Steam engines available for traffic in 2014

I suggest we could push the time line beyond ten years. 82xxxs were designed by Riddles for a working life of around 40 years. Given that this is a New Build, the first HG should be fairly inexpensive. If we can talk in terms of 20 working years, then the suggestion and potential financial return is not so far fetched.

The boys and girls organising, paying and constructing 82045 would probably disagree !

 

Neither do I but Byzantium itself would have been proud!

Paul H.

 

I think that if you could have a new loco for £50K/year some of the TOC' would be looking at bringing back steam! Perhaps you are out by a factor of ten? Or talking about narrow gauge....

 

£5milion for a loco that has all the drawings and patterns already to hand? Did you read the thread?

 

I think your calculation of being able to build an 82XXX for 500K is flawed, even if all the patterns are available. If it is taking a team of volunteers years to build one I can't see them building a batch of (say) half a dozen at a commercially viable rate. You would then be looking at paid labour to build the things and I could see the cost being nearer £2M per copy.

 

Two observations about Gios's post.
First, there are more apprentices being trained as paid employees by heritage railways than has ever been the case. There are possibly fewer volunteers acquiring a high skill set for a variety of reasons, one being that the number of paid staff is generally higher.

Second, our railways are not "normal" businesses. To survive they must be run well, but the meaning of "well" is very different in our world. In my professional life I advise companies big and small on strategy, and after 15 years of working for a number of multi-nationals and very small companies (including starting one from scratch) I have a reasonable idea of what business looks like. Only once have I come across a business that felt like a heritage railway, and that was a German family owned business. There as in our organisations, people worked there because they believed in an ideal, and the owners weren't too concerned about ROI and other measures that mean a lot to most shareholder companies. What they cared about was that the business continued, and everyone got fed. As a business viewed through a normal business lens that German company was not efficient nor very successful (despite its turnover of around £3Bn). The profit wasn't even a business target. However, the company is over 160years old. Nobody gets made redundant, and everyone is paid a fare share either as a salary or (in the case of the family owners, a cut of the profits). They really care not that the rest of the business world may think them inefficient. Although I felt at the time they were not well run, with more experience I have come to realise they were simply differently run. It is the same with our railways. There are techniques from the "real" business world that are useful to apply, and concepts (such as customer segmentation, market research, etc) that ought to be used, but the underlying culture of the business is about survival not about profit.

I am not pretending all is rosy in the garden, because it isn't. What I am saying though is don't make the mistake of thinking that because the heritage railway movement doesn't demonstrate achievement that can easily be measured in the way you would measure an ordinary shareholder business (revenue growth, profitability, ROI, net cashflow, etc etc etc) that this NECESSARILY means that that railway or this railway is in trouble. These can be indicators, but they may not be.

An illustration. When the G&WR suffered the second landslip any normal examination of the situation would probably have concluded that with no insurance cover, and no prospect of running trains for at least a year, and no reserves thanks to the first slip, the business was finished and the best thing to do was wind it up. However, what the G&WR was able to do was raise finance from a market that is entirely unavailable to most organisations, where the payback is the satisfaction of having contributed.

Aha you say, but that tree is fully mature. Possibly, and the ability to keep harvesting fruit from the tree of enthusiast giving will need careful watching, but the people who put their hands in their pockets to rescue the Bluebell and the Talyllyn are largely dead yet the pot continued to grow. As I have said before the contribution of the 1950s trainspotter generation is over estimated. I suspect that a better guide to the future ability to keep the hobby going is GDP growth and population growth. In both of those the long term outlook in the UK is currently better than in most European countries.

 

That's true, and I think there have definitely been occasions in the past when people have set out on loco overhauls high on enthusiasm and low on sound planning! Thankfully, I think those days are largely behind us, not only on the Bluebell, but on most other railways too. Certainly in our case, I think the one loco we have left that has been dismantled and then restoration had stopped is No. 27, and a group is now actively fundraising and working on her eventual restoration. The bigger problem is lack of undercover space - not just storage, but for restoration activity. Even now, too much restoration work (especially in the early stages of dismantling, cleaning, assessing etc) takes place outside, with the obvious inefficiencies both of being weather-dependent, and having a requirement to spend part of each day fetching tools and supplies, and then putting them away again at the end of the day.

