West Somerset Railway General Discussion

I would have thought so, but I don't know enough about company finance rules to say for certain!

 

There are also the MK1s assigned to the WSRA in lieu of payment for the BL shop and stock. Are they mortgaged twice ?

 

A floating charge is on current assets of a company. Such as stock, debtors, etc.

A fixed charge would be on fixed assets such as buildings.

If the company goes into liquidation the floating charge will become a fixed charge

 

Appealing for donations to raise £1M seems a massive ask. Last year other railways ran covid appeals, such as Swanage raising £350k. However this year Swanage (and others) are back to successfully running well loaded trains, without the need for further covid appeals. I guess this shows the WSRs problems run much deeper than Covid.

 

Length?

Sadly, as rehearsed many times in various threads, the amount people are willing to pay for a heritage railway experience and the time the less enthusiastic travellers are willing to spend on a train has limits whilst the costs rise as the length maintained rises. Swanage achieves good passenger loads at a much higher fare cost per mile.

 

I think that is @Herald's point. Similar ticket price on a shorter railway means the proportion of the ticket that goes towards the infrastructure is spread less thinly. From memory, when the WSR was selling single tickets it was about £28 for a 40 mile round trip. Swanage are charging £16 for a 12 mile round trip. They can also potentially run a reasonably intense service with only a single train in operation, whereas the WSR requires at least three to offer any kind of frequency; that increases the number of locos and carriages you need operational and therefore what your "standstill" loco and carriage overhaul and maintenance requirement is, which is direct contributor to your costs.

I don't tend to the automatic "shorter is inevitably better" school of thought, and in any case, we are where we are - you can't move the station with good motorway access any closer than it is to the station with a nice beach. But additional length does drive cost. Running. heritage railway is hard enough at the best of times, but being so long just makes what would in any case be a hard job even harder.

Tom

 

Being pedantic, you could move those two end points closer together. It would be a very different - and difficult to operate - railway though.

 

But SVR were quite clever with the compartment for the day and stops at the Engine House , Bewdley and then the end of the line , actually giving a good day out. We were really impressed with how they did it and good load factors too.

 

As i understood they weren't,t expecting to make a great profit but it re-engage their volunteers and generated a lot of positive publicity. It also helped with keeping the machinery oiled and working.

 

It’s a shame the WSR don’t have a museum at, let’s say Washford for example, that could be used as an interesting stop off point.

 

Completely disagree with that. With the benefit of hindsight, those railways that chose not to run made the right move in many cases. They were able to effectively mothball a lot of their overheads and furlough their paid staff. Most of those that did run realised early on that reduced Covid loadings could only at best cover direct costs. Of course, it depends on the specifics of each operation and some may have chosen to run at a loss or at cost for other reasons.

 

The WSR is badly in the red. Do you really think it would have been even worse if they had run some trains last year?