West Somerset Railway General Discussion

There’s a General Manager of a well known railway of similar length who thinks that the fares on the WSR are too low to make it sustainable and it needs to be charging a lot more.

 

But will people pay higher fares? Depending on the elasticity of demand, they could end up reducing their income by charging higher fares. It’s a fine balance to strike.

 

A visit to the Talylyn last week cost £48 for 3 but we were also given a £2.50 voucher for the buffet, very clever unless you want to share a cup of 'free' tea between 3 you spend at least £10-15 in the Tywyn buffet and another £10-15 in the Abergynolwyn one because it's raining (as it does in Wales!) and there's nothing else to do for half an hour! Clever marketing. There's no such thing as a free lunch.

 

The K&ESR did very nicely, thank you from the socially-distanced summer 2020 trains run in Kent.

 

Nope.

 

In normal times, ticket sales on the WSR are, broadly, 3 parts from BL, one part from Minehead and one part from everywhere else, of which the majority is Watchet.

 

As did the IOWSR who were able to run Santa trains as well. Side door compartment stock has been a real boon in coping with social distancing.

 

Well, quite. The WSR should be charging whatever fares brings it in the greatest income. If that is less than it needs to charge to make it sustainable, then it either needs increase the footfall, lower its costs, find other sources of income or all three. So far its activities in that t direction appear to have been confined to the easy bits: hocking everything that can be hocked, wriggling out of onerous contracts, sacking paid staff, tapping up all the groups on the line for "contributions" and holding out the begging bowl.

 

They've even missed what should have been another easy bit. After applying for and receiving one large grant, they assigned the task of making a second grant application to different people, and that one failed.

 

The K&ESR had a sell-out Santa season - £0.25M’s worth - in prospect for 2020. ‘Kent variant’ put paid to that. But given the fact the K&ESR is looking forward to the future with confidence, the strength of its financial (and other) management may be judged.

 

Given what's been said about the failure of the SVR's application, I hesitate to put the blame on the shoulders of those preparing the bid. The references in the rejection to the nature of the WSR organisation, however, suggest - yet again - that the organisational model centred around a plc has inherent limitations.

 

It might be worth adding that, from what I can recall, the WSR PLC is required as a "condition" under the terms of it's lease with SCC to run a minimum of 300 trains per annum between Minehead and Bishops Lydeard.

There are a number of obvious 'get out' clauses to this "condition", but a decision to curtail working over the whole length would potentially have consequences as to the lease.

 

Most of the posts from people connected to the WSR, whose who have not had their Staff passes removed , seems to be carry on, crisis, what crisis, parroting the management line, we are running full trains, yet you still need 1m to survive, so what is it, if your running full trains, you should be at least breaking even, possibly making a small profit, Thing is this, most people will not pay over the odds, so raising fares might not be the answer, grants and support is the answer, but the railway, decided they know better, igoring people who had previously put in a winning bid, attempts to force change are met with hostility by current Board members, who on the face of it, seem to be of the mind set of if i can't have the railway, no one else will, No railway is too big to fail, the bigger they are, the harder it will be to save them.

 

Yes they certainly did try. Nor so certain about some places located in less severe Covid tiers.

 

Very similar sentiments to the WSR Chairman's message of 18.12.20 http://www.wsr.org.uk/plc-chairman-2020-christmas-message.htm

My recollection is the 2020 appeal totals included sums from station funds and the like, and non-COVID specific appeals such as the WSRA rail appeal and a DMU fund. Arguably, an amount of that might be non-repeating.

Patrick

 

£1M certainly does seem like a very optimistic target.

I’ve always thought people on here were being very negative, saying that the WSR would follow Llangollen into administration. However now this sum of £1M has been announced as the amount needed just to keep going into 2022, I’m inclined to agree with them.