North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

....And Gladiator 5076 wonders why I call them the "management shower"????

 

....And Gladiator 5076 wonders why I call them a "shower"??? I wonder if some of the problems are there because it's a weekend and there's no-one at work, despite it being potentially the one of the busiest days of the year?

 

I do wonder why you did call them a management shower, and still wonder

 

The test of any customer facing business is how it responds in a crisis. By all accounts the management and all involved yesterday did a great job in getting everyone back where they needed to be. No mean feat organising road transport over a bank holiday weekend. They all deserve credit.

 

That's all well and good, but should the customer facing staff have been put in that position to start with? With all the recent dry weather, lineside fire/s the other week and the recent steam ban, was it really a sensible decision to run steam on the Goathland to Levisham section yesterday?

 

The fire was over 100 acres in size, according to North Yorkshire F&R Service. And judging by the photograph provided earlier in this thread, was in difficult terrain, hence the number of crews required to fight it. Not an easy job. We do not know the information given to the railway by the fire service but that would be either mandatory or advisory, suffice to say that information would be acknowledged by the railway.. With a good wind fire spread could be an outcome. A map in only half the story

 

You surely don't expect an answer to the question you posed , do you? Typically, (as with politicians), he'll answer the question he would have preferred you to have asked asked, and focus on the positive answer. See upthread for other examples of the same, or questions being asked or points being made, but never answered.

 

Manifestly as it turns out the decision to revert to steam was premature. The pressure to meet visitor expectations over the Easter weekend is huge with criticism of an all diesel response to the lineside conditions. Sometimes a judgement call can be wrong but the desire to provide what the vast majority of visitors want is understandable.
A well intentioned error of judgement still doesn’t detract from the commendable management response to its consequences.

 

No shortage of Monday Morning Quarterbacks on here.

 

I am sympathetic to this perspective. When travelling last Thursday I was alarmed at how dry the lineside looked over that section (and mentioned it in my subsequent post) but the reality is that people really want steam - as has been advocated by many on this thread. The pressure on a the business to put steam in place as soon as possible must be immense.

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I thought all customers wanted to go to /from Whitby by train ..something not provided yesterday afternoon or this morning …
Or are you referring to dining passengers demand steam ?

 

The BBC weather forecasts for the last 10 days have been showing rain on most days but has never materialised.

 

Wouldn’t a much lower risk approach have been to run with a diesel inside the steam locomotive?
This would have kept most of the general public satisfied as they could still take the family to admire the loco etc?
Or do other factors prevent this?

 

In the past when locos like 4277 and D200 were NYMR based trains were steam hauled but diesel piloted from Goathland to the signal before Levisham crossing ,would come off there and drop into the front of the train to Goathland etc .
Trains were hourly on a Sunday and visitors paid to visit the railway not pass through on their way for fish and chips .
Assume today it would require atleast two more paid footplate employees and a diesel hire fee and fuel (will ignore for convenience the reduced consumption of expensive coal ,water ,bus hire ,passenger compensation etc ).

 

Why two paid footplate?

 

As
As a Levisham signalman I have fond memories of loco swaps there with a shuttling diesel between there and Goathland. That’s despite Levisham not being signalled for such manouvres and the impossibility of running to time with such swops. Maybe either or both of those constraints might be the reason for not following that option?

 

If that was the reasoning then it was foolish in the extreme. The dry state of the lineside was known and I'd have thought that caution at any cost (even with time keeping!) would be better cheaper in the long run than throwing said caution to the wind. It isn't as though the NYMR haven't regularly faced fire risks before! Maybe this was a consequence of the single slip at Goathland being removed and not replaced, making loco swaps harder but I would hope that there ought to be ways of adding a waiting diesel to a train at either Levisham or Goathland, or vice versa, detaching it, that wouldn't wreck the timetable. If that's not the case, then maybe the timetable is inadequately written.

 

Driver and secondman ..

 

I guess the question is more “why paid?”

My first visit to the NYMR was summer 1995. I seem to recall steam worked Grosmont - Goathland and Levisham - Pickering, with a diesel doing the bit in the middle. We arrived back very late and had to hitch hike back to my then girlfriend’s house in York due to having missed the last bus! Happy days …

Tom