North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Locomotion No 1 - sold out, Mad Alice - sold out, FS - sold out. For all the errors some events are producing.

 

Garth, please read your post again ‘For all the Errors some events are producing’ What exactly are these events producing if there are errors being produced?

 

Do you not think you might be better off with some sort of formal communication with those at the top with those ideas you have?
I really don’t think name calling on a forum like this gives you much credibility.

 

Bottom line is. Railways like the Moors and WHR need to become alot cheaper.

my family income is pretty decent. However we just cannot afford to undertake full line journeys on alot of these railways. Thats with TOC discount.

it has always felt to us that the railways always aim for the retired market. People with alot of disposable income.

My question is this: what happens when that generation is no longer with us? Over £100 for a family of 4 when we have the rest of a holiday to achieve is unrealistic.

case point, a WHR journey this winter with Santa for a family of 4 standard class is £111 plus booking fee (no idea how much that is) for not even a full line journey, plus fuel/accommodation around Christmas when purses are straining anyway, is just mind blowing. I have just looked and I could fly us all to Dublin and back for cheaper.

 

Even pensioners need to budget! It was better value on some when we had children and we could get a family deal
For examplevWHR same cost whether 2 adults or 2 adults plus 2 under 16s


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its not about good value, i agree family tickets are better, but if that family ticket is still for example £150+ it’s still unreachable for a lot

 

Family (2+2) family tickets were available at the same cost as 2 adults travelling the full line. Also, 2-stop eg Pickering- Goathland, at £25 were available which for 15 miles is a comparable price for most heritage railways. Also available from the booking office was the 3-stop at £35. I’m using passed tense given the effective end of the season.

 

But what would it cost you to stay in Dublin?

 

It doesn’t matter. I think @76079 is making a great point about perceived value and how many people will look at the price of a ticket. The problem is that in order to cover the cost of running a railway the ticket price must be high. If the price were reduced the number of passengers needed to be carried would probably not come and /or could not be carried on the existing numbers of trains, so the costs would rise, probably faster than the revenue increase. We’ve been there before.

The only alternative to that might be not to run all the trains all the way through the railway - which both the FR and WHR do and thus offer services at different price points with genuinely different costs.

 

The question of prices is a difficult one. I suspect that an abbreviated Pickering-Goathland services, crossing with a Grosmont-Levisham one at reduced prices might be popular, but for the loss of the run-round loop at Goathland and the clash with services to and from Whitby. At some point there has to be recognition of the fact that prices have risen rather faster than inflation in recent years, and passenger numbers seem to have fallen. Could the two stats be somehow related? I think that what it all boils down to is that costs have run away out of control and need to be brought back under control, to enable fares to be reduced to amore attractive level. There's no single area that will not have to change in order to get there.

 

Without getting into if £49.50 is the correct price for the NYMR or a similar high price for the WHR long lines with a a lot of probably ageing infrastructure are never going to cost a lot less.
I accept many have financial issues that put things out of reach or beyond what folks are prepared to pay, but post Covid things now just cost a lot more in all industries not just Heritage Railways. That of course has been impacted by the Russian war and its, along with Trump's impact on global trade.
How do you propose the ticket price "becomes a lot cheaper"? What magic bullet is out there that I and all the railways are missing that allows them to insulate themselves from economic reality?

Pre Covid I could steward a CME from my home in Swanage for around £120 including travel and two nights hotel. Now it is virtually impossible to get the hotel for under £200 for two nights, let alone the increased rail fares to London. So I do very few tours any more, not because I cannot afford it, but because personally I think it is too much to spend a day getting utterly knackered and pay over £200 for the "privilege". Pretty much the same with attending many gala's, it is not the gala ticket, it is all the costs that go with it to attend. If you made the NYMR ticket £20 return yes more would travel, but the railway would soon go bust and those who cannot afford to go to Yorkshire because of all the extra associated costs, travel, accommodation, food, would still not be travelling anyway.

Sometime things just cost what they do, whatever the perception the public have. Maybe the NYMR should be £40 not £50, no idea, but one thing is sure it will not be £22 that it costs for an 11 mile round trip at Swanage or £28 for a 20 mile round trip at the MHR to name but two. What is your "a lot cheaper" price for a 48 mile round trip, some of with comes with NR imposed costs?

