West Somerset Railway General Discussion

This reminds me of the late President Charles de Gaulle. On watching tv if he approved of what he was watching it was "my television", if otherwise it was "their television".

 

It depends on what value NR would see in taking the line back, would there be a market if Minehead was brought back as an destination from say Bristol?
If the WSR PLC were to fold, the Council as owner of the track bed would have several problems, what to do with it, and could they get someone else to run it, If NR came along and said, " we would like to take it back under NR, The council could get shot of the liability, and get an daily main line service back to Taunton, at the same time. it could sell off Minehead station site, and the stations, if it saw an opportunity to get some much needed income, NR could build a new station, next to Butlins, doing away with Seaward Rd Crossing,

 

An ear kept to the ground for mutterings by developers might provide some indication of any imperative to return the line to 'the big railway'. Right now, I honestly doubt there's sufficient potential to interest any commercial operator and no likely regular freight to improve the cost/benefit calculations.

 

Any news of a decision on the outstanding WSRHT Disciplinary Hearing?

Interesting if they havnt made a decision yet

 

I believe Jeremy Hosking has something more than £1.5m available for individual locomotives, and he cannot overhaul a locomotive in a matter of weeks.

When the big railway 'overhauled' an engine in a few weeks, in reality what they did was dismantle the engine and reassemble it with a different boiler, and where necessary, different parts. Current day locomotive owners do not have a spare boiler, spare fittings & etc.. sat on a shelf fully refurbished awaiting the locomotive's ticket to run out. We might have a few replacement parts in stock where we know the old will soon be life expired and will be binned.

The maintenance of steam locomotives is now a cottage industry, with different workshops having different specialties. Nearly all of the bespoke machines the big railway workshops had have gone, meaning that we are left doing things the hard/manual way. Modern day steam workshops are not sat around idle, they need to have a steady programme of work, and therefore frequently you have to await your turn, sometime you can negotiate with other loco owners to have your job done first, sometimes they might refuse. So after stripping down your locomotive, different components may well go to different workshops all with their own lead time. Even within the same workshop, there can be a different lead time on machining work vs fabrication vs fitting resource. Skilled manual labor is increasingly hard to come by, particularly as modern machinists are often now in reality CNC programmers. Frequently workshops have a small number of people working hard, but if just one person is ill, that can have a knock on effect of weeks or months to your schedule. The 'big railway' workshops had so much work that people could specialise, take for example, bending main steam pipes. Bending steam pipes is now a very infrequent operation and so it takes far longer and is more expensive than if we had someone who did that as their job, day in day out, as used to be the case. That kind of specialisation is now not possible, there isn't the volume of work to support it. If you want an axle or a large forging, the lead time can be years.

There is now a lot of management overhead for every task, finding someone reputable willing to take the task on, finding the drawings, find the material spec, finding or making a pattern, sourcing the material, inspection and testing etc.. This overhead is non-trivial. The 'big railway' workshops just went down to the stores and got another one.

I might also add, what would be the point in overhauling a locomotive in a matter of weeks? We have far more locomotives than we need. The rotation of engines is a large part of what keeps things fresh and interesting.

 

To be fair, you are not the sort of customer that makes up the majority of the WSR's passengers. A family looking for a day out would be happy to spend some time on the beach in Minehead.

 

Much as you may dislike the style of the P & D I really don't see that it could be called a commuter line. There can't be much commuting between Paignton & Kingswear !
I think we would all agree that it is a tourist railway, run specifically for the tourist trade with little by way of heritage other than ex-BR coaches and steam locos. But then nearly all preserved standard gauge lines that run on a daily basis have had to make some concessions to modernity in order to operate. At what point should we make the discrimination between "heritage" and "tourist", or is it simply a matter of personal preferences ?

 

It is personal preference, but there's a degree of objectivity required too. The test for me is whether the operation is ultimately about the retention of an otherwise redundant railway, with a view to keeping some of it's previous character, or a purely commercial operation that happens to be on an old railway.

If they are scored from 1-10, where 1 is zero heritage interest and 10 total heritage interest, I'd set the "heritage"/"non heritage" bar at 5. On that scale I'd probably score the P&D at about 3, and the likes of IoWSR at about 8 or 9, with most of the larger operations in the band from 6-8. WSR would be in that latter spectrum, probably a 7.

Picking up an earlier conversation, I'd probably score Ffestiniog at 6 - scoring points for the focus on keeping the railway open and retaining the heritage aspects, but then dropping some for how commercially oriented the operation is.

 

I cannot see why the WSR is compared to the DSR.
Truthfully it should have been compared with the SVR, MHR, NYMR or The Bluebell lines. However, it nor really compared with those lines anymore as it has relegated itself to 'an also ran' now.