Tom

 

In your original context, absolutely. As a customer I have found both to be well organised businesses offering a good day out. However they are not necessarily the perfect role model for other heritage railways. One actively suggests travelling out by train and returning by a different form of transport, the other recommends a short ride each way with a considerable time spent away from the railway in between. Neither promotes a "steam day rover" as the best deal!

Trying to keep on topic as you say, it is interesting to read the thread S160 6046 to NVR in terms of what has already been discussed here. Ownership of locos separate from the railways where they are based. Locos being moved from railway to railway. A short term loan to cover for a longer term loan. Owners (?) seeking to make sure their locos earn their keep. Consideration of how small you can keep your fleet without upsetting your customers. Yet out of it comes a deal that seems to suit all the interested parties. Efficient use of an inefficient system?

 

Actually, that situation is unlikely, at least in an ideal world. Engines deteriorate mechanically as well as have boiler tickets that run out. So in an ideal world, you would match annual mileage such that after ten years, the loco needs a heavy general on mechanical grounds in any case. That probably means doing 5-6k miles per year for ten years for a pre-grouping loco; probably 7-8k per year for a more modern grouping-era loco, maybe as much as 10k per year for a BR standard. Obviously, it depends on the difficulty of line, your loadings etc, but those would be ballpark figures. In other words, we could run our H class for 12,000 miles per year, but she'd break mechanically well before her boiler ticket was up. Or we could restore Camelot and then take her out only on high days and holidays, and then wonder why at the end of ten years, she had to have a boiler lift while mechanically she was hardly run-in!

In practical terms, you try to balance annual mileage to ensure everything wears out at more or less the same point, but always accepting that that policy might, for example, see a major mechanical failure on a loco after, say, 8 years which isn't worth fixing given the short life left on the boiler ticket and on the rest of the loco mechanically. Which is why predicting availability isn't quite an exact science when you only have small numbers of locos - the mainline companies of course had statistically big samples and a paid workforce of known productivity and carefully worked out schedules for overhauls and could predict availability for the fleet quite accurately, even if they couldn't predict for any individual loco when a sudden failure might occur. If you only have five or ten locos available, of many different classes, you don't even have that statistical surety, which probably means you have to plan on a lower availability figure than the 85% that JimC gave for the GWR.

On the Bluebell at least, the one loco we have where the boiler is out of action but mechanically the loco is more or less "as new" is 34059, and that was very much a special case in a boiler failure that was unexpectedly early in the life of the loco. I believe the mileage since restoration is around 13,000 against probably 75k - 100k that you might expect between heavy overhauls for a rebuilt Bulleid.

Tom

 

Clan Line has always been a role model of uber-professionalism, which is why it is unassailable in the VSOE Happy Place - with a demanding but rewarding customer in it for the long haul and an engine that just gets on with what's asked of it. Neither side "surprises" the other.

 

Thank you 21B for a coherent and well thought out response. It makes the point that I attempted to make in an earlier post extremely well. That for every question there are well considered responses, but an absolute or consensus answer always evades us. I hope you do not mind the presentation of 'slices' of your thesis, but they serve to make the points.

I am not sure that major Heritage railways can operate under your 'survival' model simply because of their scale, although a few smaller outfits probably can. I think we have moved on from the days of 'playing trains and having jolly good fun'. Whether we like it or not the major players are in a multi million pound business. When you have revenue at this level you need to operate as a business, especially when a significant proportion of this revenue is cash - otherwise some light handed bugger will help themselves ! It has already happened.

I take your point that apprentices within the Heritage movement are at last increasing - although they are still relatively small in numbers. In addition you are correct in saying that paid staff numbers are increasing. One of my long term concerns relates to the large pool of skilled engineering volunteers, which is decreasing due to the demographic, and will not be replaced in similar numbers in future years. These volunteers came free at the point of use, and because of this were probably undervalued. Paid staff can never be employed in the numbers being lost. They don't exist in significant numbers, and if they did they could not be afforded. You may consider that we are 'not a normal businesses', but in certain respects we are exactly that. Paid staff affect the bottom line, on some lines significantly reducing the bottom line.