 

Yet more poor timekeeping today, 1115 arrival from Pickering, arrived Grosmont 1148, 4472 front, 9F rear, so can see how it takes time to do double run rounds at each end, but surely this could and should have been factored in.

1140 departed 1226.

Diner passenger joining the Moorlander at Goathland 1250. will be kicking their heels in the damp conditions.

 

agree with all of this. Never said I have any answers.

however I used to be extremely active in preservation and the hobby as a whole.

time and money pressures have put paid to it basically.

priced out of model railways with the average loco costing around £200. DCC over complicating everything.

it’s that very word that is killing the movement over complication. I want a reasonably priced ticket from end to end. My kids don’t really care what’s on the front because they can’t stick their heads out of the window now anyway.

we’re trying to overhaul too much, extend too much, build new too much.

I’ve visited a few railways over the last couple of years, a lot crying out for coats of paint, clean loos and none plastic sandwiches. (Catering enterprises seems to be the norm creeping in) yet you look in the workshops and wow we’re still trying to overhaul 7 different engines 4 of which aren’t actually suitable for the railway they are due to operate on.

hard choices need making, more volunteers need recruiting. Can’t save everything or achieve everything.

for me it should be consolidate not complicate

 

Fundamentally the issue is the cost of living crisis. Until that is resolved and wages start rising in real terms again, luxuries will remain out of reach for many

 

The amount of comment and passion the NYMR reflects just how much genuine love and goodwill there is for it from us - the enthusiast bedrock. The negativity stems from us feeling like that love isnt being reciprocated - that being seen through the inconsistant fare policy, the strange timetable, the apparent antipathy towards the history of the line and the 'commercialisation' that seems single focussed on Pickering to Whitby to the detriment of all else.

I think the current NYMR image jars with what was on TV only very recently in 'The Yorkshire Steam Railway: All Aboard' and this is a lost opportunity - I know for a fact a lot of people visited the line solely because they learnt about from the programme. The NYMR really needs to do what SVR did when Gus Dunster took control - get back to doing what it has traditionally done well and get all of us batting for it.

 

Earlier on this year the railway ran 60007 twixt Pickering & Grosmont for £30. The trains were full That indicates to me that this fare is acceptable to Joe Public. Extrapolating that to Whitby would give a fare of £40, let’s say £39 for psychological reasons. To get. £6m fare income at that level would require about 154,000 passengers. Depending on how many days you run would depend on how many passengers/day but let’s say 200. That’s only 770/day or 385 on each of the two morning trains from Pickering to Whitby. Those should be achievable figures and exclude the morning train from Whitby each day and all the non-Whitby services. They are obviously simplified and don’t include child and other reduced fares but I think that they show a lower fare combined with historically achievable passenger numbers could produce a suitable return. £6m is obviously short of current turnover but this figure excludes the likes of divers, secondary spend, donations and other non primary income.
That’s only half the story, though. The elephant in the room remains the high wages costs created by high staff levels and that really needs to be addressed. People can always come up with reasons why a person needs to be employed to do any particular job and it takes a good manager to satisfactorily eliminate jobs without eliminating the necessary tasks.
I strongly believe that getting to the sweet spot in terms of fares and controlling staff costs are the two things that need to be addressed. Anything else is a bonus.

 

I know I bang on about the NYMR management being short of imagination, but perhaps I should give them more credit - are they trying to make the Fylingdales area a major destination for bog snorkeling?.....

 

Good points, and despite what other scaremongers have said, none of us is suggesting a decimation of the paid staff, jut a meaningful reduction - and for my part I'd start out by taking a long, hard look at the inhabitants of Park Street; the there are posts there that I'm sure are not needed/unaffordable, and others that could be combined. But I would also add a third thing that needs to be done, and that's improving the offering on internal Pickering-Grosmont services, and rediscovering the roots of the NYMR as a heritage railway.

 

“Keep our prices down and our numbers up. “ “When people come they expect value for money. “. Two quotes from Graham Lee (Stafford Barn) at the HRA conference.

 

I agree with the second one.
The first one is not a given as Saphos can appear to testify to (as can many now bankrupt airlines)