North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

The £24.95 fare is Pickering - Goathland. For reasons only known to those in marketing. the website does not even offer Pickering - Grosmont, not even on the 10.55 which only goes to Grosmont and no further. Nothing is offered from Grosmont other than to Whitby. There's no mention of single tickets anywhere, as far as I can see . Personally, I find this to be a laughable state of affairs. The small print does however say "If your preferred journey is not listed, you can still buy tickets on the day from any station Booking Office or on board with one of our friendly Travelling Ticket Inspectors." That does mean that you can't book in advance and have to pay on the day prices.

 

It does seem odd when coming from W Yorks, in my case Leeds, the 1055 out and 1440 back seems like one of the more obvious day trips

 

A little light relief to give us a break from the heavy depressing stuff…
The Head of People has sent out an update from the Volunteer Forum that has been passed to me where he has asked if the railway “needs an almoner to keep in touch with volunteers who are ill or too old or have passed”
This could be the first heritage railway with a head of dead people

 

Does being too pissed off to renew my membership after over 50 years qualify me for his ministrations?

 

The Middleton Railway (which I’m involved with) introduced the idea of an almoner to keep in touch with those volunteers who could no longer be involved for whatever reason. It has been a very successful idea and our almoner recently gave a presentation to the HRA on the subject, which was well received. There must be many such people on the NYMR who this applies to. The almoner keeps in touch with these people and will send a get well card to those who are ill, if necessary. A meeting is arranged from time to time when people are invited to attend and meet up with other fellow colleagues who are no longer active. I’m not sure whether keeping in touch with dead people is really practical but sending sympathy cards to the near family on behalf of the railway is sensible. Whether I, as a disgruntled volunteer, would qualify in any way is a debatable point.

 

Joking aside, I’m not sure it’s a totally stupid idea - a masonic almoner deals with the ill and elderly brethren and their widows/relicts.

given that at their best some railways are like family I think many more should be doing likewise.

though agree on the implied table tapping/Doris Stokes aspect*

*though even then, it’s an income stream…

 

Looks like Omaha had a solo run out today on load 6

Jon

 

Keeping in touch with the dead? Will this be the start of the afterlife subscription model?

(seriously though, I think it’s a lovely idea to keep in touch, but as with many coms it could have done with a bit of a proof read perhaps. Another example of “well I knew what I meant”)

 

Some pensioner travel in London may not be optional but much is. Most of ours was as it was "something to do" say pop up to London, walk down the river have drink back in time for dinner. That would not have happened if we were paying for the transport. My point being is that you really do not know what you do not know. Best you can do is guess at the so called cost or "loss"
The relative isolation of a lot of Heritage Lines from free public transport probably adds to the lack of take up of free or greatly reduced fares.
For example I have been a Bluebell member for as long as I can remember I visited (and hence got a discount twice in 23 &24 but before that the last visit was 2017 and 2016 once each.

 

It's important to make sure you don't fall into the trap of thinking the plural of anecdote is data. Which is why I think the figure given at the BRPS AGM (that on average, annual members travelled 1.4 times) is useful - obviously, each railway would (you hope) be able to make its own calculation based on their own ticket data.

What you don;t know is the extent to which a member only chose to visit based on the reduced price they have for doing so.

You can do some more modelling on the accounts data. For the Bluebell, there are around 9,200 members and the total cost of running the society in 2025 was £104,000. (The two big line items were the magazine, and the cost of holding the AGM - smaller amounts were postage and audit, and everything else comparatively trivial). So that is about £11 per member to run the society. Given a £35 annual membership:

• the Society in effect has a net benefit of £24 for every member who joins; and
• the PLC gets fare income of (1.4 * £13.50) = £18.90.

So the net income to the railway from membership is about £43 - that's based on a normal 3rd class day rover bought in advance; the fare income would be higher if the member is visiting during a gala or paying the on-the-day price.

What is unknown is how many time someone would have travelled had they not been a member and had paid the full fare, but even had they travelled 1.4 times (unlikely) that only comes to about £38 in fare income. So whichever way I look at it, it feels to me that membership is a net benefit to the railway, and therefore increasing membership is something to be encouraged - in our case that becomes even more compelling once the two organisations merge into one.

Yorkshire may be different, of course.

Tom