Lynton and Barnstaple - Operations and Development

Selling the OSHI, whilst retaining the land required for the railway, remains an option at any time in the future.

 

Yes it does, but at that point the original purchase costs of over £2m and whatever else might be expended in the meantime will not necessarily be recovered. Indeed the bank valuations suggest that only around £1.3m might be expected as a property sale. Would that have been the best use of £700k?

There are two critical shortcomings at present. Strategic thinking and adherence to rules. These keep showing up and whilst some of these decisions might work out, the purchase of OSHI and the expenditure on a road to nowhere don’t make any sense in the short term if the immediate goal is to extend to CFL. There is a total lack of joined up thinking and we can’t carry on like this if we want to build a railway.

On the subject of CFL, there is a gradient through the site which is far too steep for a terminus (with or without a platform accessible from outside) I’ve heard the plan is to use fill to level the gradient, and then later take the fill away when the railway is extended. If that’s true……at this point words fail me.

 

Though doing so might then crystallise a loss if it is true that the L&B have paid too much. In that light, it becomes easier for a charity to hold on to a poorly-performing asset than to get rid of it; the effect is that capital is tied up that might be more productively spent elsewhere.

In that light, there was a cost referenced in the Trustees’ statement that was in the 2015 prospectus about an “expected purchasers premium” of £240k. Is that a known thing in property conveyancing? Or is it (as I suspect) a recognition that since the L&B specifically wanted that building, rather than just looking for any country pub investment, they realised the seller would be in a position to drive a hard bargain and budgeted accordingly? If, as I suspect, the latter, then you could see that £240k as the value the Trust places on the building by virtue of its historical connection to their core charitable aim, over and above its business value. Which is fine as far as it goes, but would suggest that were they to subsequently sell it, any hard-nosed investor just looking for a pub business to buy is likely to start the negotiation immediately £240k below what was paid.

Tom

 

Or even more, if the price paid was greater than stated in the prospectus - I would assume such a premium was the percentage increase on the base price, not just the cash amount.


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I agree with @21B and @Jamessquared
Regardless of the wisdom of the present management’s decision to buy this pub, the L&B’re now stuck with the deal which was made. I hope they can make a success of it.

Nevertheless in the longer term existing or new management may have to decide at some stage whether it’s wiser to keep their loans & capital tied up in this business; or get out even this means accepting an overall loss (which is sometimes a better idea than throwing good money after bad).

 

Is the "purchaser's premium" what used to be called "goodwill" in business transactions?

 

Near me a house operating a B&B was sold.
Afterwards, the sellers demanded payment for the business - too late !

 

AIUI - but I stand to be corrected - the 'problem' as such is not the actual gradient, but the fact that any run-round activity would involve leaving coaches standing on the gradient without an engine attached at one end (unless you always ran double-headed and ran round one engine at a time). It would appear - once again, in the absence of any greater detail from the Trust - that there is a presumption about the ORR requirements which may not have been tested (yet) by offering some form of mitigation. For example, some form of 'cunning plan' that would at least prevent coaches running away if there was no engine attached might prove acceptable, but who knows unless the ORR is asked about it?

 

Unless I'm missing something would a more pragmatic solution be to propel back (using a suitably equipped leading vehicle) to the loop at KL and run round there - much as was done on the LR between the temporary terminus at Corwen East and Carrog.
Ray.

 

Precisely what the ORR might say in response to a discussion about siting a terminus (of any kind) on a 1 in 50 gradient when the recommended maximum average gradient is 1 in 500 I wouldn’t like to say. It isn’t pertinent though, because any operator who without good reason sought to gain permission for something so obviously risky would be inviting criticism. “Because we want a longer run for our train” is not going to cut it as a justification.

On a sunny summer day with a dry rail and brakes properly adjusted with an alert crew and no external factors, stopping and restarting on a 1:50 is quite within the capabilities of both train and crew. On a dull misty autumn afternoon toward the end of a long and trying day with brakes that are due to be inspected a crew growing tired, someone takes a flash photograph at the line side and momentarily distracts the crew, with the result the braking point is missed, the driver corrects by braking harder and the train locks up. There isn’t the space to blow the brakes off and try again and the result is the train over runs the station….. how long is the overrun, is it a sand drag or a buffer? We are about to discover first hand how modern narrow gauge coaches behave in a crash.

Now people who know me will know I am not an especially risk averse person, but the likelihood of an overrun at a station on such a gradient is quite high, and the consequences pretty severe. There are operational mitigations like speed limits and stopping dead at a point well before the platform that would allow a chance to correct a slide if it happened before “running out of road”. More difficult to mitigate against though is pulling away again and not rolling back (with similar consequences to failing to stop).

Really the point I am trying to make is that if you want to be seen to be a credible operator this is the sort of question you wouldn’t ask in the first place. The best option would be to engineer out the issue and honestly the best way to do that is to not build the railway such that you have to stop and reverse on a falling 1 in 50.

Filling to create a 1 in 500 station is still going to mean being right at the foot of such a bank and the fill will have to be removed at some point. That’s a colossal waste of money. (Edit: colossal may be hyperbole, I’m not a civil engineer so calculating the cost of the materials and their compaction etc isn’t my thing - I still feel that it is a waste of money though.)

