West Somerset Railway General Discussion

• IMHO the Heritage movement is undergoing a sea change. It is painfully obvious that the cost of maintaining infrastructure is outstripping the amount of money available. Will some parts of the HR morph into a PPP. Would some enthusiasts be happy seeing a reduction in Heritage services in return for the national entity maintaining the line(s). The movement is fast ageing and the depth of pockets is shortening!

 

Most of the membership are sufficiently detached that they don't know whether the directors are doing a good job or not, and assume that they must be. The board send out the mailings to the membership and can paint a rosy picture even if the reality is anything but. Look at how many General Meetings it took to finally get rid of the WSRA X6.

 

Yep, I have a plan.

But it wont work without charitable status for the whole Railway; some significantly changed attitudes; and the ceremonial roasting of some sacred cows.

It is pointless putting it forward in an environment when olive branches are met with blowtorches.

Robin

 

But just like in all aspects life they are not Ian.
You can run a train without a TTI for example, but not without a loco crew or guard or people to man the signal boxes if you have them.
I am at times a volunteer railtour steward, but I am not as valuable as the train manager.
In my day job,when I had one, the Director would not have seen me as important as his General Managers.

 

While in the meantime stuffing the membership with plc supporters or 'finding' lots of proxy shareholder votes as happened at the (then)WSSRT?

 

Decisive? More like divisive. An unjustified delay in holding the agm, a period of refusing any further memberships applications (while, strangely membership numbers appeared to increase) with the pre-delay membership around 60 and the final numbers around 200 it's really not surprising how the vote went.

 

Is that 50% of the total number of shareholders eligible to vote or is that 50% of those that attended or sent proxies to vote at am AGM/EGMor whatever?

 

To be fair, on this question, it is possible that the influx of new member applications took some time to process. So whilst further new applications were not permitted, those that had been received before the cut-off were dealt with as time became available, and the top set of the WSSRT were quite busy at the time.
Did any new members actually have membership refused? I know of a handful of people on here who did join at that time, and I can't recollect anyone complaining they were denied membership.

 

If the cow needs shooting, get the knackerman in and put it down. Ceremony and fanfare won't help heal anything

 

My suspicions are more about the period after the candidacies were submitted, where there appeared both to be a reluctance to admit potentially reforming new members and a desire to press gang those felt likely to vote for the status quo.

My application (earlier in the summer) was processed perfectly professionally and amicably.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Ditto

 

Am I right in thinking that The PLC are going to give The Heritage trust The Washford site?

from the minutes:
581. Washford Museum The proposal from the PLC was noted and it was agreed that further discussions will take place with the Company.

 

It depends what that proposal was, which at the moment seems unspecified....

Clearly there will shortly be no existing Museum there for the Trust to manage, but maybe they will get the site to house the carriages etc? I can't see how or why the Trust would want to simply set up a third GWR/WSR Museum (in addition to BARM and the Gauge Museum) and entice passengers there to visit it.

 

There is a reference elsewhere to covered storage for the coaches.

It'd be subservient poodle getting a biscuit.

Also shows how all those claims about the pressing need for Washford were BS. There was never any need and that was never the reason, it was always about the bruised ego of the PLC board and their need for revenge.

 

Maybe it's just me.....but it seems to me this thread resembles a group of vultures circulating a dying man and yet the dying man neither knows not cares much for the existence or otherwise of the vultures or the thread.

I took a day off reading this thread and came back to nearly 100 posts that took the sum of world knowledge not one millimetre forward.

 

Here's another idea (inspired by your post, and some other recent ones): set up a charity (hereinafter the New WSR Charity, or 'NWC'), funded by more or less whatever mechanism you had in mind above; it would, as funds become available, buy major assets from the PLC, such as sections of the actual track (not the land that's sitting on, which the county owns). Such transfers would have two benefits:

• If the PLC were to go bust, those assets would be protected, as at Llangollen

• The PLC could use the money it receives for other pressing obligations

To the extent said assets are currently covered by liens to lenders (as many apparently are), the lenders would of course have to be part of such sales; i.e. company Q would agree to release the lien on asset X provided that the money raised from the PLC's sale of X to the NWC were used to pay down the money owed to Q. This would still benefit the PLC, even if none of the money from the sale of X went to it, as it would reduce its indebtedness.

The NWC would have to be set up as an open membership body of some kind, to give everyone at the WSR the confidence that all WSR people/entities would have representation in it, and that it has all their interests at heart. You personally would have to eschew any direct leading role in it, sorry, as there are those on the WSR who don't trust you. I'm not sure where to find leadership for the NWC that would be trusted across the WSR; perhaps some notable outsider(s) (e.g. Mr. Bailey - @Lineisclear) could lend a hand here with leading, with a few less-aligned WSR insiders (e.g. Mr. Coleby - @ikcdab) to provide some direct connections to the broader WSR community.

The good thing is that it could start off small, and grow as people see it in action, and see by its actions that it can be trusted. (If it can't act that way, there's no point to even starting it.) For instance, if it gets to be a good size, perhaps the operating license could be transferred to it; again, so that if the PLC falls into a hole, the whole line doesn't go down with it (again, looking at the Llangollen example).

But I think that rather than trying to do it all with a 'big bang' reorganization (which would front-load all the organizational problems, making it almost impossible to achieve), an incremental process that starts out very small will be more workable. For instance, if the NWC is set up, and it doesn't initially function smoothly, it will be easier to tweak it to get rid of its issues if it's a small entity with limited responsibilities.

Noel

 

All pointless speculation. The 'big bang' will have to come BEFORE any reorganisation.

Those of us who have predicted it are rather in the 'Churchill wilderness years' position.

If the chickens come home to roost as we have predicted, the fellow-travellers, poltroons and apologists will need to step aside and allow a rescue operation run by folk who know what they are doing.

 

The $64,000 question.

When?

 

Will there be (yet another) appeal to raise the $64,ooo ?

 

'I refer the honourable gentleman to the answer I gave some moments (posts) ago.'

But the tea leaves dont read well ATM.