West Somerset Railway General Discussion

Yes, but like most notices, I ignored it

Tom

 

So you're the one.....

See how much trouble you have created!

 

If I'm reading my contours correctly it's uphill from the station to Stogumber village and pub, about a 50 Metre climb (part of it looks very steep).

So it would probably be a fairly quick trot back from the pub to get the train.

 

Not too bad, more steady uphill rather than steep.

 

A great idea I've been mulling over myself. Edmondson was part of the experience and sets the scene from the off. The fact that so many railways have gone away from it tho does suggest that its shortcomings in a modern, heritage world () are not imagined.

We have got used to the extra space and flexibility that paper tickets provide. There is a lot of 'stuff' now printed on the tickets and a large number of different ticket types. To convince the passenger services manager to go back to the small Edmondson size we would need to be able to print at least one whole side of the ticket. All tickets would need to come from a single ticket stock to make it easy for volunteer ticket office staff to pickup and remember.

The ticket stock could be hand fed through a mini printer. The difficulty will be designing and building a reliable feed and print mechanism and producing the driver software to integrate with the computer till. Will need a few railways to get together to make the development worthwhile. Auto feed from a magazine would be better but more difficult to engineer.

Anyone out there with these skill sets?

 

Comment from the TTI on the QB last spring: "Oh, you've got a real ticket" - Edmondson, of course, what else.

How do you punch a hole in an iPhone anyway?

 

@Mogul Quite a few thoughts occur concerning your post, but if anyone else is interested and there's mileage in the notion, we'd best take it off this 'ere WSR Ops thread PDQ. If it's just the two of us, we'll know soon enough!

 

With great pleasure id imagine

 

Seriously, I'd be very interested to see the results of including weather on ticket reports.
I suspect that recording 'the weather' is too subjective - a Blustery Day, a Beach Day, misty, sunny but cool etc..
In my experience, the reasons folks choose one attraction over another are many & varied.
I rather doubt that you'd see any real correlation between weather & ticket sales, but I'd love to see if it's meaningful.
Seriously, has anyone tried it?

 

A combination of stilettos and drunken dancing? Not that I ever dance!

 

Maybe Robin can tell us about the stilettos?

 

You can easily collect retrospective weather data from the internet. Things like hours of sunshine, mm or rain, Max, min and average temperature, Max, min and average wind and direction are recorded for a number of weather stations across the UK going back years.
Monthly avaerages are here https://data.gov.uk/dataset/historic-monthly-meteorological-station-data
I did find daily figures a couple of years ago but cant remember where that was now. I had a go at looking for a correlation but the conclusion I came to was that as you also need to factor in things like day of the week, where easter and half term holidays fall other events on and off the railway before an obvious link would become apparent.

Probably a good project for a statistician (or student) to come up with an algorithm to compare this with ticket sales data.

 

It would certainly keep a statistician occupied for quite some time!

Personally I've never noticed much of a correlation between weather and numbers other than at special events, where wet weather does tend to lower numbers. On normal days though, other factors such as day of the week, time of year and school holidays seem to make much more of a predictable difference than the weather. All anecdotal of course though, and that's only for my railway GWSR as well, where numbers possibly fluctuate less over the course of the year than seaside/summer holiday destination railways.

I know Bodmin and Wenford for example have a boon on rainy days in the summer holidays with train lengths increased by 50% and still standing room only - everyone's gone on holiday to the beach, the weather's horrible so let's go in the train instead. I'd be interested to know how the weather affects them outside of holiday season and whether there's any difference.

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Also probably dependent on your particular split between pre-booked and turn-up-and-go traffic, as presumably pre-booked would be less susceptible to the vagaries of the weather.

Tom

 

Yes, I noticed the notice, but didn't think it was a notice worth noticing.

 

As you say it's going to vary a lot from railway to railway. Swanage being a beach destination gets a boost in beach goers taking Norden to Swanage Day returns when sun is forecast. If the weather turns cold or windy in the afternoon there is a jump in round trips purchased from the Swanage end as people with kids to entertain are pushed off the beach. A rainy day will generate steady business. I'm sure there is a link that is individual for each railway. Useful to understand your numbers but what one does with the information however I'm not sure. I doubt Ops will want to add / remove coached based on weather forecast so I suspect the game is not worth the candle.

 

I think they might - as I said the BWR already do occasionally, I'm sure the guard told me they increase their main rake from 4 to 6 the day it chucked it down and I visited.

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But that’s a whole different can of worms about matching loco to train weight - potentially the loco diagrammed has to be capable of pulling six even if the most of the week it is only pulling four...

Tom

 

Oh no... Please no one "rub the lamp" as he puts it! :O

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Part of my point was that they don't need a statistician to tell them when that's necessary. Good old fashioned experience and common sense.