 

I'd support "colossal", on the basis that it's relative to the size of the project and the funds available. That same sum would be a rounding error on HS2.

 

@21B makes a lot of sense here. Why are we doing CFL again? It increasingly looks and feels like "we must do something; this is something; therefore we must do this" which is a great way to make bad decisions. As has been repeatedly suggested in the last 300 pages, what we should do is pause, have a proper conversation about the options (the "Consultation" earlier in the year was nothing of the sort, as John Barton had the decency to admit in Lynton), and then in light of the available resources, plot a way forward across the L&B family together.

@marshall5 - as I understand it, the Planning Permission for Killington Lane requires it to be removed and the land remediated when the railway is extended. The KL loop is in any case offset to the north of the old formation, so the extenstion won't lead to it anyway.

 

KL is offset for exactly the reasons @21B mentions.

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Beddgelert is on a 1 in 47 and the WHR run round there relatively routinely.

I don't know if you're footplate crew anywhere, but 1 in 50, whilst a real gradient, isn't *that* horrible - if you manage to stuff things up badly on that with continous braked coaching stock, it would say more about the training and experience levels of the crew than the suitably of the location.

Try having to do a stop and restart on a wet day on a 1 in 19 with a rake of SG unfitted wagons and life can start to be interesting...

 

I am not familiar with the background to the re-opening of this station, other than to note from Wikipedia that HMRI approved it for running-round trains.

This would suggest to me that clearly there is a potential current NG precedent, also that that it is a good example where 'we' should not make assumptions about what the ORR might require if the L&BR have not already asked them. AIUI the ORR does not state 'requirements' anyway in the way that HMRI used to, but rather gives (or declines) approval for a scheme shown to be based on a risk assessment for the chosen method of operation.

However, the other issue with any temporary terminus at CFL is the apparent lack of space on the existing formation to provide a run-round loop anyway, hence my earlier somewhat tongue-in-cheek suggestion that it be built up on an American-style timber trestle - easier to chop down, burn down or blow up when no longer required than digging out lots of cutting infill ! Think of the film set potential for a new genre of 'oggie' Westerns

 

One thing which may have been over looked is and that the trackbed south of Killington Lane is going to need to be dug out, also as I understand it the trackbed around to CFL is going to be lower and could I suppose be almost level by the time it gets to CFL if a new lower level is being worked to, but I do not have an up to date plan of just what is proposed and what is going to happen.

Also where would you put all this extra spoil? The old plan was to use it to help fill in the embankment a bit, but since we won't have any access to it what is the point on extending the existing railway?

 

I do have experience. I’ve been footplate crew for longer than I care to recall among a number of other roles on railways.

Twice I have experienced a fully fitted train “pick up” it’s wheels due on both occasions not to heavy brake applications but very poor rail conditions. In both cases (one standard gauge and one narrow gauge) it took some distance to gather things back together. In both cases the speed was less than the line limit when the incident occurred.

Beddgelert is on the original site. The railway in fact never actually officially ceased operation if I recall correctly, and there is no other practical place the station could be, and the station is not a terminus with a hard stop at the end of the platform. CFL has none of those attributes.

The approach to Beddgelert is speed limited to 10mph and there are some serious curves that would also slow the train somewhat, and finally I am not sure that the gradient is right through the platform, it looks to me like it eases in the uphill direction and stays eased to the bottom of the reverse curve. Someone with greater knowledge than I will confirm or not. The speed restriction could apply, but not the curves of course at CFL.

Beddgelert is not always easy to leave in the uphill direction either. A couple of weeks ago the diesel needed a dozen attempts to leave with a garrett dead behind it (no train).

I don’t doubt the train is likely to stay where it is left on the 1:50. The issue is can you safely arrive and depart time and again in all weather conditions and with all foreseeable circumstances.

There are operational mitigations that could be employed, as I suggested, but there may well be a “don’t do it “ response as being the best possible mitigation. New station. New location. Going to be hard to argue for anything other than 1:500 maximum average gradient through the platform.

 

I seem to remember from many years ago that starting an uphill train from rest with an England at Penrhyn on the S-bend in typical Welsh liquid sun could be fun. Bill Hoole had quite a job getting going, and was not amused having to stop there.

 

My advise would be to not even consider any extension at the moment, until you have sorted out your issues, and are in a better situation, with the managerial problems you have, appear to have, at the moment there are too many things that could go badly wrong, and threaten the existence of the entire operation, until you have a clearer picture of the likily direction the future is taking, you need to secure what you have, and ensure you have a future, decide how you intend to move forward, you can't have half the board running off one way, disregarding the concerns of the others, that only endangers everyone, you can only move forward if you have a board that is moving in the same direction, land purchase, needs to be in the hands of one organisation, not several, and with people who can talk to people in a constructive way, not upset them to the point where they become impossible to deal with.

 

Wet weather isn't usually too bad in itself. A big issue on the F&WHR is railhead contamination from overhanging trees. In the summer after long dry spells you get honeydew and other stuff washing of the tree canopy when it rains and this makes it into an ice rink. Much worse than the rails just being wet. Likewise in the Autumn the leaf fall causes similar issues. There have been issues on the WHR with whole fitted trains locking up in the past. Cutting back overhanging branches solved the issues.

Although Beddgelert is regularly a terminus now this hasn’t been without incident. It certainly requires great care on the part of the train crew.