North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

There was always a degree of "flogging the log" with this return as with one railway that I was closely involved, when I reviewed the returns from previous years it was obvious that the compiler had been rather enthusiastic shall we say. A good example from the past was the West Somerset that convinced itself that over 200,000 passengers were being carried and additional track capacity would be required. Following an audit it became apparent that the internal reporting was suspect and the actual figure was rather less. There was no more talk of rebuilding the loop at Kentsford.

To add to complication some railways reported in the same manner as the "big " railway ie one return ticket is counted as two journeys. Now this makes sense for NR but most heritage railways only sell return tickets and they are interested in the number of passengers/visitors , not the number of journeys. But...you can quote as many passenger figures as you like. The requirement is still to make a profit.

 

I was trying to understand why either number-of-visitors or passenger-miles (for which number-of-passenger-trips is a reasonably good simulacrum) would necessarily be a good prediction of accident rates - which is presumably what ORR cares about - when I realized that ORR may just use historical data to decide what the best predictive number is. I.e. take whatever number one is trying to minimize (e.g. total-accidents, or serious-injuries), and compare that to whatever historical data one has (number-of-passenger-trips, age of drivers, etc), and pick the one with the best correlation. I wonder if they actually did that, or just made a guess at which number to use?

Noel

 

I've never understood why they make the statement about 'limited capacity'. You'd think it would be blindingly obvious that the Autocar is only two coaches in length therefore more limited than a rake of MK1's. In a similar vein for most of the last two or more years they have had the internal set listed as 'limited capacity' despite it being four coaches with rarely enough passengers for two of them. Surely a part of any railway is to run the amount of coaches needed for that service. If you can't shunt you run the highest amount that rake will need during that day/week until you hit your max. The only time you should ever put 'limited capacity' is when you are admitting you can't increase by enough for the amount of passengers you expect, thus admitting failure.