Bluebell Railway General Discussion

This sounds very much like a case of "posh carriage-itis" to me........

Surely running older carriages with higher upkeep cost and more expensive maintenance bills is just frivolous like running larger locos.......

 

Must have known you were visiting, Paul.

 

It depends what you are trying to achieve, part of the charm of the Bluebell is it’s vintage stock and locos. The average visitor is more clued up than you think otherwise every railway only needs to have an industrial saddle tank and a few Mk1s.
It should also be remembered that a large body of workers on heritage railways are there because it’s their hobby. A few railways have lost sight of that and have lost membership as a result.

 

Are the older carriages really more expensive on ru ning costs and upkeep. There are a lot of comments around about how expensive it is to overhaul and maintain mk 1s. I guess the older coaches were more simply built also and there seems to be lots of skill at Bluebell to maintain and restore them.

 

The Lakeside and Haverthwaite Railway is doing very well using industrial tanks and a few Mk1s. Using an ex BR loco doesn’t bring in more passengers as far as they are concerned and they operate as a commercial operation. The Bluebell currently looses money on normal operating days and it is the special events that make money.

 

This is a really interesting point and the answer is likely to be unpopular in some circles! A related conundrum is why some lines have recovered post Covid so much better than others.

 

It’s a different type of operation. I would think that most people using the Lakeside will be incorporating the trip as part of a day out on the lake steamers. It may be a commercial operation but they also cater for enthusiasts with the two Fairburn tanks

 

Older carriages not more expensive, but must live indoors. Mk1s live ok outdoors for longer, but eventually become very expensive to rebuild. Carriages have a far more direct impact on the visitor experience than a loco, regardless of the type, providing it is steam, and even that proviso is no longer as strong as it was.

I would like to see more data about railways to discern if there is any common factors in recovery. I suspect that in reality, no railway has actually recovered from covid. Those whose numbers this year did not step back may not have got to the level that they would have had if the covid hadn’t happened. I do have a sense that some recoveries stalled because the prices haven’t been put back to something more aligned to expectations. Some haven’t met visitor expectations as well as they used to do. Some are just not being imaginative enough. One or two have tied themselves up in knots with re-orgs that don’t deliver. Several are quietly becoming insolvent.

 

You are getting different answers from different people (which is fair enough) but for us, yes older carriages are definitely both more expensive to restore and after completion require more labour than Mark 1 stock to maintain.

From a restoration point of view, good wood is more expensive than steel to procure and the majority of Mk1 projects are complete whereas the majority of vintage stock is not, meaning extra £££ required to adapt underframes, build interiors etc.

Moving onto maintenance once in service, when kept outdoors wooden stock is returned to works for repaint/varnish far more frequently than a painted Mk1. Canvas/wooden roofs benefit from repaints more frequently than the galvanised steel Mk1 roofs. Although not a hard and fast rule, older stock often have more doors (and more grief/labour) than Mk1's.

Please don't misconstrue my post - the message is not "mark 1's are better to have than old stock". My personal view is that a mix of stock is good, and the extra costs of the older stock is worth the benefits!

As others have also pointed out, the playing field can be significantly levelled if older stock is restored/maintained with volunteer labour, kept undercover, used less frequently, or a combination of all three. The NNR does exactly this: paid staff are generally engaged in Mk1 restoration, following which the vehicles are kept outside and are used heavily in traffic. Volunteers restore older stock which is shedded undercover and used more sparingly. The two approaches compliment each other perfectly.

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The problem with leaving Mk1’s outside is that over time they will deteriorate to the point of heavy investment required. This discussion is interesting as we are going though a similar exercise in West Wales attempting to deal with our MK1’s, add a vintage set and build a shed for the lot. The price tag is considerable and it’s no surprise that some railways chose to prioritise.

 

The optimist in me thinks that - on the Bluebell at least - the tide may very gradually be turning away from heavy reliance on Mark 1s. For a long period (say 1980 - 2010) they presented a relatively cheap way to increase the size of the carriage fleet, since examples could be purchased in runnable condition direct from service on the big railway. Not only is that now not the case, but structurally each one is increasingly needing much more substantial work at overhaul to replace life-expire material. If you couple that with the fact that we now have significant amounts of covered storage, and some of the perceived advantages of Mark 1s are vanishing and the relative disadvantages of wooden carriages also diminishing.

The commercial department seem to like open carriages (for coach parties I assume) and also like consistency in seating patterns, but placing greater emphasis on using Maunsell's and Bulleids as the core sets could meet that requirement.

There are two Mark 1 sets explicitly referenced as heritage objectives in the Long Term Plan

• BR Standard Mark 1 Steam Stock
• A short train of mainly BR Mk1 specifically for catering purposes.

but I could see us getting to a point where we didn't have many others. (And even the "short train of mainly BR Mk 1 specifically for catering purposes" could, in them fullness of time, consist of two Maunsell's in the consist).

None of which will happen overnight, but the question is what is the direction of travel? My sense is that it could be swinging towards fewer rather than more Mark 1s.