 

Maybe the Erie Railroad in the Fisk+Gould era? Or perhaps some of Gould's later operations out West? Although I think maybe those all missed the first part (although Fisk+Gould, and their tutor Drew, were happy to use all sorts of devious tricks, many far worse than merely 'running a line poorly'); generally, the lines subject to takeovers were being run poorly. But 'buying it cheap and then running it properly' was the modus op. of a lot of the barons, starting with Vanderbilt.

Noel

 

I should, perhaps, have expanded more on the question. Bringing it back to the discussions about the WSR : how does anyone expect to keep the railway open and retain the heritage aspects without being commercially oriented ? It seems to me that the art is to find the right balance for each line, as there are a number of varying factors (financial support, volunteer support, passenger traffic, state of infrastructure, and so on) which will determine the best course. There can be no set formula applicable to every line.

 

An interesting idea but as with so many others there could be unintended consequences. Presumably you do not suggest this timetable for August, when one departure from BL cannot handle the traffic on offer, but even if its only on the quietest days of the season, you will leave BL like a ghost town, totally deserted for maybe six hours, so no sales from the shop or cafe, and the staff [such as signalmen] who thought they would like to work a day's shift deciding its not worth turning up. In my experience there have been a lot of turn-up-and-go holidaymakers at Minehead who wanted the full round trip, which you have now made impossible. There are two distinct markets, the line being mainly used by day trippers from the BL end, but holidaymakers from the Minehead end, and this does not help. Wet weather boosts takings from Minehead ["what else is there to do" syndrome] but reduces it from BL [stay at home and wait for a nicer day.]
I do not have a solution to the problem, and Tom has a lot of very sensible comments to make on this forum so I do hope I am not sounding too negative.
Meanwhile it was nice to see a well supported train arrive at Watchet on Sunday and decant a lot of happy looking passengers into the town while some stayed on board for the ride to Blue Anchor and back.

 

I've said it before, but...

Network Rail do not make these decisions, the Department for Transport does, and would instruct and fund Network Rail to take it over if it saw fit. It would then procure a Train Operating Company to provide services over it. It remains to be seen whether Great British Railways takes over these decisions in due course but my bet is they do not.

These things only seem to happen after a lot of local government pressure (and funding)

 

From what I can recall the Saturday Dunster castle express was the first down train and that was usually very busy as was the return journey in the afternoon. Minehead to Dunster was a popular trip. Most ticket sales from Dunster would be Day Rovers, or to Blue Anchor and Watchet.
The last down train arriving after 5.30 always seemed empty, but I guess it was needed to get stock into the right place for the next day.

 

Ah well, it was only an aunt sally to be shot down (and certainly not suggested as the answer to a peak demand; more what a minimal non-peak could look like).

I think the more substantive point is to try to understand the passenger flows, and then how you meet those with the smallest possible number of daily loco and carriage diagrams (but no fewer). I think there is a tendency on preserved lines to try to operate them by starting out "right, we'll have an hourly departure through the day in each direction between these hours", which doesn't necessarily meet the demand. For example, if part of the line is busier than an other part, do some services turn back mid way rather than run on largely empty? (i.e. have a more frequent service at one end than the other). The key is to run the smallest possible amount of unremunerative mileage, but no less than that. It's far from easy.

Tom

 

I doubt that disciplinary matters would be made public, unless the person involved saw fit to post here or elsewhere about it. And I doubt that many individuals would choose to do that unless the outcome left them with an axe to grind and no future on the railway.

 

Did anyone else see the near miss on Blue Anchor crossing gates this morning, the gates were a third closed when a small car shot through them at about 25 mph?

db.

 

Hopefully the signalman will have better luck catching them when they come back

 

I think cutting services to cut costs is the wrong way of looking at at. It is British Rail style managed decline. The more you cut, the more potential passengers drift away, meaning you need to cut even more.
When I do plan to visit a railway, I typically look at what days they are running the most trains and try and go on that day. More to see, and more options to travel.

The way of looking at it is 'why' are passenger numbers in decline, and then doing something to address it to get more bums on seats. Perhaps there is just less visitors to Minehead full stop. Last time I stayed there in a B and B, I noticed that there were places that had previously been B and B style hotels some years ago, that had reverted back to just private housing.
Remember as passenger numbers fall, it is likely that spend in the gift shops and cafes, donations etc also fall.

The WSR is a fantastic railway, should be a jewel in preservation, but it needs to get that message across to both enthusiasts and the general public. From an enthusiasts point of view, one of the issues seems to be there is little new happening to get me excited to jump in my car and go. What about hiring in some unusual locos + coaches to provide something worth going for. What is happening right now to make enthusiasts want to visit ? not much from what I can see.