West Somerset Railway General Discussion

For one example the SVR and Mid Hants have excellent YouTube channels, with interesting and more importantly up to date content.

 

The Ffestiniog has its excellent moving pictures - normally monthly as a big update (more recent below)



Talyllyn produces regular short videos



(1000 views in a week - if that say that triggers 5-10% of viewers to visit you are looking at 100 extra passengers and related secondary spend)

Even smaller lines such as the Bala Lake have an active channel.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTqIt6zxiXHBoGsudvCbfMg/videos

 

This first bit, "double like". For the rest, I've no desire whatever to become bogged down in the West Somerset mire.

 

This takes me back to schooldays - one decent excuse for not having done your homework is better than five or six lame ones!

But to be fair, this may not the best time to reorganise when there is so much to do to get the trains running again. I'm not running the Board's fan club, far from it, but one thing at a time!

 

None worked on Mr Babbage, my old maths teacher. He had disconcertingly irrefutable forensic means of establishing if homework had been hurried through, sitting on a wall on the way to class!

 

The strangest thing I have seen around a leisure railway lately has been a Head Cook sporting a chef's tocque. Yet such railways are (or should be) about having a sense of theatre. No different to waistcoated guards

 

Charles Babbage? Surely you're not that old Howard? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage

 

Cheeky sod!

In point of fact, he was the grandson of that august luninary. A fact of which I only became aware after the retirement of Ivor Reginald, of that ilk. It would, however, seem they shared similar disturbing personality traits!

 

In defence of the WSR - @malcolm imps posts regular photos from the pway work that he is involved with. And we have had updates from the workshop. But these tend to be irregular, in contrast to the wagon updates on the MHR, blogs on the GSWR or groups such as the wagons at the GCR or carriages at the NNR.

I think the important point is that if you read most of the regular blogs they are generally about fairly mundane things - 'this week we have spent the week sandblasting the underframe/testing all the lightbulbs/repairing holes in the upholstery'. But that is all good communication - showing people the 'hidden' or 'unseen' work that goes into restoration or running and it gives a lot of value and power to the 'unsexy' or 'not revenue generating' bits of heritage railway operation.

The WSR is a little bit like North Korea or the Soviet Union when it comes to information cultures. You have to look at who is stood where on the May Day parades to work out who is rising and who is falling, or try to translate the latest statement in Pravda about tractor output figures to interpret what is going on.

 

And @Steve Edge 's unofficial website is good at distributing information, with kudos to Steve

Patrick

 

Indeed. Whilst I agree with @Pete Thornhill that it's an area the WSR could do with focusing on, it does have some decent starting points to build on. My biggest gripe is the Facebook stuff. I'm not convinced Facebook is the best way to blog what volunteers are up to anyway, but I appreciate the simplicity of it compared to setting up standalone blogs like we at the GWSR do or a nice shiny newsletter like the SVR and Bluebell. However, if you are going to use Facebook, for pity's sake don't have a separate private group for each one, that potential followers only stumble across by accident! Much better to have a public page for each "stream" that people can freely follow at a single click, rather than attempting to join a group. Then have one overarching group that always comes up when you search West Somerset Railway for general discussion, with easy links to find all the related pages, and content from those pages is "shared" to the main group periodically.

After that it's "The platform" newsletter. Great start, most of the hard work is there in finding someone to put it all together, and a selection of contributors. I think it's mainly presentation on that front which could really make it work. Oh, and stop uploading it as jpegs!

 

Misleading? What, residents at the time that page was last edited? Not like they have Flying Scotsman and Green Arrow on there.

You say GWR or nothing. 53808 and Kilmersdon are not GWR, so if that statement was true, they would not have been present on the website, or would've been deleted straight away once on the back of a lorry.

Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill.

 

Depends what you mean. I don't think the WSR are miles behind the SVR. If anything, the SVR lagged behind for many years.

 

Maybe in the past, I wouldn't know, but to do a couple of comparisons, SVR has twice as many followers as WSR on their main Facebook page, and 3 times as many members in the main Facebook group. Meanwhile the SVR's monthly newsletters are streets ahead of the WSR's platform newsletter, although see my comment above, I don't think it would take too much to improve the WSR one, it's got some good basics to start with.

I should also add I'm not singling out the WSR as necessarily particularly bad, when it comes to Facebook followers for example, GWSR has a pretty poor showing for our size, albeit a healthy sized Facebook group.

 

Whether or not intentionally misleading, leaving information like that up when it is no longer accurate is misleading. As much to the point, and applicable to many, many, places, it demonstrates a clear lack of interest in the hard graft of actually engaging with potential customers. Those who know are deterred by the existence of verifiably incorrect information, and the example given tends to be the tip of the iceberg when seen as an outsider.

This example comes from the WSR, but is uncomfortably typical of too many volunteer based organisations, which invest significant effort in getting a website, but then fail to provide the lesser effort of keeping it up to date. The Mid Hants thread shows how even the best attempts can go awry.