North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Yes they have a different business model but aren’t both providing a day out to somewhere nice by Steam Train to members of the public. PDSR and similarly Lakeside are more overtly tourist focus rather than heritage perhaps. It’s been a fair few years since I went to NYMR but I always felt it was ‘scenic’ rather than effortlessly heritage by comparison to somewhere like Worth Valley.

 

It was

 

You touch on a core debate. By all accounts I’ve seen, PDSR has gone to end to end trip only, dropping the intermediate stops. Debate here and elsewhere is the effect that focus on Whitby traffic, which can only be 3, maybe 4, trains per day has had on a railway that used to include significant traffic to the intermediate stations.

NYMR has also gone to considerable effort to maintain a heritage ambience - not least restoring the overall roof at Pickering.

If it were as you describe (and I don’t doubt your experience as a visitor), then that suggests that the charitable status is on a very shaky footing.

 

It would be interesting to know if any Heritage Line has done any meaningful analysis, but my take is somewhat aligned to @Paul_Turner that the great percentage of any line's daily visitors (not enthusiast related events) see it has a steam hauled sometimes scenic train ride. And although drifting off thread I believe the same applies to railtours that have no unique aspect (which of course is most of them).
Heritage aspects may be appreciated generically when there, I would need a lot of convincing that they make most choose to visit.

 

I remain to be convinced that the 12 month Gift Aid ticket was a success in any way. As an example, a friend said to me that he and his wife had just been on his fifth visit (last year). I asked him if they would have done that without gift aid. His answer was “probably not but we do tend to go two or three times a year. “ That’s a significant amount of revenue lost from those two people and I wonder how many other visitors to the line actually travelled more than once in a normal year, for want of a better term? We’ll never know.

 

I'm not sure that's true Steve. Surely we do know. The free return inside twelve months ticket required the purchaser to produce evidence of their orginal purchase each time in order to claim one further ticket for each subsequent journey so the details of who made further trips, and when, would be readily available. It's also known what the percentage uptake was with the vast majority not making any further journeys but neverthless enabling the railway to recover an extra 25% of the normal ticket price.

 

Tom, the VoR has been with us from the year dot. It is a narrow gauge railway that was run by the GWR and then BR. It is privately owned now. I don't think it can be called a heritage railway.

 

You'd have thought that a legal advisor to the HRA would read things a bit more carefully before commenting on them, wouldn't you? I don't think this is an isolated occurrence, either, which is why I tend to take his various pronouncements on the need for paid staff with a generous handful of salt! (And advise others to do so too!).

 

So, why haven't these figures been published, and why has last years Gift Aid offer effectively been scrapped if it was working so well?

 

I would often make three or four journeys per year and a gala. Last year, I did not renew my membership and bought a pass. I went to the diesel gala and had around twenty trips in addition to the first trip.
Talking to other passengers, many were doing multiple repeat journeys.

Goathland was busy on all trips with plenty of walkers and enthusiasts.

 

I think you could say the same about the BMR, it was always effectively a privately owned and run heritage railway.

 

BMR? You refer to it as a heritage railway, wheras I don't think that the VoR, because of its history, cannot be called a heritage railway.

 

The BMR surely reflects the heritage interests of its builder/owner?

 

I regard BMR and VoR as heritage railways, along with the PDSR. They sell themselves to prospective customers on a mixture of heritage and scenery, and do so effectively.

At least the PDSR and BMR are also commercial, as opposed to charitable, enterprises. Their operating practices reflect this, as do their corporate structures.

I suggest the difference between them and NYMR is not about “heritage”, but in whether their spirit and objectives are about being a preserved railway. In NYMR’s case, the “tell” is that the purposes of the railway include words like “museum” and “history”; it is not there to deliver a commercial return. The challenge for NYMR, made more complex by the constraints of the Whitby operation, is in maintaining that historical purpose while being financially viable.

 

I think the charitable status of the railway should be fine overall, so long as it is administered effectively.

Really, the railways function has evolved with the addition of trips into Whitby, but this has been happening for sometime. The previous management, was clearly laying the foundations for a business model that allowed Whitby to be a core route for passengers wanting to have a destination to go to. Really the comparison to be made is not with PDSR but with the Severn Valley Railway which sees several morning departures from Kidderminster to Bridgenorth before a similar return working. The method here is to get passengers that arrive at one end, there and back. With the carriage shed built and New Bridge able to out station engines this should be the method for running the NYMR. There is no need to drop intermediate stations (although Newtondale might be an option) as the SVR doesnt do this either and shows it can be done. There is still enough passengers to want to stop at other stations and goathlands popularity remains strong. Not everyone wants Whitby.

The problems have been caused by inconsistencies in the recent management team that has departed. This saw bookings at specific times there and back rather than flexibility, then the season ticket (that could allow the railway to claim gift aid) and then changes to price of the season ticket plus the additional 'donation'. Finally the reduction in price of day tickets has caused yet more frustration.

Whats needed is simple understandable and consistent ticketing and operations. The solution to this to be is fairly straight forwards. That the season ticket should be between Grosmont and Pickering only. That it should not include special events like a guest engine brought in for a week or any gala event. Whitby trips should need an additional supplement fare. It should also be set at a similar price point such as the £60-75 (a slight increase from what it was first rolled out). Yes people return and have a ticket for the train, but each time are spending in the shop and cafes. Two trips with this fare would still cover a break even point. Other venues across the region run a season ticket knowing that people dont often keep coming back over and over and over again. Its enough to get 2 or 3 trips in. Beamish is an excellent example of this.

The railway faces costs owing to the way its operating but trying to set back everything back to what it was before Whitby and season tickets is just to ignore the changes made and not use it to establish better operating. You also loose the passengers that have now become a core business model and whats actually needed is the engine fleet to get to Whitby without the need for changing engines and needing two locomotives. NELPGs fleet gives you engines that can form a core of the work from Grosmont, where as previously several years a go a fleet of Black 5's and 4MT's were a core of Whitby engines, plus now Repton and S15. With luck K1 could spend time at the Moors waiting on developments for the Jacobite operation to resolve themselves, but really the solutions are there. Making operations efficient and consistent is the new key issue - thats what needs to be focussed on, rather than additional staffing and faffing around with niche pet projects like a tram engine.

 

As you acknowleged the Gift Aid 12 months free return initiative generated well over £400k additional income at no cost. By any measure it was highly successful. It wasn't changed because it wasn't succeeding but because of a change in the railway's marketing/business strategy. It's harder to justify if the railway is operating five days a week rather than seven but the main down side was the limit of five days that, under HMRC rules, can be excluded from the free return offer. A common heritage railway response to the financial challenges is to offer more special customer experiences, sometimes at premium prices. such as the SNG visit, Galas, Flying Scotsman etc. A free return offer makes sense if it's only valid for ordinary timetabled services but much less so if the revenue foregone is a premium special experience fare.

 

The comment was a perfectly reasonable response. "Never pay for something a vounteer could do" assumes that the railway in question has volunteers. Where it doesn't that blanket advice to its General Manager clearly doesn't apply. You might say that it should accept offers from volunteers but some prefer not to for a variety of reasons.

 

It IS there to deliver a commercial return, indeed to be viable in the long term it must! The difference is that as a Charity all that return has to be re-invested in the railway not paid out to shareholders.

 

The Severn Valley Railway unlimited pass is £155 and the Swanage Railway annual pass is £149, both excluding special events so I would expect a NYMR annual pass to be at least that.

 

It wasn’t. It misses the point that this thread is about a railway that does have volunteers, even if it frequently of late has felt like their days on the NYMR might be limited.