North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Unlike a loco, I’ve no idea how much it keeps to maintain a coach over time but let’s make an educated guess at £10K/ coach/year for a typical mk1. Over a (say) 30 year overhaul cycle that’s £300K/coach which I believe is reasonable. A while ago the NYMR was looking to a service fleet of 40 vehicles. That’s £400K/year. I wonder what goes into the budget each year?

 

257 on yesterdays diner:






Richard

 

Good to see it running.

 

I have a feeling that if you are on top of the maintenance then that number isn’t far off. The problem though is that individual vehicles don’t probably need as much as that each year and so it can be easy to take a bit of a holiday, then discover you have a catch up to do.

 

Carriages can be a bit of minefield when it comes to putting figures against. Locos do tend to be easier as the costs usually boil down to coal/ water/ oil/ washouts/ steaming fees/ hire fees and transport fees.

Pre covid, there was an exercise completed on the SVR to determine cost per mile per vehicle. The average steam engine came out around £25-28 per mile to run. Carriages came in around £7-10 per carriage, per mile.

Using Toms Car 54 restoration costs of £750k. In the 20 year lifespan between overhauls, will the coach recoup the cost of the restoration? Dining cars, generally used less than your average TSO but each seat sold has higher price per head. Lets say Car 54 is used 100 days per year and sells out every trip. The average price per head is £100, 36 seats in the carriage, £3600 per trip, £36k net per annum, 2200 miles per year, £17 per mile the coach earns. You then start adding your costs for food, staff, marketing, cleaning and general running costs e.g. Paid staff salaries, examinations, maintenance, any running repairs, checking batteries, repaint/ revarnish, and the price per mile rises rapidly.

How do you quantify carriages like a BSK versus a TSO or an accesible carriage or a Buffet car.
Length of the railway comes into play when working out the cost per mile.

This is all worthy of a topic on its own.

 

I think there is a power ten error in your calculation (100 days would be a gross annual income of £360k, not £36k, based 100% occupancy) but as you say, probably worth a conversation elsewhere.

But taking this bit: "The average steam engine came out around £25-28 per mile to run. Carriages came in around £7-10 per carriage, per mile." The interesting point from that is that while an average train has one loco, it probably has around 5-6 carriages. So quite frequently it is the headline loco costs that people fixate on, but actually the carriages are costing twice what the loco is! Which puts into perspective arguments about coal costs and so on.

That in a nutshell is the heritage railway problem. Most railways budget for locos, because (comparatively) the lifetimes are fairly well defined and generally can't be extended much - so you have to keep up with maintenance, or pay hire fees. By contrast, infrastructure and carriages have huge costs but very long, and generally (within reason) extensible lifetimes, so they are easier areas in which to defer maintenance.

I don't have the figures to back it up, but I have a sense that on many railways, numbers of operational carriages are falling. To a certain level you can manage for a while - cut service sets from 7 to 6 to 5 carriages. So you can disguise the problem more easily than you can with locos - for a while.

Tom

 

Sorry Tom, Long day playing with O gauge locos. My scales were off somewhat.

Having sat and thought through some basics. Im going to use what I know from the SVR.

Carriage number 1234.
Overhauled on 12/10/2025
New upholstery £14k
New lino £3k
New timber £2k
Paint £2k
Door lock overhaul - 7 door locks @ £150 per lock = £1050
Labour 4000 hours @ £15ph = £60k
Overhaul total = £82,050

Yearly running costs
16 x R1 brake blocks = £700
2 x Vac bags = £120
2 x SH bags = £120
4 x maintenance periods with 3 members of staff @ £15ph - 1 hour per maintenance = £45/ £180 per annum
Yearly costs = £1120

Total costs including overhaul and yearly over 20 years = £104,450
Total cost per year =£5225.50. This is just to recoup the overhaul youve just completed and the yearly expenditure on brake blocks, vac bags etc

On the SVR we try to keep to a 20-25 year overhaul schedule. Try....
If carriage 1234 runs 200 days per annum with an average daily mileage of 64, thats 12800 miles per annum. 256,000 over the 20 years

£104,450 divided by the total mileage of 256,000 gives £0.40 per mile.

All this is before youve added in other day to day running costs across the railway, other paid staff, services, catering costs, commercial costs, infrasctructure costs. Hence the minefield.

Now if we just had a super computer that life itself formed part of its programming then its just 42.

 

Interesting figures, for which thanks. However, on the face of it, it seems to be a cheap overhaul. What about the couplings and bogies, especially tyre turning or replacement, Bearings, Armstrong oilers, springs, etc. they are not cheap items. There’s no mention of replacement for tin worm either, all of which are likely to be needed with coaches that are far from new.
It’s these sort of things that are currently sidelining the NYMR’s teak set (bringing it back on topic.)

