Teifi Valley Railway

Some serious governance issues highlighted here which may be relevant to many smaller societies and clubs with significant assets but small numbers of active supporters.

 

The book sounds as if it would be an interesting read. Title and author please!

 

What now interests me is that there apparently is nobody interested in this situation in which it's possible to just stop sending in annual accounts. Companies House can't do anything, the accountant who used to do their accounts does not reply to emails, the ORR is only interested in safety issues, and HMRC express no interest. So they get away with it ...

 

Book is called Ower Deliberations by Atlas D'four.

 

I feel the TVR is something of a cautionary tale. One that trustees and members of other railways should reflect upon.

 

Maybe and you can't doubt that ripping up the track was a massive issue that has set them back years. But on the other hand, you can't measure the success based on one disaffected volunteer. Other volunteers do post positive news so things are not all bad.

 

The book repeats that it's all the fault of there being 2 organisations involved, the Company and the Society, and how it would be impossible to achieve any commercial success in those circumstances. This ignores the success achieved in the nineties and the painful fact that any setup depends on the character of the people involved.

 

Is Atlas D'four a pen name?

 

Yes - Elizabeth identified the author in post #1100 on Tuesday.

 

And the fact that it was started by the volunteers of the Society and wouldn't even have existed without them!

 

Regardless of the rights and wrongs of all this, the "Teifi Valley Railway Disaster" Facebook page should be required reading for anyone involved in the governance of a heritage railway. Certainly I insisted that my fellow Trustees read this (whether they did, and whether they absorbed the lessons - who knows?). Far too easy to ignore difficult governance issues and worry about what colour the coaches should be.

 

I bought and read the book and I found it really interesting. Nothing departed from my understanding of the story that I gained from here and the old Facebook page, and I found it very interesting to hear it from somebody else. Having spent a fair bit of time around narrow gauge railways it didn't seem like a controversial portrayal of what it is like or what happened at the TVR. I also didn't think the portrayal of "Eleanor" was damning apart from some mild sarcasm for effect, although no doubt I would take it differently if it was a very thinly disguised description of me.

If you can get past the slightly (but not excessively) esoteric writing style and a brief diversion into the history of National Socialism it is worth a read if you are at all curious about what it is like to be involved in the running of a volunteer heavy small railway. You can swap the character names for any number of people you encounter, including myself

 

Note your comments on the book. Some items that somehow got left out:
1. 4 months into the contracts Dearing stopped paying his fees and never resumed regular payments. This left the Company with no regular income.
2. Dearing refused to make any contribution to the quarterly bills for electricity, water and phone. I insisted on making a deduction from the payments the railway had to make to him.
3. Every morning in 2014 Dearing's workers would start up a diesel loco to take a small works train down the line, supposedly to surveying the track, cutting back the lineside vegetation, maintaining the fencing and clearing the platforms. It turned out that what they were doing was cutting down lineside trees. A new shed appeared in the Yard, containing a large machine that converted the timber into cute little logs for sale to the public. Guess where the money went ...
4. Clearance of the carriage shed was carried out by workers who could not tell the difference between a piece of scrap metal and a vital component of Sgt Murphy, awaiting the return of its boiler at the time. Something very heavy also struck the front bar of the engine, causing severe damage. Nobody had any idea how this had happened - although Sanderson had supervised the work.
5. Dearing had to rely on Sanderson to convince railway members that the first mile of track had to be lifted. He had reached agreement with the local timber company that they would cut down the spruce plantation only if there was this convenient access along the trackbed. Access for the very large timber felling machines was otherwise impossible. But the book shows innocent Sanderson believing that the track would be relaid in October ...

 

Last disclosures of financial information from any part of the Teifi Valley Railway:
Railway Society - 31/12/2020
TVR Ltd - 31/12/2020
Busy Bee Cafe - 31/12/2017
All documentation is severely overdue but the attitude seems to be that everything is confidential.

 

A picture from another universe ... as Companies House once again threaten to close the Company down.

 

Why not just let it fail then start another? - The new company picking up the pieces of the railway and the volunteers and discarding all the managerial trouble makers and/or questionable finance people? (Obviously making sure that the BB Co. takes nothing from the railway as, as I understand it, they have neither leased nor bought anything from the company and have never been shown in the accounts to have provided any income to the company.)

 

And even aside from the LRO any new company would have to have enough money, on day 1, to buy the assets from the liquidator.

 

Update: Companies House threatened to strike the Company off since the last Accounts reached them in March 2022. But Mrs Cox has played the same trick as before and for the fourth time found an objector to closure. Anything rather than let the public know what has been done with their money!