Swanage Railway General Discussion

Is there any news at all with the new water tower project and upgrading the loop at Swanage to 6 car?

If that had happened we wouldn't need top and tailing at all...
(I know it was mentioned they would save money on water, lower maintenance on the boiler and we wouldn't need to lob around the class 33 and having a 'steam service' which is actually a diesel but just with the steam on the back.)

Its been talked about for years but never seems to be any progress whatsoever

 

To be fair some of those years where it has been talked about have included a global pandemic and cost of living crisis so some re-prioritisation of spending may have had to take place...

 

Well yes but there are a great many projects which have been mooted and started well before COVID that have stalled or remain uncompleted for a wide variety of reasons. Not only the water tower project, the 6 car railway, the carriage shed, the Furzebrook sidings, the toilets at Swanage Station, the restoration and bringing back into service of the 2 Moguls, Beryl and numerous wagons and carriages that require restoration or re-restoration. The various issues at the Purbeck Mineral and Mining Museum including extending the narrow gauge line.

The reality is that SRT SRC has far bigger ambitions than it can bring to fruition due to insufficient resources be that financial or physical or the co-operation of third parties.

 

The Strategic Plan towards 2030 was last updated in 2015 (v7)
https://www.swanagerailwaytrust.org/documents
Mentions 6 car running in action plan 14 to be actioned by the board and General Manager.
A lot has (or not regarding some projects!) happened since 2015, will probably be updated if a new CEO (to replace the GM post) gets appointed, hope they find the right person as the SR probably has some hard decisions to make on some operational issues and projects (rolling stock, catering, Wareham, water tower and platforms, coach/engine sheds, etc)

 

I think that is going to be near impossible because when the phrase "hard decisions" is stated what it really means is choose the project(s) we are going to do and abandon the ones we arent. Yes there will be talk of strategic fit, prioritisation and "sequential testing" but that is just to a way of trying to make the decision palatable. The reality is that there is a high probability that those who support a project which wont be progressed, will get the hump and walk away or at very least reduce their commitment.

Perhaps the "right person" to be CEO will be the person who can by dint of magic choose the right projects and deliver them (within budget both time and cost) whilst keeping the disgruntled supporters of abandoned projects on board by convincing them their time will come. Perhaps the first person the new CEO should appoint should be Alastair Campbell or Charlie Whelan.

Perhaps the SRT should ballot all its members and ask them individually to rank in order of priority the projects listed above and then having collated the responses make that the plan going forward?
After all the members of the SRT are all dedicated, responsible knowledgeable individuals "from all walks of life" whose collective intellect and experience should surely deliver the right result.

 

Find little to disagree with in your logic, which in 2023 I suspect applies to every HR to a lesser or greater extent.
It may need a redrawing of what the actual aims of the railway in this case SR actually are. There have been a couple of recent projects that have perhaps for good reasons drawn finances, if only in one case in the form of donations from elsewhere. Wareham and the T3 (which was not on the horizon that long ago) are the projects of "the moment" for very good reasons, but going forward whilst asking for a "vote" may give you an idea of what people think is important it may end up clouding the issue.
As a few examples and I am sure there are many more.
How many operating days a year does it really need to run six coach trains?
Is the water tower a nice to have rather than a necessity?
Is a Wareham service needed even if it just covers its costs?
Carriage shed seems to be essential but what if it comes bottom of the vote?
Catering offerings do they really contribute or should it all be outsourced at someone else's risk?

In the end you probably need a benign dictator in charge with a board that is prepared to take hard decisions, even be a little unpopular for a while, upset a few at the risk of them walking (although we are led to believe all the WSR grief has not done that).

Lets remember that the SR runs more than most (all lines?) in terms of days operated and most of that time it is not the enthusiast market that is the daily passenger profile (which may mean the station toilets are way more important than if the loco is the U or a Bulleid).How many of those people on the train this week actually cared (or noticed) that on Wareham days there was a diesel on the back of two trains each day?

Covid and the war have no doubt altered things but the sector does need to

 

Knowing I will get considerable flak for this, imho all the general (non enthusiast) visitor passenger cares is that it is a reasonably solid looking steam loco so in that vein the Class 4MT fits the bills. The U also fits the bill. Personally my favourites are the WC BoB class Bulleids but do they generate sufficient additional revenue to justify their additional cost? I doubt it.

Just on extra thought - what is the tipping point of 6 coach trains which would enable fewer services which would enable a smaller fleet? Given that for the vast majority of the season only 1 steam loco is required per day how big a steam fleet does SRC need?

 

The problem is that half the time, the diesel is actually on the front of the train. So 50% of the time that is what visitors will see rolling into the station, or hear pulling their train whilst the steam loco brings up the rear. How many care? A fair few I’d imagine.

