North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

I know it's all very simplistic, but those sort of figures show why the railway is struggling so much. Assuming 250 passengers, then £3500 per train is £14 per person return on a normal day. But on a Sunday, there's only really three return trips, the other two are the autocar with limited seating. So you're only really spreading the cost over 3 services, not 6.

And that's simply to cover wages! If the turnover is £8m, then in simple terms the railway needs to average nearly £43,000/day on running days to cover all costs. I'm sure that's easy in the summer, but cutting down on the number of running days off peak doesn't seem to be the right way to go about it - you're still paying wages aand accumulating costs, but you're not getting any income to offset it.

 

Didn’t say I was. I was simply trying to make the point that it has been exceptionally dry around here for the last 2 weeks.

 

No it is not right, but has been effectively reposted as fact, when in fact cab crew (driver / fireman or secondman) are unpaid.

 

The ecosystem is completely different from BR days.

 

They were indeed simplistic figures. Mine were based on the current WTT, which excludes such as Santas and the odd evening diner but these all go to simply show the size of the current problems. £43,000 based on 6 trains/day and a £49 fare means that each train has to carry 146 passengers to break even. However, not everyone pays the full rate fare of £49. There are pre bookings, children and, quite significantly, coach parties, who pay considerably less. Conversely, there's secondary spend and all other sources of non-fare derived income.

 

er....that's not quite right. Yes, the vast majority of footplate turns are covered by volunteers but, when a diesel is required at short notice, the driver is often a member of paid staff if no volunteer is immediately available.

 

If you were so certain why did you not simply reply to that effect to me or Tom? I am not even the messenger here! As @Steve observes (and not uniquely to the NYMR) it is not necessarily a volunteer.

 

As it was the hypothetical situation of common sense of a diesel pilot over the middle section then it was never fact .However ,I’ll believe the ex loco crew roster clerk over the TTI for the facts rather than what the mushrooms are fed from above .

 

I always thought that such paid staff, when they “volunteer” to cover such footplate turns (when no volunteer is otherwise available) are not actually paid for such footplate duties. Nevertheless, to say infer that all footplate staff are paid is not fair on those that do volunteer; I gladly volunteer on the railway but would be very upset if people thought I was being paid, in which case I might as well be paid.

 

It is not a hypothetical situation as I was talking with a volunteer driver, who said he’d has previously volunteered for such turns (diesel piloting between Levisham and Goathland), and he commented it wasn’t an enjoyable turn but still did it.

PS and my post re paid / unpaid footplate staff was based on my earlier conversation with him. So believe who you will.

 

Within the footplate department there are a number of paid staff. These people generally give their time freely and volunteer for turns. However, there are times when the railway is short of crew and a member of paid staff has to be taken off his normal job and put on the footplate. In such cases they are usually paid because they have not volunteered. Looking at the roster for April I would think (but don’t know) that three of fourteen turns undertaken by staff would be paid. That’s out of something like 300 turns, not including cleaning turns.
Incidentally, I was told by one of these paid staff that the now departed Head of People had told him that he shouldn’t be volunteering as his days off were meant to give him time away from the railway.

 

It's hard I think to be prescriptive. For example, consider two railways. Railway A has a large workshop with paid staff and does most of its overhauls in house. Railway B has no similar workshop, and sends locos and carriages away to be overhauled by private contractors.

The result will be that Railway A seemingly has a much high staff budget as a proportion of turnover, but will be spending rather less than Railway B on external contracts.

So context is everything. My hunch is that the in-house option probably works out cheaper (because you don't have to pay a profit margin that the external contractor would require). On the other hand, the contracted-out option is potentially beneficial in severe downturns (such as happened in 2020) since it is likely that a railway with lower fixed overheads, is less susceptible to a sudden downturn in revenue.

In practice, you can see the model in lots of areas, not just workshops. For example, some railways have large catering operations (which likely give rise to high headcount at least when looking at staff numbers); others will essentially sub-contract catering to a third party, with lower staff numbers and lower wage bill, but likely a lower up side in profits when times are good. Ultimately, it is a risk / reward thing for each railway's business model.

