Severn Autumn Steam September 21-23

Good news as far as I'm concerned - never seem 3650 in steam.

 

I have slightly mixed feelings on this. At £22.50 for a Day Rover which you can use from the small hours till late at night if you want I think the gala is excellent value for money and if anything is underpriced. Therefore I don't mind paying an additional £5 for a WTT if it helps the railway funds. However I think that in most cases they are charging £5 for something that we don't really want. Speaking for myself I all want is a basic timetable with the loco allocations. I'm not really interested in individual loco/set diagrams and certainly not in crew rosters so all but the first few (almost illegible) pages are not of interest.

It would be far better iIMHO to hand out a basic timetable/roster free with every ticket and if necessary put the fares up a little to compensate for lost revenue.

I do agree though that if the railway do decide to charge for something it is not right for people to try to get copies free of charge!

 

Agree with the above really. I did buy the WTT, but would have been much happier with just the public timetable plus loco allocations at a reduced price... Even if this were just added to the PDF on the website - therefore with costs of next to nothing - it would do the job. Surely selling this at maybe £2 - or ideally adding a quid or two to the cost of the rover and handing the roster out free (it just feels better that way as a punter!) - would work out better for the line than selling a full paper copy of the WTT for £5? This would have the added advantage of saving me (and no doubt a few others) from having to type the whole thing up into a spreadsheet each year to make it i) Legible and ii) Portable!

 

With the SVR there is always a degree of "we've always done it this way, why should we do anything different?". The sale of the full WTT, professionally printed and bound (and therefore not cheap to produce) has happened for as long as I've been going to SVR steam galas (that's over 20 years now, before the days of websites and internet forums). I'd always assumed that the full WTT was used by the people who ran the gala, and by running off a few more copies and selling them they could at least partially recoup the costs. However:

If olly5764 doesn't get a full WTT as a fireman working over the weekend, then who is the audience for the document as it currently stands? If the answer is the punters who buy it, then I would agree that it isn't what the vast majority actually want. A cut down version containing the full timetable with loco and carriage set rosters could be produced at a lot lower cost and therefore be sellable for a couple of pounds. Alternatively, put the cost of the tickets up to cover it and make it available for free (I agree with Robert Heath No.6 that this feels better as a punter).

Where I do have an issue is in the different treatment of enthusiasts at different galas. No-one would dare propose that the diesel gala loco rosters only be available by buying a WTT for £5....

 

Pete,
it was more the " and action as appropriate taken" approach that I thought was a bit OTT

But I hear your point of view.

 

Any recommendations on where best to Park for 3 days taking in to account pay & display and the likelihood of being on the train during the night/after midnight.

 

If you get there early enough, I'd go for Bewdley, always my preference on normal days but it will get full quickly.

 

I asked the same question last year but didn't get an answer. Whilst you can get a multi day ticket to travel, car park tickets are only available for one day, on the day (as far as I know).

I would hope that anyone checking the car park isn't going to be as strict as they could be. There must be official guidelines for this, but I don't know what they are.

 

Its called knowing your markets?.... Maybe they know that kettle fans like to buy a WTT whilst the oil burners dont...

 

I'd rather spend half an hour at Kiddy at that time of night than Bewdley. Is anything open at Bewdley that late? At least at Kiddy you can go to the railway museum and get a cuppa and a bite to eat. There's three arrivals at Kiddy (22.49, 23.48 and 00.41) before the next departure at 00.50. That does seem a bit odd to me.

 

Perhaps more accurately put as "Kettle fans won't boycott the gala if forced to buy a WTT to find out loco rosters, whilst oil burners will"? Or they know when they can get away with charging extra and when they can't.

 

An unfortunate choice of words but I think that it sums up the situation.

Some people get fed up (or maybe stronger words) when it appears, to them, that they are being "forced" to buy a WTT to find out the loco rosters.

 

Thanks for replying, anyone know the guidelines on overnight parking.

Also is the top field at Bridgnorth still parking and is this pay and display and are there time restraints here.

 

I bought a WTT last week and although there's a lot of info' in it that is of no interest to me personally, it has taken me about 10 minutes max' to map the loco's across from it onto the public timetable. The SVR put on a good show at these galas and I think £5.00 is a small price to pay for the info' you get, with the money going back into the railway after all.

 

Well, my wick is trimmed, my shoes are polished and my lever cloth freshly pressed, it's gala time! Oh the excitement!

I hope that all of you on here who I know, know on here and have yet to know have a fantastic time.

 

Cheers guard_jamie. It will be my first time to the SVR let alone one of their galas and I'm looking forward to it.

I'll be there on the Saturday with my father and son. Can't say what trains I'll be on but I'll be the one with the South West Trains Rucksack if anyone want to say hi!

Now for the shameless plug!

I'll have on my person several high quality West of England Line Enamel Badges if anyone is interested. Details are as per the attached and more information about what they have been produced for can be found at: Salisbury ASC

Thanks and role on the weekend!

 

Just a note of caution for any first-time visitors to the SVR Gala, if you are travelling by car please do appreciate that the car parking fills up quickly and early..very early, at all locations! If at all possible arriving at Kidderminster on the big railway is the best bet!

 

Train is the best option for those of us who can't drive yet either..
apparently, my train will be in at about 9:30, then race to Bewdley and get the freight, hopefully...

 

Today was reasonably busy for a Friday, shame that the weather was quite wet. Hope everyone is enjoying it so far.

 

I'd planned to be there but the weather forecast (and right for once) was so bad I went into work instead.