 

Maybe but as it is only two afternoon trains I assume most of those are on the way back to Swanage. The day trippers will still have steam out of Swanage on the way back to Norden. Having just been in the garden when the U went out on the 15:20 no one anywhere near or on the train will be in any doubt about which loco was working. Sounded awesome.

 

The last thing you want is to ballot the members - you'll just get an even more confusing picture of priorities, largely uninformed by data. The role of the membership is to elect the board, set broad strategic objectives (like "do we want to be a heritage railway or a commuter railway?") and then let the board get on with it based on detailed knowledge of all the salient constraints.

I question the six-coach plan if the result is that you can't run round and therefore need to run a second locomotive top and tail. If you have genuinely reached that point in passenger numbers that you need six coaches in use, you might as well run two separate, shorter trains , which would have identical operating cost and crew requirements, but would give a better passenger service.

Very unlikely. If a lot of the time you are running one train in service, you can't change that to 0.85 trains in service by adding an extra carriage.

Ignoring diesels (for which I have less knowledge), a finger in the air is that you can probably expect about 6-7,000 miles per year out of a modern steam loco (SR / BR) and still nominally get 10 years out of it, with probably one intermediate overhaul. Perhaps 4,000 out of a mid-sized pre-grouping loco. For a short time you could push a modern loco to 10-12,000 miles per year, but would be unlikely to get 10 years out of it if you did. So if you run 30,000 steam miles per year, you probably need 5 locos (more or less regardless of how long your trains are). 6 would be comfortable; 4 would likely be feeling worried and storing up a long-term overhaul problem; 3 would mean you were only one failure away from not being able to run the service at all.

The problem is that the error bars on that calculation get progressively wider as the numbers diminish, because you have fewer and fewer locos to cover an unexpected outage (or surge in demand) - the reductio ad absurdum would be that if you only ran 6,000 steam miles, you'd struggle with only one operational loco, where as if you ran 6,000,000 you could be pretty confident that the number would be very tightly bounded.

There's a tendency for enthusiasts (including the specialist press such as Steam Railway) to just focus on the boiler ticket dates, and somehow assume that every loco will inevitably run to the end of its ticket. But it is actually not that common that locos manage that; the number you should be focused on is the annual mileage; what the target is for a given loco and how far through that target each loco is. (If you don't believe me, how many times do you read phrases like "Loco XXX is currently showing significant signs of wear and is being used only if absolutely necessary to preserve it to the end of its current boiler ticket". )

Tom

 

Of course this year may be the wrong year to have the six coach debate due to the constraints of the Wareham service both in path use (and hence the need to hit is NR paths and not screw up SWR, who most days seem to need no help in that cause) and the short length of a 3 coach DMU.
If it continues going forward then it may be an issue, but on non Wareham days the 2023 one steam one diesel service appears to cope just fine with the demand from my limited observations.
But it was said in Swanning Around the railway is passenger counting, so I guess they will glean some good data.

 

When passenger numbers are falling (as they are) it is tempting to blame external factors: covid, brexit, cost of living crisis and its effect on discretionary spending but what effect does a degradation of the consumer offering and increased competition from other leisure spending competitors have on SRC passenger numbers?

IMHO there some obvious issues relating to presentation but my biggest concerns are: (1) the schedule. Incorporating the Wareham service has created a very uneven schedule when previously one of SRCs strengths was its regular headway (2) the traction: Swanage is a steam railway but diesel is becoming far more prominent.

(1) The membership do not elect the Board.

(2) I was not suggesting going down to 0.85 of a train obviously. My question was what size fleet of steam locos do you need to support 1 loco in steam per day? Is it for example 4 or 5 in the fleet, if you had a schedule that within the year gave 42 days of 2 steam locos in service would you need a fleet of 5 or 6 or 7 or more steam locos? At what point do you reverse engineer the timetable / operating programme and say for example we have a fleet of 5 steam locos. What is the optimum timetable and operating schedule we can deliver with that resource? What level of risk of consumer dissatisfaction are we prepared to run for example by not having a second steam loco in light stream ready to go if the in service loco fails?

 

On the point of priorities, I would suggest that many water towers may be reduced to display items only within a few years as more railways make the change to watering locos at ground level.

 

I was under the impression that in SRCs case part of the justification was to draw down on ground water? and not off the mains thereby reducing the cost.

To go back to the point about boiler life / wear. Yes using chronological age of the boiler (since last overhaul) is a very blunt measure and completely fails to take into account mileage run, type of mileage run, quality of firing / driving, number of cycles (cold>hot>cold), quality and depth of maintenance, the list of factors goes on and on....

 

I was on it and yes it was good also very full. At Corfe one of the station staff told me that there were a total of 354 on the train. Yesterday the numbers on every train were being counted. In many visits , this was my 4th this year , I have never seen the Railway so busy. It seems to me that it’s the Wareham service with its limited capacity which results in the need for 6 coach trains . On non Wareham days trains are not 6 coaches as different timetable operates with a 33 on 5 on the other train.