The difficulty the NYMR seem to be in is that they have high fixed overheads which can't easily be scaled back; so they are making budget savings by looking at the variable costs, notably cutting services (days of operation and number of trains each day). But the impact of that is to spread the fixed overheads over a smaller passenger base, with the result that each passenger is having to cover a larger proportion of the fixed costs. If you have, say, a marketing budget of £250k per year (staff costs and advertising) then is starts to be come a significant factor in the ticket price as to whether you amortise that cost over 300k annual ticket sales or 150k. And that's just marketing, the picture is magnified for the big ticket items like infrastructure renewals when they start to get shared over a smaller passenger base ...

Tom

 

The railway obviously doesn't want too many situations like this, with hordes of frustrated passengers and stressed staff. I also feel for whoever made the wrong decision to re-introduce steam working - they won't forget it in a hurry.

Although the NYMR may have been able to cope with fire-risk periods through diesel or mixed steam-diesel haulage, I'm surprised that the railway (and others running through areas of high fire-risk) haven't much pursued the option of oil-fired steam locomotives. I appreciate that oil-firing has historically been little used in Britain, but that was surely because good quality coal was available from within the country, usually plentiful and relatively cheap. Those conditions no longer apply. Furthermore, climate change seems to be progressively increasing the fire-risk hazard.

According to the last filed NYMR annual report and accounts, the railway has had difficulty with recruitment and retention of both paid and volunteer staff. I don't know how well supplied they are with engine crew, but doubling up with steam and diesel haulage looks a significant overhead.

I recall that many years ago (1980s, pre-"Heartbeat"?), the Chair or GM of the NYMR was quoted in one of the magazines as worrying about the on-going viability of an 18-mile preserved railway. It is not just the length of track and numbers of structures to be maintained, but sufficient train-sets to operate the longer railways with a reasonable service frequency. In later years, the NYMR appeared to thrive, but is now affected by cost pressures similar to other lines. From a cursory look at some annual reports, I think the NYMR remains Britain's leading heritage railway in overall turnover - and overall operating costs. Is that correct?

 

AIUI No. 3672 will be converted to oil burning during its current overhaul. Nevertheless, the costs of oil firing remain a significant challenge at present. I recently asked a representative of the Ffestiniog & Welsh Highland Rlys whether they had any plans to revert to oil burning (which, of course, they used from the 1970s to the mid-2000s). His response was that, despite the recent rise in coal prices, coal remains significantly cheaper than oil. In the past the FfR kept its fuel bills down by using waste oil, but increasingly strict COSHH regulations now make that much harder to do.

Sent from my SM-A125F using Tapatalk

 

It’s all sounding a bit W1A?

 

I think you need to write to the CEO of the NYMR explaining this point of view. As someone whose background is in publicity I suspect she may not have thought about it!

 

The NYMR isn't converting either the WD or, sooner, the S!60 to oil-burning as a cost-saving measure, though, it's because they will (in theory) reduce the risk of lineside fires at the ever-increasing dry spells. If successful I would expect more conversions to follow. I suspect waste vegetable could could be an option if the railway invested in the facilities to turn it into biodiesel but then obtaining suitable quantities could be a problem - even in a part of the country rich in fish & chip shops to provide feedstock! And, of course, it would probably be necessary to build a processing plant for the purpose, so probably quite a bid investment.

 

It's all beef dripping up there isn't it…?

Simon

 

What about percentages for a railway that has several marketing people on the payroll AND uses an external agency ?
Or employees maintenance and overhaul staff then subcontracts some boiler repairs and new tender fabrications etc out to third parties ?

 

I think there's another angle here - and that is what value of work is done by volunteers, by department. Only when you cost that in as a notional cost do you get a true comparison.

However, I do then absolutely agree on the next part of the jigsaw - which is that having those costs as fixed costs on the payroll raises the stakes in terms of the income that the railway must earn, and that spreading that fixed cost across fewer workings raises the stakes for each of those that does run.