Swanage Autumn Steam Gala - 12-14 October 2018

£5 was for the brake van rides. Very good value.

 

Ah well that's different - brake van rides are an "extra" that not everyone would want to do whereas I imagine everyone wants to take a trip up to River Frome. I agree £5 is very good value for a brake van ride.

 

As a premier life member i have free travel so cannot say whether there was a charge. I can say i did three trips to Frome Bridge and not once did i see a TTI asking for supplements. Agree that it was greedy if there was a charge.

 

There was no extra charge to go over the road. £5 extra for a brake van ride.

 

I too am a Premier Life Member but I took that out so long ago I would not dream of claiming free travel now. I am happy to pay whatever fare is charged as a means of continuing to support the railway when ever I get the chance to visit.

Peter

 

I took out a pension years ago, perhaps its best I don't claim for that either. I support the railway in other ways.....

 

Just a few of my images from the weekend. A cracking event, I felt it was even better than last years's Bulleid Gala, even if the weather was not so good.

 

It was also possible to buy an advance ticket online for the gala, £25 bought an adult one day rover, receipt / proof of purchase sent by e-mail (so no postage), exchange at the ticket office on the day for a printed ticket.
Multi day tickets were also available in advance. Timetable with loco allocations free to all (online) in advance.

I had a great day, rode behind 7 locos on Friday, my ticket contributed about £3.50 per loco... cracking day out!!

 

How come the diesel galas timetables work but the steam galas don't? I recall the Bulleid gala having similar late running issues.
Different organisers?
There is a danger for Swanage that their steam galas have/will have a poor reputation for time keeping and people will stay away.
Yes galas can for different reasons run late but they must be robust enough to either to be able to recover time and/or not just get later and later.
Its all well and good having an impressive line up but if the planning (not all the watering in one location) and the management on the day of the gala(chasing up crews, late running, keeping your eye on the ball etc) is not up to scratch then it doesn't paint a very good picture of the railway. Swanage you can do it...your diesel galas are one of the best run in the country but your steam galas are not.
Line up 10/10......performance 2/10 (reason for such a low score is that each day you ran severely late and it appears that you did nothing to mitigate).
End of school report.....must do better

 

Yes I am sure that everybody did their best each day and it was still great but it needs regulation. Not easy but somebody in charge who can think on their feet as it goes along.

 

As i said earlier, i was in the box at Corfe on Saturday lunchtime with the planner and the regulator. They agreed together with the shunters that to stop one train would have a domino effect on other services, plus stock and loco's would be out of place and miss their watering slots.
They pondered as to why the service was creeping explaining that all of their plans allowed for all speed limits adhered to, shunt's and movement's properly timed yet time was still lost.
A little later i witnessed the attachment of a loco onto the rear of the up service, all very slick. The shunter was desperately trying to get the loco crew on the front to create vacuum. They were busy talking to punters etc.
Brake test done guard gives right away, passengers then decide to jump on, leaving doors open.
Guard then cannot get attention of rear loco crew.
Frustrating was not the word, another two or three minutes lost.
As the old saying goes, without passengers we could run a bloody good service.

 

Surely though galas are exactly the sort of place where you should expect dilatory passengers; or at very least, longer than normal station times due to increased numbers. How many times, in the run up to a gala, do you see comments of the form "is it possible to cross from platform X to Y in less than two minutes?" or similar when perusal of the timetable has shown a super-quick change might be possible with a departing train leaving as quickly after an arrival as the token working allows - on a good day. The fact the possibility exists means some people will try to do it; and the fact that some will try means three minutes becomes six in a blink of an eye, and you are already on the back foot.

So the timetable has to be robust enough to cope with what are predictable situations. If it gradually slips through the day (rather than, say, being fine until all of a sudden it isn't after a specific operating incident such as a loco failure) then it wasn't properly robust in the first place.

When I was growing up, I remember our local bus company making the same excuse, saying they could only run to the timetable if they missed out most of the stops. Blaming the passengers didn't wash then, and it doesn't wash now.

Tom

 

Anyone with even a limited knowledge of the Swanage Railway could see from the timetable that all 3 days would end up over an hour late. This is what I expected so no problem for me as I would never use public transport to visit a heritage railway. But three consecutive trains from Swanage being caped on Friday but still running the freight was unacceptable. Also announcing the 1739 from Swanage (first train after the three caped ones) would not be returning from Norden to Swanage, although it should have done the 1810 from Norden was beyond belief.

 

Following the posts here do suggest the Swanage AS Gala is rather like the curates egg. What is probably as important, I believe, is the views, not recorded here, of those who attended but are not train enthusiasts but just those, often family people, looking for a enjoyable day out. Will they think twice before visiting a similar event here again? Those who have, or have had, young families know of the frustrations that occur when waiting around for something to occur or arrive. It seems a fair assessment that this event was all too ambitious the plus point will be if the railway takes note of the advice.

 

One of the amazing things about the Friday when I travelled (yes it was a school day I know) was the almost 100% obvious enthusiast profile of the passengers. (Must be all us OAP's!)

 

That decision was not made by those on the ground. The original plan was to only cape the shuttle, run all other Passenger services as booked with different locomotives (following 257 failure) albeit late, but to terminate the last train to Frome at Norden. 31806 was to then complete its final booked turn & run a "mop" up train to return those stranded - which would of had all sets in the right place for Saturday. The crew on the U built their fire up ready, the shunters got everything in position, and instructions issued to signallers. Only for the station announcement to sound train cancelled, & for those requiring an onward journey to please go to the booking office where taxis will be arranged accordingly. As one of the men on the ground I can only apologise for this, but I can assure things are being reviewed internally already and numerous notes have been made for the debrief once everyone is able to come together.

The line-up was one of the best Swanage has had for a steam gala for a long time. But the operations failed to live up to what was required. There was more than one reason for this, and as a member of team Swanage it was sad to see for as has been noted elsewhere - the diesel gala is one of the most robust and complex operations we offer and yet has never had such late running without an unplanned loco failure or something along those lines. Hopefully lessons will be learned, as we have had some really good galas in the 12 years I've been visiting 71B. But we have now run severely late at all 9x of our last 9x days of steam galas (Exchanges, Works Outing & Strictly Bulleid) though admittedly this one was by far the worse. Having amazing line-ups can only hide the issues so much, and at what point will it be too hard to recover from?

 

Thanks for the insight. As a working volunteer (although not working at the gala) it saddens me to see folks' planning, hard work and effort go wrong and it's good to note that a review /debrief will take place.
For what it's worth, I think a gala needs to have something different from the norm and the Wareham extension, the freights and the 'local' terminating at Corfe certainly provided that. Well done to the signallers, shutters and crews at Corfe who had to be on top of the game with so many loco movements in a short space of time.
On the Sunday, the delay was just over an hour by the close which would suggest that an extra 10 minutes built into each rotation of the timetable would be sufficient over a 9 hour day.

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£5 for a brake van trip over the road is good value,

 

Having met some decidedly non steam friends/visitors on Sunday, I can give some feedback. They had spent the afternoon on Saturday on HX station mesmerized by the whole operation and they had excellent feedback from the SMs at HX about what was happening via the Tannoy.

They loved it and joined us on Sunday pm on the trains.

Sunnie

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