 

So back of a fag packet, I'd start as follows.

Let's say "1 loco in steam per day? " means 200 days of operation, doing 5 round trips of a 6 mile line.

That gives you 200 * 5 * 6 * 2 = 12,000 annual steam miles, which on my earlier figure would suggest two locos nominally available for traffic at any one time. (6,000 miles per year each, or 60,000 on a ten year ticket - which would be achievable with a Standard 4, but probably not reliably achievable with the M7, T9 or T3)

However, 200 days means you need to do about 7 washouts in the year. A washout takes at least a week, more likely two weeks if you involve volunteers who can only work weekends. (Withdraw loco on Sunday, cool down and prepare during the week, washout following weekend, reassemble and warm through ready for the following weekend, with any minor repairs tackled during those two weeks). Moreover, running 60k miles per overhaul means you likely need at least one, and possibly two, intermediate overhaul of a loco on each ticket (to do a piston & valve examination and other repairs as required); plus each loco will need preparation for an annual steam test. So the washout and intermediate overhauls mean that for large parts of the year, only one loco out of two is genuinely available for traffic (as in - could be steamed up immediately). So with two locos to cover 12,000 miles per year, you are only one failure away from not running a service.

Therefore, at that point, I'd suggest three locos nominally available is the minimum, of which one is running, one is on washout / light repair / prep for annual steam test, and one is on an intermediate overhaul and / or spare. In practice you'd be juggling those round through the year, ideally to a plan, but Sod's Law happens.

So that gives an additional 42 * 5 * 6 * 2 = 2,520 miles, i.e. you are up to about 14,500 steam miles for the year. On my 6,000 mile per loco that probably means 2.5 locos, but since you have already accepted 3, you could probably stretch things out to accommodate the additional traffic without an additional loco. So you are still at 3 locos nominally available, each of which will end up doing about 50,000 miles on a ten year overhaul. In other words, the modest amount of additional mileage caused by running extra days doesn't significantly change the loco requirement. OTOH, if you added another 28 days of 2 train mileage (say adding in Easter and the spring / autumn half terms in addition to the summer holidays) then your requirement is probably 3 - 4 notionally available, rather than 2 - 3. In other words, there is a tipping point at which things become too tight with only three locos; and "158 days with one train + 42 with 2 trains" is getting close to that tipping point.

Topping and tailing services with two steam locos obviously puts a strain on things, since essentially it doubles your loco mileage and operational days to feed into the calculation (additional washouts etc). Hence my earlier thought that if you have to top and tail because of the length of trains, why not just run two shorter trains instead.

Fleet is different to available. The calculation above is just those nominally available, i.e. with active boiler certificates. If you assume, say, 4, then that means you have to be able to overhaul a loco every 30 months. How you do that is massively dependent on the railway's own resources, the ability to work on site, the ability to move things off site to contractors etc. I suspect you might need to be juggling 2 - 3 under overhaul at any one time, not least to optimise use of skills and equipment. (For example, aiming to keep both boiler smiths, machinists and erecting shop all well occupied).

So I suspect the answer with the conditions you set is probably somewhere in the region of a fleet size of 6-7, of which nominally 3-4 would be available and 3 under some kind of repair.

(But all of the above is further complicated when you have to consider who owns what, since separate owning groups will have their own requirements and capacity and resources).

I suspect that is a luxury that even on well-appointed railways is largely consigned to the past, except perhaps for a few special event days.

Tom

 

The problem I perceive, which @gricerdon alludes to, is "is the railway overall carrying higher numbers than seen in previous "normal" years or has the "Wareham peak timetable" created a problem with peak time capacity - ie the capacity reductions introduced this year have resulted in too few trains when passengers wish to travel.

The old yellow timetable (peak school summer holidays) was every 40 minutes in both directions (swanage <> norden) 10:00 - 17:20 / 18:00. This years timetable Wareham included is very different.

 

Numbers are not falling everywhere and the reasons why can be little more than guesswork here.

 

Edit to add: Clearly those directly involved on the railway will have a better grasp of the specific figures to feed into a calculation, and also any confounding constraints that might cause the calculation to be adjusted. Use of diesels will also have an impact. So the above isn't intended as a kind of didactic "the SR needs a fleet of 7 locos", but rather an illustration of how you might tackle the problem if you were given a clean sheet of paper and asked "how many locos do we need".

Tom

 

This all points to the need to extend the Swanage loop and so to remove the main constraint, I know that the Wareham service meets an obligation but as it’s not comprehensive it’s only of fairly limited use. Yesterday I wanted to get to the railway earlier than the 1119 shuttle so I caught the 0958 arrival and the 1014 Breezer 40 through to Swanage for the 1120 train. If we aren’t staying in Corfe and so have compete choice I will try to avoid the Wareham service days in future