North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

I think visitors must be down in April and May due to the steam ban.
Once steam returns, I think a big publicity drive on TV news etc would help. I'm sure many people would be pleased to make an extra visit to support the line if they thought things were looking shaky.

There has been criticism of the management, but I think even very good managers would struggle with the recent circumstances.
It is a pity the oil burners were not ready in time.

 

£350k is still quoted on the NYMR website at https://www.nymr.co.uk/pages/faqs/category/sponsorship which states:

Mind, the same page also has 'Laura Strangeway, Head of Marketing' as the contact so may well be out of date unless there has been a recent change in roles?

 

Both facts seem to me to clearly indicate how good she was - and is at the job of marketing!

 

Intrigued by this, I went onto the railways website and could not find the page that you are directing us to by searching on there and not simply clicking on your link. Their website is not the best, though, IMHO.

 

Interesting - it suggests that the intention is to make the link available to potential partners, but not to be browsed to.

 

Or, equally possible, it's a legacy page that has been unlinked from the navigation but not actually deleted.

Tom

 

I simply found it by typing 'NYMR passenger figures' into Google and it was the first result.

 

But if the webmaster has focused on navigation within the website...

 

Are you saying many enthusiasts would make an extra visit? That I might buy into.
I cannot believe that many members of the general public, especially holidaymakers, would say we will spend an extra £50 each to help the railway out at the expense of doing something else that day. It may be a heritage business, but I suspect most will see it as just that, a business that is struggling, like many in many sectors.

 

I'm less sure about an "extra" visit, but publicity might drive people to decide to visit when they otherwise might not have.

 

Fair point.

 

I feel a sense of deja vu coming on! I don't think a holidaymaker, having paid £50/head for a ticket to Whitby, is going to return at another visit at the same price, but they might if the second ticket was at a significantly reduced level and if they were convinced there was plenty to see and do along the route between Pickering and Grosmont. That means a serious and well thought out programme of advertising and information, delivered to them when they buy that first ticket. That means the in charge starting to think along the lines of making the NYMR worthy of visitors planning to make a two day visit. It needs to think in terms of Whitby being just a part of those two days, not the whole thing!

 

The tyranny of the (not so) frequently asked question…

 

Two of them right here, what you might call Quite-Content-To-have-Never-Wanted-To-Have-A-Nesters. And we recently planned our annual few days in north Yorkshire by sitting down and working out some figures.

• We have zero interest in joining the bucket & spade brigade to Whitby (done it once, no reason to do it again*).
• Therefore we're working on using the railway between Grosmont and Pickering.
• This time, if the NYMR were offering a day rover (or an annual pass) at a reasonable reduced rate for just the Grosmont to Pickering section (say £35 vice £49.50 and £150 vice £180 respectively), we'd have bitten its hand off.
• As it is, for us the day rover is now too expensive and the annual pass a lot too expensive, given that we would never use a lot of the mileage that you're paying for (i.e. Grosmont-Whitby).
• So, with the increasing financial pressure that we're all under and having to account for, it'll be a one or two station return for two people on one day and the rest of the time we'll do other things.

We absolutely sympathise with the NYMR's plight. However perhaps it should recognise that - although families are of course its biggest market - not everybody wants to go to Whitby.

* How many other people who have done the Whitby run only do it once (as 60044 has noted)?

 

A growth market could be traffic from Whitby into the Moors, with suitably branded tickets.

Speaking to people in Pickering at the station, quite a few have said they're not travelling as it's too expensive.

 

Meanwhile, the Nene Valley has cut its prices by around 27% to attract business...

 

It's got to be worth promoting, to fill seats that would otherwise be empty

 

Quite. If your traffic is strongly tidal, then the immediate growth opportunity (without driving extra service costs) is to try to fill the counter-tidal services ...

Tom

 

It is, but you do run the risk of alienating folks if Pickering to Whitby is £49.50 return but Whitby to Pickering is £25 return. You can see the headlines in some newspaper now.

Plus the public can be shall we say (being kind) not always attuned to how transport works. I read the other day someone had posted on Facebook that as all those trains going out of London in the morning rush were empty, why are they not used instead to make the inbound trains less overloaded.