North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

That raises some interesting - and uncomfortable - questions about loadings.

 

Quite. It's a nice headline figure, but it's not only 8,000 people reusing their tickets rather than buying again that could wipe it out - how many were put off by the high initial fare and didn't bother travelling at all?

The high fares do put people off travelling. I'll admit, when we travelled last week, I used my TOC travel card when we did Grosmont to Pickering and back. My wife would've baulked at the £70 return fare, but by paying less initially we've then spent more as the day's gone on. Couple of coffees in the morning, snacks and a bottle of water on the train, a few bits in the shop at Pickering, drinks and ice creams before the journey back. All of a sudden our secondary spend is £60, and once added to the ticket price, the railway has received more than the normal full return fare for two people.

If we had simply wanted a train ride then we would probably have travelled to Goathland and back, but it's a short journey so there's no point in buying anything to eat or drink, just buy it when you get there. The railway would've only got £30 if we'd done that, rather than the nearly £80 they did get.

 

Will that many passengers even cover the cost of coal for the day, let alone hire fees? The madness continues!

 

That raises some interesting questions about economics, because the £50 of secondary spend had it's own costs, so was worth less to the railway in terms of usable cash than if it had been spent on fares (but still more than £30!).

The challenge, though, is whether NYMR can go for volume, or needs to focus on high profit niche sales. My own hunch is that it's caught in the middle, unable to be special enough for niche (not to mention will struggle to recruit and retain volunteers on that model) but can't see it's way to making sufficient income from volume sales. My fear is that it's doing the worst of both, deterring volume but unable to justify niche.

 

It does sort of show that to the non enthusiast, with the exception of FS a steam loco is just a steam loco.
Tornado was new and hence original as a new build what 17 years ago and hence had that uniqueness factor that the general public were aware of. I would suggest it is not like that now and most average visitors would be as happy with a Black 5 as Tornado as long as it is in steam.

 

It cannot be denied, I think, that it is doing the worst of all possibilities and that comes from confused, muddled thinking on the part of the management, and that I think comes from employing people who have no real interest in heritage railways or the people who volunteer there. We see a stream of "initiatives" that don't really get followed up - the advertising on 75029's tender is an example that will shortly fade into oblivion, just as little has been heard of the "living museum" concept since that was announced. Another example is the subscription YouTube channel hat has just be been suggested a few days ago - apparently (so we've been told) the Tank Museum makes £2M/yr from its channel so that's an idea to copy! Personally, I doubt the numbers, and I do remember that he NYMR had its YouTube channel (aka the Philip Benham promotional reel!) a while ago and it was eventually quietly dropped - not an inspiring augury! And that was free!

I don't doubt the commitment and hard work being put in by the SMT, but it is all being wasted without a clear understanding and plan of what needs to be done, and I just don't think that level of understanding is there. As has been said, headless chickens with no sense of the business just about sums it up.

 

Don't give them ideas.

 

As an aside - I was fireman on a large, green, pacific locomotive at the weekend. We arrived at our destination, I got off and one of the passengers came up to me and asked "is that a Black 5?"

Tom

 

Looked at another way, £400K means that only 147 people/day gift aided their 'donation'. Either the traffic figures are very low or a lot of people declined to gift aid. and make the previously quoted 70% conversion difficult to believe. No matter how you look at the figures, they don't show it to be a good outcome. We'll never know the true cost of getting that supposedly free £400K as we'll never know how many people travelled for free who would otherwise have revisited and paid the full fare in any case.

 

In fairness, the conversion rate needs to be measured excluding the likes of coach parties, where eligibility for Gift Aid will never apply. It is complexities like these that make interpreting these numbers so difficult - and would if working at the management accounts level.

 

The NYMR used to have GMs who stood on the platform as trains left and came in (admittedly easier in those days because their office was just off the platform) and they had a good idea idea of how many were travelling and what their impressions of the railway were - and, seemingly, it was a lot busier then. That's how they got a feel for the business and how it was going; it also gave them a chance to talk to platform staff and train crews and get their impressions too. The NYMR is not a commodity-selling business, it's all about experiences, but the NYMR 's SMT is trying to bag up experiences as a commodity to sell. and is having at best (if one is charitable) only very limited success, and is just not learning from their failures. I could forgive a CEO with little or no prior experience at the helm, but it isn't easy to forgive one who appears to have learned nothing. And the bunch who appointed her and continue to support her (cue another round of denial by Lineisclear!) are just as culpable - and having gone through an expensive headhunting process prior to making the appointment, I'm told they rejected the headhunter's preferred option?

 

Any headhunters recommendation is only as good as the spec they are given.

 

At £30/head I’d expect breakeven to be around 50 passengers per day, based on the probable marginal costs of running the loco.

 

That’s giving a marginal cost of £1500/day. In my experience Grosmont-Pickering return will use 1.5 tons of coal so two trips is going to eat 3 tons plus, let’s say, half a ton for light up and standby losses. Let’s take coal at £350/tons plus so that will give us £1225. With the best will in the world 60163 is going to cost more than £275. A pure stab in the air at a hire fee (because I don’t know) of £2K would work out at £3225. Allowing a wee bit for oil and water, let’s say £3300 in total. That’s a nice round 110 passengers/day to break even on marginal costs. However, as the railway is being opened especially for these trains there have got to be associated staff and other costs that otherwise wouldn’t be incurred.

 

Ah well in that case it seems there's no advantage. I didn't realise this .

Well that's what you'd have to check - if its only saving you a few quid and you're paying a booking fee AND as above you still have to go to the ticket office, then it's not.

 

That was something that certainly happened in Philip Benhams time. I’ve had many a brief conversation with him whilst the loco was being uncoupled. I was surprised when I realised that I never saw Chris Price on the platform. I can’t really comment on the present CEO as I’m rarely there these days.

 

I think if we stand back and look at the actions by the management team in the round, I think they are leaving no stone unturned in the quest for cash now. It suggests that the financial problem is acute and near term

I know. I pegged the hire fee much lower based on my recall of the fee, but that was a few years ago. We can say that at 88 passengers they are somewhere near breaking even, at best making a small surplus, at worst making a smallish loss.

 

The standard Pickering to Grosmont fare is £35 so travelling on Tornado tomorrow will save you £5.

 

I have no idea of hire fees, especially for one whose work plan went down the toilet, but a long time before Covid and the war and its effects, the figure I was given for a mainline loco (on the mainline) was way north of £2k a day. Maybe the NYMR have a "deal"