North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Sold out, but the problem is you have 08.45 and 11.40 FS services, then the 12.35 diner - that's roughly 1000 people. About 40 spaces at the station, a few more than that at NYNP car park down the road. Maybe 100 spaces in total, nowhere near enough.

There are reports of people missing the 11.40 yesterday because they couldn't get parked anywhere. Dozens of parking tickets have been handed out. Yes, people could get the 09.10 from Pickering to Grosmont to travel on the 11.40, but the first train back south is 17.50 - over three and a half hour after the lunchtime FS service gets back!

There's not enough of a gap between the first and second services to allow the car parks to empty a little, and then there's the dining passengers as well to accommodate. Northern services aren't really an option except for the morning service. The railway have massively dropped the ball with this. If you've got a family of four who've paid £200 for a trip behind Flying Scotsman and couldn't travel because there was nowhere to park up legally due to lack of other transport options, I'd be absolutely fuming. It's great they've made a bucket load of cash out of it, but I can see a lot of anger being directed at the railway from the general public this week.

 

Comments on the official and unofficial facebook pages about yesterday and parking are not good …

 

From my admitted limited knowledge of Grosmont there is not anywhere you could plan to park a significant number of vehicles is there? You could hardly plan to hire a farmers field at this time of year when there is a good chance it may be a sea of mud. Where could you even set up a park and ride, Whitby?

 

Sounds like a fun day out......

 

This harks back to what I said a few weeks ago about the NYMR existing because of goodwill. Some of those passengers who had what should have been a magical day spoilt by this incompetence, will undoubtedly have been first time customers. There is now probably zero chance any of these people will become repeat travellers. So yes while the FS trains will have made money handsomely, they will have damaged the Railway's reputation and lost future income and quite probably future volunteers.

Sawdust.

 

Pickering! Ignore Whitby for the duration and run shuttle services to connect with FS services at Grosmont. But no, they've been greedy and tried to run FS services and Whitby services and the diner, and it's backfired spectacularly.

 

Is there that much unused parking space? I had excluded there as when we used to stay in Pickering there never appeared to be much in the way of parking. Do you want to upset the neighbours rather than the passengers?
Ideally what is needed is some unused industrial estate, where admittedly you would have to have security otherwise every scroat in the district will be attracted by the "easy pickings"

 

They are running trains this week between Pickering and Whitby so as to maintain a limited service between Pickering and Whitby against the original timetable (published back in the Spring), which showed normal scheduled services but which was due to end Sunday 2nd November. However, between then and 9th November (when the railway would otherwise have been closed) the NYMR is running a shuttle between Grosmont and Whitby.

 

I suppose there would never have been a “right answer”. If the FS trains had started from Pickering: I suspect:
- There would still have been a parking issue, this time at Pickering rather than Grosmont, particularly between the arrival and departure of the midday service
- FS would have to be kept overnight in any event at the Grosmont MPD. I recall the SNG services (at the start of the season) started from Pickering but had to travel LE from from Grosmont MPD and the start and end of the day, and
- I doubt there would have been no spare paths for a through Pickering - Whitby service. How does this affect the original Gift Aid requirement of running a service on all days of scheduled operation (ie being available to Annual Pass holders) except 5 days.

In other words, I cannot see a perfect solution, and Hindsight is a wonderful thing!

 

There's a lot more car parking capacity at Pickering, though, with the station car park, the separate Trout Farm car park, and some extra spaces not far away at Picering town centre. It's ironic they've made such a mess of this event when one of the reasons for cancelling the wartime event was concerns over overcrowding (presumably those concerns did not extend as far a car parking issues!). How to further ruin the railway's reputation within a matter in a matter of minutes!

 

All fair, but if there are even a very few who could not park because the promoter had offered something without adequate provision for them to access the service, then it is the promoter who will deservedly be roasted in the court of public opinion. Especially if the promoter has a track record of running events.

This is a serious case of the “six Ps” at work and, as a recently elected trustee, my suggestion is that you use your influence in private to make sure that this can never happen again.

 

It's not hindsight. Evening Star ran light engine from Grosmont to Pickering and back again to operate three round trips from Pickering over six days when the railway would otherwise have been closed in 1986.
What this indicates is an arrogance which actively ignores decades of operating experience. This is not a new issue, I can vividly remember a very long debate at trust board in the 90s about how to manage excess demand for parking at Grosmont for special events.
I have often compared the NYMR to a goldfish, which forgets all the lessons learned the previous season over the winter, it would seem to be more applicable than ever.
I served twelve years on trust board, and I can tell you blaming hindsight for things when as a business the NYMR has been operating for over 50 years is simply not acceptable.
The difference between them and now it's that then the board was entirely composed of people who were between them intimately involved in every aspect of the business, not as I witnessed a few years ago with trust directors needing a guided tour of facilities because they had scant knowledge of the railway.

Sawdust.

 

I read the timetable, last week, and wondered how on earth it would work. Why bother with railway shuttles that don't connect etc? It forces people to use cars. And not printing the trains in the correct time order etc.

And then crowd and parking problems, which could easily have been foreseen due to the amount of tickets sold in advance.

 

Can I add at some events in the past the high school in Pickering has hired their parking as an overflow. An although in the past the coal yard was similarly used and although that is now built on the former fishing lake site will more than offset that.

Sawdust.

 

Basic common sense would say that you start services in the town, not the village.

 

It's just as well the NYMR has not followed up on suggestions that it should open its own microbrewery in one of its unused properties in Pickering - if it had it might have been tempted to organise its own beer festival and conclusively proved, even to its strongest defendants (@Lineisclear, are you listening?) that it couldn't organise an event "that involved drinking" in a brewery!

 

At least one person on Facebook has reported they've received an email from the railway saying that if they got a parking fine at Grosmont, they'll be offered a refund for one ticket to help cover the cost of the fine. Dozens of £60s being thrown away - a good gesture, but one that could so easily have been avoided.

Regarding what @Sidmouth4me said about shuttles to Whitby over the next couple of weeks, where are people going to park? Concentrating all services at one end of the line, for no real reason. The timetable is so poor that it can't even be used as park and ride for Scotsman services, as none of the services connect. Do people in Whitby really want to go to Grosmont for 15 minutes? Or stay there for three hours? They don't even connect with lunchtime diners either.What really is the point in the services?

It seems a massive waste steaming a loco and FTRing a rake of stock for seven days of minimal operations. I can't see the income outweighing the expenditure for those 7 days of running. The MPD always runs out of time for winter maintenence, so pushing back the start of it on a couple of locos doesn't really make much sense. Though at least 92134 and 63395 shouldn't need any this year.

The more I look at it, the more it appears they've simply thought "we must run something extra", without considering any of the logistics of it. The railway has been chopping and changing the timetable all season, adding in extra services for the autocar for example. Most of the time of you went on the website, it only showed the timetable for the next couple of months anyway, so if it didn't run a token service to Whitby this week, how many would really have noticed?

 

I think your summation is almost right, but the thinking was probably more along the lines of "we desperately need a successful event to survive the winter". That being said it becomes enormously disappointing that all the advertising and special events teams, and the senior management above them, were not able to foresee the parking problems (hardly rocket science!) and take steps to address them. ~It all adds up to a deep-rooted suspicion on my behalf that they haven't got much of a clue about how to deal with anything much beyond hiring the loco and selling the tickets, and really need to be replaced by people who do.

 

The really sad part is that they do seem quite alive to the depth of the water in the bilges, and are desperately trying everything they can think of to bail them out . . . but the water keeps rising.

Noel

 

Huge crowds and good weather today.