Another major concern going forward is the huge scale of financial investment that is going to be required on every aspect of operations. It is worth bearing in mind that many branch lines were not constructed to the engineering standards of the main lines, for several reasons. The wing and a prayer attitude may not be robust enough as costs continue to escalate. It has been a commendable aspect of the movement that supporters have dug deep into their pockets when one line or another has found itself in difficulties, normally through either an act of nature or the previously mentioned engineering shortcomings. We have been somewhat fortuitous that these events have not all occurred at one point in time. The very nature of branch lines means that with time, more major issues will become apparent - I am aware of three Heritage lines at this point in time with significant landslip problems.

I would urge caution concerning your final paragraph about GDP and population growth. Without being too political, I would point out that although both these factors may have proven useful indicators in the past, that may not be the case today. GDP is being propelled in the main by house price inflation, which takes money out of peoples pockets via larger mortgages, and population increase are the result of immigration, which may not be reflected in increasing passenger numbers.

From the evident failure to agree on a consensus, of what is required in any one area going forward, the only conclusion is that as one poster on here has implied - 'nobody knows anything'. It is a truth that the more you think you know, the more you realize you are only scratching the surface. I well remember thinking when younger, that if I could remember the Periodic table, then the world of chemistry was my oyster. How deflated was I when high energy physics appeared in the curriculum. Because of all that has been bequeathed to us, we are duty bound to consider the future. Whatever or whoever is correct in their views, prudent forward planning and a realization that the world is changing is going to be essential if the movement is not to be caught out by the oxymoron of stealthy increases in diminishing assets.

 

I don't mind at all. It all adds to the debate. You slightly misinterpret me though. I didn't use the word survival to suggest an organisation that was bumbling from one crisis to another. I was pointing out that a "normal" business operates to enrich its shareholders (at least that is the accepted reason for the most part in the UK). Heritage Railway organisations exist in order to preserve themselves and to continue to exist. The underpinning cultural bedrock is different, and that is what I mean by them not being normal businesses. Furthermore they are not normal businesses in the sense that they have several funding streams (lottery and donations for example) that are not available to "normal" commercial entities. These help to offset some of the disadvantages and economic challenges faced by heritage railways.

I take exception to the implication that I was suggesting that Heritage Railways do not require good governance practices and a close watch on the money in all forms. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you want to call that operating in a business like manner I wont argue. The fact is that the major railways all have staff and systems in place to control the money very well. In my experience their managers know more intimately what is happening to every penny than most senior staff in commercial businesses. The rate of fraud is probably lower than in comparable "normal" businesses, though I don't have data to verify that.

The pool of skilled volunteer engineers is indeed a concern, and I believe you are also correct that we couldn't replace them all with paid staff. That particular issue will have to be addressed in a number of ways, from ensuring we are as attractive as possible to the widest range of such volunteers that may be available, training as many apprentices as we can find funding for, making our "product" as attractive as possible, and containing our costs in all areas as best we can.

You are wrong if you believe that the Directors and Trustees of Heritage Railways aren't at least as worried about the future as you. It is a popular view on this forum that the major railways are led by a bunch of donkeys, but it mostly isn't borne out by the facts.

Your point about investment is not entirely unfair, but again these are not "normal" businesses. They continue to survive because there is a huge section of the population that WANT them to survive, and so long as that is the case, survive they will. Also most of them were engineered to an incredibly high standard (far too high actually). Yes there will be challenges, but there always have been, they're just different now.

You say consensus eludes us, and effectively criticise the fact that there are coherent responses. Would you prefer that no one else had ever given any thought to these issues? What precisely would be the benefit of a consensus? And what are we trying to form a consensus about? So far as I can see you'd like me to agree that the Heritage Railway movement is heading into big trouble with its eyes shut. What I am saying is that major storms may well lay ahead, I cannot predict the future, and I agree that we must continually strive to do better, and get more for less. I do not agree however, that these railways are sleep walking into these challenges. While ever there is the ability to give a coherent answer to a reasonable challenge (of the type you and PH and GFG have posed) there is an opportunity to survive. Start worrying when you get your consensus. BTW...don't stop asking the questions, that's fine and it makes me think.

In the spirit of staying non-political I wont comment further on GDP and population growth.

 

I'm not sure where you get your view that the majority of this forum think most railways are lead by a bunch of donkeys.I for one think they have a near impossible task.

