North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

I believe we very much agree on not artificially limiting the potential pool of directors/trustees. Surely insisting on a track record of previous volunteering on the railway in another capacity would do just that?

 

Surely that depends on the skills you are seeking to recruit to the board?

 

No, and I wouldn’t mandate that. I think that such experience can be very helpful, but I don’t think it should be mandated.

Ultimately, it is for the members to decide who should lead their organisation. If a nominations committee exists, then I don’t believe it should exclude anyone except insofar as there is reason to believe they are not eligible. Those reasons are typically few and far between.

A board (guided by, but not directed by) a Nominations Committee may choose to indicate which amongst multiple candidates is preferred, but I do not see how it can exercise that by expressly refusing to allow some candidates to go before the members for election. If nothing else, it reinforces the notion that the board is just a cosy boys club, and the members are not to be trusted. Not I would suggest a good look when you are simultaneously appealing to those same members for financial and other support.

Tom

 

If the only skills and qualifications are those available from those with a previous record of volunteering it must restrict the pool of potential talent.

 

Indeed - which is why I think it's important to be positive about which other skills you're seeking to recruit for.

For example, I would be slightly surprised if the trust board specifically recruited for volunteers in specific trades, say signalling, but would entirely understand if they made a point of looking for someone with experience of corporate governance.

 

I find it amazing that you trot out a figure of a guessed one of 20% returnees and, by implication made a decision to go ahead on that basis. That’s dangerously close to the figure of 25% that would make the 12 month gift aid scheme a nil return one and, once that figure goes over that threshold, it becomes a loss making scheme. I have mentioned previously my friend and his wife who generally visited three times a year and have done several times more in the last months. Based on two extra visits, the loss of income from them is equal to the gift aid from sixteen gift aided fares. That’s 4 fares at full price lost (say £50 ea for convenience) = £200 divided by the £12.50 extra that would be received from a gift aided fare and all that the railway has to show for it is the £25 my friends originally gave. It is apparently known that one person has travelled over 100 times on his 12 month ticket. How many times would he have travelled and paid full fare, I wonder? The fact that it has been running at an acknowledged 40% shows that it has been a significant loss making venture. Added to that, even if people didn’t gift aid, they still got the same 12 months according to the rules.
Which idiots made the decision to go ahead with the scheme?

 

I suspect that the person you are responding to was one of them....... but I think you have to look with even more scorn at the FD; even my copy of MSExcel has a function that allows" what if" situations to be anticipated, taking some of the guesswork out of the equation, I believe - surely this outcome could have been modelled in advance and the offer withdrawn or recalculated? If it wasn't, why is the NYMR paying ca. 90K/yr for his services? Is it only the Trust board where people have to prove their competence?

 

Models are only as good as the assumptions that go into them - and that means taking views on probabilities too.

 

I wonder if the debate for gift aiding fares went like this:

There is consumer resistance to the level of our fares, I wonder if asking for them to have added value and be gift aided will significantly improve revenue?

Or this:

Lots of other attractions are asking customers to gift aid their entry fee, let's do that because others are doing it?

Sawdust.

 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing! The Gift Aid option was carefully researched beforehand taking advice from organisations that had introduced it successfully. If the railway is not prepared to experiment with new options such as Gift Aid it will stagnate. They may not always work out but surely willingness to try new ideas is commendable?

 

Even if that rule was implemented (and I don’t think there are many arguing for it), can you not see how utterly stupid it is to then restrict the pool of candidates even further by having a NC with veto powers?

 

Hindsight doesn't enter into it, when I heard the details it sounded like a disaster in the making. Indeed nobody I spoke to thought it a sensible idea.

Sawdust.

 

That's interesting, because as an outsider without access to data, and as a consumer who has done similar deals elsewhere, I thought that it was a good idea that should work - as it does in many other places. I am still surprised that it has not, and that NYMR are so specifically vulnerable to reuse eroding returns.

I do however question the quality (NB - not quantity) of analysis prior to the decision, as a number of the issues discussed on here appear not to have been fully considered. This suggests to me that NYMR's understanding of its customers was a lot weaker than I would have assumed, and that the sensitivity analysis was correspondingly weak. Given the decisions made a few years prior to limit members' benefits, in part because of "excessive" use eroding the value of membership payments*, the inconsistency surprises me.

* - a different matter, where a combination of pedantry and a failure to properly understand the difference between cost and opportunity cost were IMHO at work.

 

Hindsight is indeed wonderful. However,

the decision was made on an estimated 20% and that was too close to the break even as demonstrated by my simple calc. It would be a brave person or a fool who would go ahead on that basis. Was the calculation not done and, if not, why not?

 

..... but isn't the point of paying large amounts to what is effectively a financial consultant (aka the FD) to have someone competent building that model? And shouldn't the people around them, notably the salaried financial controller and the CEO be providing input into that model, as well as other Directors? Doesn't it paint a rather sad picture of all round lack of competence? It does to me, at least, I'm afraid.

 

Yes I guess I was thinking instead of the annual pass.

 

Better to stagnate than go backwards …all we heard was comparisons to Beamish,even my elderly mum saw the failings with that comparison.
To work the revisitors need to have significant secondary spend and not be a park and free ride facility .
When visiting Beamish where do you buy your ice cream ,beer,refreshments etc ?Even my mum
when asking the same question re NYMR answered Whitby or Wetherspoons !

 

I will offer a thought as to why nominations committees are undesirable. They erode trust between the board and volunteers. All organisations need trust in order to remain functional. Why do they erode trust? Because quite often they intentionally or otherwise have the effect of diminishing the contribution made by volunteers to the railway. If the the NC is seen not to value volunteering as one of the key experiences it would like to have in its trustees, and I mean volunteering on the “shop floor” what message is sent to that shop floor. In terms it will be, we don’t value you.
Of course you want a balance of skills. Of course it’s right to have some trustees from outside the organisation. But it must be also right to ensure that there is , and is seen to be a voice of the volunteer at the board level. Otherwise, surely you cannot be surprised if volunteers wonder if they’re no longer valued.

 

The boards of both the Trust and PLC appear to be of a mindset that external appointments are good and appointments within are bad. This is especially so with regard to paid managers, virtually all of whom have no experience or understanding of volunteers. A classic from a couple of years ago was the appointment of a Footplate manager who had no experience of railways, locomotives or volunteering although he did own an old bus. He was seemingly brought in for his management skills, as established from his CV and interview. . One of his first acts was to sack all the footplate inspectors (bar me for some reason, perhaps because I looked after rostering) and bring in new ones from the people who he had met in his first couple of months at the railway and been impressed with. There was little regard for experience; indeed one person had only been passed for driving a couple of months. Needless to say that didn’t go down well with a few of the old order who decided it was time to go. The manager lasted about a year before deciding to go and the job subsumed into the operating manager’s role.

 

Whilst trying something new is always commendable, the dynamics of a preserved railway are very different to, say, Beamish.

Beamish is a brilliant place; but once I’ve been, I probably won’t go again for a few years. It offers the same things each day as good as they are. It doesn’t entice, or probably want, regular repeat custom.

A preserved railway is different. People keep returning to steam engines. They like seeing the scenery change as the seasons. They want to ride on different locos, or even just get a buzz. It is more akin to a theme park mentality, where those in the local area travel many times. Online booking today would cost me £34, or an annual pass £139, or just over four visits at full price. The SVR annual pass I think is six day tickets? That seems fair. A very small number of local devotees will travel more than that, and they probably show loyalty in other ways too.

The decision for the pass, and the pr backlash that followed when it was rescinded, truly beggars belief even this far down the line.