There is also a question of how the timetable will change in line with etc current plc's off-stated vision about "trains through the ages". Maybe we'll end up with a pattern - at weekends at least - of more modern carriages used East Grinstead - Horsted Keynes; and older ones Horsted Keynes - Sheffield Park, with a change of trains between. At the moment, I think there is a lot of fluidity as to what the railway will be like in, say, five or ten years time.

Tom

 

I suspect (as with any routine maintenance), the answer will change with cycles. Yes undercover older coaches will last better than uncovered mark 1s, but where are you going to get the big lumps of hardwood to fix the big bits in the future?

That is not going to get any easier as the world is moving away from unprocessed tree to engineered wood.

Likewise carpenters are a rarer breed than they were.

Mark 1s need welding and metal surface treatment, and there are a lot of trades that still do those things, which means people/tools/knowledge is still there.

It's also worth noting most 4-wheeled stock has already had a total underframe re-creation, so in terms of rolling chassis, they are arguably newer than mark 1s.

Personally, I don't care what I'm sitting in (although mark 2s may be stretching a point there). I'm here for the steam (or diesel if I've come for a diesel day). I've travelled in the LMS rake at the Severn Valley and it was no better or worse than a mk1 for me.

 

It depends where in the country you are - easier to find carpenters than welders in Sussex, and certainly amongst volunteers.
The Restoration of the Metropolitan coaches cost around £40k in materials, and entirely undertaken by Volunteers. If that restoration had been undertaken by paid staff you'd have been looking at £650k.
In terms of Mk.1s, roller bearings and Commonwealth bogies are supposed to give maintenance advantages, but at a penalty of several tons extra weight.
However, our commonwealth bogies are now at an age where they are needing heavy overhauls, which are much harder than the equivalent on a standard SR1A bogie, and they are not so suited to intermittent use at 25mph, intended for heavy use at 75-100mph.

 

I get the impression that carpentry is a reasonably popular pasttime and I guess in many peoples eyes something they can achieve whereas metalwork is maybe in people's eyes a bit more difficult. Then if you have an outlet which will let you use those skills then that is probably a bonus. Maybe worth using a different tack to attract volunteers with woodworking skills ?

 

I will not attempt to put words into any individual's mouths, but I think what most of us enthusiasts would like to see when visiting a railway is variety and appropriateness. When visiting the Bluebell, I would not wish for an LNER B1 to arrive pulling a train of GWR stock, on the NYMR I'd prefer not to see a GWR tank on a train of Maunsell carriages. Note the use of the words "wish" and "prefer", though - we live in a real world where perfection, or even something close to it, is rarely achievable. Variety is the spice of life and all-Mk1 /BR standard loco set-ups are thankfully equally rare and one encouraging thought is that there are probably a lot more carriages that have yet to return to service in restoration than there are (main line) locomotives, so as the years march on, I think we'll see more variety on the coaching side than we will on the locomotive side. Hopefully we'll eventually see a breed of railway managers arrive who ca see the pros and cons of Mk 1s and Pre-nationalisation coaches and find intelligent ways to optimise the use of both.

 

I was going to say, there certainly appears to be no shortage of woodworking skills in this part of the world, all the way from carpentry to cabinet making, and, particularly encouragingly, popular with younger artisans.
Although the turnaround time for a rebuilt timber bodied carriage will be a lot longer than that of a Mk1 (even if 21246 certainly challenged that assumption!), the overriding practical advantage of vintage stock over Mk1s, is bums on seats per ton tare. An average 4 carriage train of Mk1s (say, BTK, SO, CK, and BCK) would weigh in at approx 140t tare for IRO 166 seats.
The Mets, on the other hand, can accommodate up to 218 fully loaded, for just 80t tare. The 4-wheelers, with a similar economy, are just as useful in providing gainful employment for our smaller locomotives. I'd be interested to know how running costs per mile compare between Mk1s and Maunsells, given their similarities in weight, but difference in running gear (SR1 vs. Commonwealth).
Hope you had a lovely Christmas, Richard.

 

Agree. No doubt that is correct for 'most' enthusiasts but regretfully the (90%-95% of) passengers who frequent a heritage railway (and who put the funds that they do through the farebox) could not give a monkeys what is on the front end as long as it chuffs, or whether it is a Mark 1 or 2 or Bulleid or GW or teak as long as it is clean, tidy and the bog works.
The current breed of managers on those railways that are going to survive in the future have a tremendously hard balancing act- and hopefully they understand that - and no amount of comment from our oliversbest overseas correspondent, or even nearer to home the IOW lover should influence that or even be taken seriously. There are 170+ standard gauge heritage railways and each is different, both in their location & audience expectation. Enthusiast galas are a showpiece, and allow a railway to indulge and show what things were like, and to allow those volunteers whose time the heritage railways depend on to put on a super show- which they are very good at.

 

Inadvertently you have highlighted the problem. The need is less to put on a 'good show" now and again for gricers as a good show day after day for the ''normals''.

 

Unless there are no car repair shops in Sussex, I contest that welders and metal body finishers are out there...