Santa specials and Gresley trains operated in the recent past not special events and were the Gift aided passes available on these, or not? My understanding is the latter simply because they didn't operate over the full length of the line to Whitby.

 

I don't think it was anything to do with Whitby, but because they were sold as special events, for booked train only.

 

Some of us have doctorates...

 

You and me both (and in related subjects, I believe …)

Tom

 

Me too, although perhaps a bit further off piste, as a biochemist (though my degree was chemistry). I have always said that chemistry lies at the heart of everything!

 

Obviously physics is the fundamental discipline!

 

And that was my PhD -- though I have to admit that the specific subject of my research was of minimal relevance to the rest of my career, where I used my entirely informal knowledge of electronics and latterly worked largely as a wordsmith.

BTW why are we discussing our qualifications on the NYMR thread?

 

Well, with all of the brain power available here there should be no problem in coming up with a sure fire plan to fix the NYMR 's woes. I'll sit back and wait while I admire my GCE O Level certificate in woodwork that hangs above my desk!

 

Coming up with answers to the NYMR's problems is all very well, but persuading the management to try applying them is quite another. We'll have to wait and see, but I find the notion of focusing more on selling "experiences" filled with flaws. We are told that volunteer numbers are dwindling, but surely one thing that "experiences" need is people to run them? It is suggested that the old business model may becoming less popular but I'm not convinced that abandoning it is the answer - tweaking it to make it better value seems to me to be a more affordable approach and having less appearance of "lowest common denominator" thinking.

 

I suggest the issue is not that experiences need more people, but that they require more attention to providing the extra element that the customer has paid for to justify the "experience" tag. And as we've seen with lights events, the time over which an experience is effective may not be that long.

 

That's probably true in "experiences" probably do need updating more often. The NYMR is notoriously shy of investing or updating it products, it seems to me.. The "train of lights", for example, needed a lot more in terms of external displays/tableaux, which I don't think it ever got - and even where others have provided potential new resources for revenue generation - e.g. the LNERCA closing in on an increasing fleet of vintage carriages (the GN saloon, the NER dining saloon and the ECJS diner) it looks as though they bare unwanted at the NYMR and will end up elsewhere. On the NYMR "experiences" seemed to be focused on the "bland" using BR Mk 1 stock. In think there are still some harsh lessons to be learned, but will realisation come too late?

 

I imagine that a framework of a plan could be created by the Nat-Pres brains, however it would depend on reliable and accurate data on passenger numbers, costs, liabilities etc coming from the NYMR - things which appear to be state secrets despite claims that the figures are/should be/will be available.