 

21B. First I must say that my comments concerning financial governance were to make the point that the movement in general has morphed into a business rather than just a hobby. It was not intended to imply impropriety at any level. I made and make no comment about management leadership or ability.

The type of consensus to which I was referring, maybe I should have been a little clearer, is that which would encourage basic data to be compiled and agreed upon. Data which could give a reliable pointer to the future. The fact that very few people had any idea as to how many steam loco's were in active use, illustrates how lacking our knowledge base actually is. Of course I don't expect a consensus on topics like livery, locomotive type, stock preferences, the lady sitting on platform 2 or railway architecture.

As a very simple example, from the commendable efforts of posters on this thread we now consider there might be about 190, plus or minus ten, standard gauge locomotives in steam. In the perfect world this suggests that every year about 20 will be withdrawn for a ten year and/or an overhaul. For locomotives of the age range of the current fleet, it has been suggested that for classes three to five, the average cost of such an overhaul at todays prices is likely to be about 400K. We therefore have a rough idea of the annual cost to just stand still - 8 million. We can argue the sums, but we will at least have a reliable guide to the maximum/minimum cost requirement to service the fleet.

In headshunts, shopping centres, museums and sheds up and down the country there are a much larger number of locomotives, again from this thread 900 plus, in varying stages of repair (or disrepair). These are owned by individuals, trusts, groups or companies. In many cases they have been used until their 10 year is due or they fail for some other reason. The future of many is unclear, as the owners and groups may have changed, circumstances may have changed and companies and groups in many cases made little if any contingency for their eventual overhaul. It is notable that many of todays more vibrant loco groups have a structured plan, with a programme of overhaul points together with financial planning to ensure objectives are met. Once the enormity of what lies hidden away from the public gaze becomes apparent, simplicity rather than complicated modelling will be required to convey the reality.

I 'walk the line', 10 miles every week. I observe everything. There is a frightening and never ending demand for expenditure to maintain what we already have, from mile posts and fishplates to bridges and tunnels. All this before even considering the high levels of borrowing commitments being sustained by the movement. In order to have a realistic idea of the levels of investment required going forward, I would argue that we do indeed need consensus. Consensus over numbers, lots of them. We can discuss personal views and preferences once fundamental problems have been addressed.

On a brighter note. It has become increasingly apparent that several railways are now well aware of the backlog of work that has accumulated, and are making serious efforts to address past neglect. Whether they are truly fully aware of the scale of this legacy only time will tell.

 

A figure of c.£400,000 is being bandied about for the average cost of a loco - class 3 to 5 - overhaul. Can I ask how this is being arrived at? There are so many variables - amount of work needed and amount of volunteer labour are two that will vary greatly from one loco to another. So often it's labour costs that drive the price up and the more volunteers you have, the cheaper the overhaul becomes. I can only quote 34081 as an example but even after paying for a contract job on the boiler, such is the volunteer input we have enjoyed that we will turn her around for much less than the £400,000 being suggested in this thread. She's a Class 7 and not a mechanically simple one at that so I'm sure locos with similar high levels of volunteer input and simpler mechanics can also be overhauled for less than £400,000. I stand to be proved wrong of course.

 

The clue is in that word AVERAGE

 

I suspect some overhauls will cost £400k, but that's not necessarily an average. As an example, from the estimates for the boiler work noted in the "KUTP" campaign I wouldn't be surprised if the current total overhaul of Stowe approaches that figure (could probably still be a bit less though). That however involves putting in an entirely new inner firebox that will likely be good for perhaps 30 years in traffic. So the next overhauls should be cheaper: averaged over, say, this and the next two overhauls, I'd have thought the inflation-adjusted figure would be well below £400k on average - perhaps half that figure. The same would go with new cylinders: it's possible that 592 will need new cylinders at her next overhaul. That's a big expense, but if done, those cylinders will almost certainly outlast my lifetime.

It's possible that if your railway is faced with an overhaul queue in which all possible candidates have done two or three tickets in preservation, then any restoration you look at is likely to involve hefty boiler work. But if you have a range, some of which are "tired" and some are maybe just coming to the end of their first post-Barry period, things look rather more rosy.

Tom