 

Steve.

The figures are very back of a postage stamp. You easily spend 150k plus per overhaul. With that figure in mind it goes upto £0.67per mile.

As you mentions the teaks. The type of construction of the carriage will determine the materials used and cost of overhaul. I know that GN compo 2701 cost 137k to restore 10+ years ago.

It is a conversation worth having. Should railways be paying themselves whenever they use a vehicle so there is money in a pot somewhere to enable the railway to overhaul the vehicle.

 

Your last paragraph highlights a subject that I think gets regularly discussed. IMHO it would be pointless in having (say) a money box for each coach with money put aside for its next overhaul or maintenance. It could, however, go into a totalised maintenance pot on paper in the accounts from which overhauls and maintenance are funded. I’m sure all the accountants on here will have a term for it.

 

I think this is true. I can give you one data point. A railway I know, used to have 24 carriages in service pre-covid. Maintenance arrears / condition (depending on how you view things) took that down to a low of less than 10 which was mid 2020 so it didn’t matter, with 11 by the end of that year. The number has stabilised around the 15 or 16 mark. This is ok operationally, but not comfortable.

 

I'm no accountant but isn't that sort of thing called a sinking fund?

 

Dunno. I’d have thought a sinking fund was when there’s no longer any money in the bank. Not one the NYMR wants to have.

 

The difficulty there is that the "pot" gets eroded by inflation.

Another way to look at it would be to take your carriage requirement and overhaul plan. For example, suppose you aim to have 25 operational carriages and also aim to overhaul a carriage every 25 years. Then you need to resource your C&W department sufficient to overhaul one carriage per year. But that is subtly different from paying 4% of the cost of an overhaul into each of 25 separate funds, and then drawing down one of those funds each year when that carriage is due for overhaul. You'd hope that 25 years * 4% = 100% of the cost of an overhaul, but inflation will ensure it isn't!

The difficulty is that having a rolling budget then becomes easier to cut when times are hard. Take your C&W budget that has been sized to maintain a fleet of 25 with one overhaul per year - if you slice 10% off it, that's really equivalent to saying either "actually we only want 22.5 carriages in traffic" or "actually we are happy with a 27.5 year overhaul interval". Which is fine if you explicitly make the decision in those terms, but I suspect in many cases the consequences are not laid out in that fashion when such decisions are taken.

Hence my view of why keeping an eye on things like "how many carriages does the railway have available for traffic?" or "what percentage of the line is subject to a temporary speed restriction?" are probably important "canary in the coal mine" indicators of the health of a railway, every bit as much as just the headline profit or loss. It's much easier to show a profit if you don't keep up with the maintenance backlog!

Tom

 

I did a Web search, and "a sinking fund is a fund set aside from current income for the repayment of debt". I'm not sure the NYMR has one of those, either.

Noel

 

I suspect the annual running costs are bit light too. I follow the GCR's C&W FB page, which has regular reports of maintenance on the running fleet. I've lost count of how many times a rake has been brought into Rothley for its annual exam, and coach x has had to be lifted for some steam heat pipe to be replaced, or coach y has had to have an unexpected buckeye overhaul, or coach z has had to have leaks in its toilet plumbing repaired, for example. None of these are free... and given the sort of mileages being quoted for SVR carriages (or NYMR, given which thread this is) I think it's unreasonable to expect even an overhauled-to-as-new vehicle to run for 20+ years without requiring quite a few such repairs along the way. (I'd expect repaints every few years too.)

 

I remember, from my time in the business end of the computer world, all the tricks companies can play (within the accounting rules, amazingly enough) to make the headline profit or loss numbers look good - for unwary investors (or should we perhaps call them 'fools', since they and their money are soon parted). My favourite one was shipping incomplete units (completely empty chassis, in one famous case) so they could book the 'sales'. Which suggests a variant on the famous line (which neither Disraeli nor Twain uttered): 'Lies, damned lies and financial statements'.

I especially like the "what percentage of the line is subject to a temporary speed restriction" one. Very astute!

Noel

 

That also assumes that said 10% budget cut aligns neatly with the flow of work. Given how lean most preservation operations are, and the tendency towards costs being "lumpy", the impact is liable to be greater than you suggest.

Absolutely

 

I'm not an accountant, but I would suggest that a 'reserve fund' might be an appropriate term to use.

 

Is it the restoration fund for this . . . https://www.merseyferries.co.uk/about/u-boat-story/