North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

It is the same reason as why I haven't spent a single pound on the NYMR in eight years. While you are totting up, my own personal circumstances have now changed and I do need to make a new will and as it stands no immediate family I want to leave anything to.

Sawdust.

 

Please stick around Sawdust. If and when a new NYMR emerges it will need people like you, Steve and many others to help rebuild.

 

I am already being proactive in this regard.
Sawdust.

 

During the first Covid lockdown, a heritage railway with a structure of Parent Charity owning the Operating Company, had a small number of its Charity Trustess advocating stripping all assets out of the Company and bankrupting the Company. And laying off all paid staff with no redundancy.
It didn’t happen because it’s not really legal!

 

I suggest that those the harbour the belief that if the NYMR failed an alternative Phoenix could emerge need to understand that neither the Trust or PLC can go under without automatically sinking the other. Their secured indebtedness has long been cross guaranteed so if one company fails it takes the other with it. It really is "One Railway". The sums potentially recoverable by creditors would indeed run into millions. Even if all or part of the track and stations remained ( by no means certain) the chances of a viable membership heritage railway re- emerging must be remote. Those that decide to withold financial support because they dislike "the management" ( and its not clear if that includes the volunteer trustees whose strategy the PLC is impementing) are gambling that by doing so they can force a change of culture and direction. They must accept that if their gamble fails the NYMR might be gone for good.
Some years ago I suggested with regard to another heritage railway that those unhappy with its management should either back them or buy a bike. That advice holds good for the NYMR. It would make an excellent environmentally acceptable cycle greenway that could easily emulate the highly successful Camel Trail. Is that a risk worth taking?

 

I

I know of nobody who thinks like that. Everybody I talk to thinks it would be very difficult to come back from. So please disabuse yourself of that idea.

Sawdust.

 

I agree wholeheartedly which is why I responded to some of the posts on here that do clearly assume that an operational railway could be salvaged.

 

Firstly I don't think any poster here wants the NYMR to fail and I'm not sure why you should think otherwise.

Second I had until very recently believed that one of the reasons the NYMR Historical Trust and the PLC had been established as seperate entities was in order to protect the assets. It is apparant I was wrong in that belief and that no such protection exists. Among your recent postings you made it clear that the NYMR Historical Trust have allowed the PLC to use assets vested in the trust to enable them to rack up ever increasing debt to cover salaries and operating losses. Clearly this lack of governance by the Trust, in which you were until recently promient, to protect the assets places the blame for the assets being at risk firmly at your door. Whilst it has been the PLC living beyond their means who have been profligate yourself and fellow trustees are the people ultimately responsible.

When it comes to your assessment of the likely viability of a "new" heritage railway should the PLC and NYMTHT collapse together, which is the most damning aspect of your posting, sadly I think you are probably correct. I don't think it impossible there could be a revival on some perhaps lesser scale and that is one of the reasons I personally am not willing to bequeth a lifetime of savings to a black hole, finance a failed cabal or to mitigate Santander debts.

You refer to a gamble, which is what any further money down the Park Street drain would be. The odds are so stacked against the railway but that isn't the fault of those choosing to withold bequests, of whom I am but one. It is the fault of those who have led us into the mire of financial ruin whilst sitting on a raft of unearned salaries.

I would continue to back the survival of the railway to my dying day, but I refuse to back a management who have abjectly and continually failed.

You suggest that those who doubt should buy a bike. I suggest that it is those who have failed who should be told to be on their bikes.

 

Indeed.

Coming back to the Bluebell example, we are proposing going through a complex series of changes to end up with a CCBS, as follows:

• Convert the existing PLC (a company limited by shares) to a (non-charitable) CBS
• Convert the existing membership society (a company limited by guarantee) to a (non-charitable) CBS
• Merge the ex-PLC and ex-Society CBS entities into a single CBS
• Apply for that merged CBS to become a (charitable) CCBS

There are a couple of drivers for what might look like a convoluted process. One is that there is no legal way to merge a company limited by shares with a company limited by guarantee, so each has to separately convert to a CBS and then merge later.

Secondly, the current PLC holds all the licences to operate and - unless we want to go through a ruinously expensive and protracted new planning process - that company needs in essence to retain its identity through all the changes in type of company it is. So there are a series of changes planned, but it remains clear at all stages which company is operating the railway.

Once you layer on all the necessary consultation work with current members and shareholders, the need to call (with proper lead time) various EGMs of each organisation to agree rule changes to enable the change in company type, legal work and so on, it becomes apparent why this is projected to be a two year change, which we are currently part-way through. So I come back to my earlier point: I think there is value in doing it, but it isn't a quick fix. (Obviously there is also a fair amount of legal expense in the above, but I believe that the RoI is nonetheless quite quick just from the savings in software and business rates, even before you consider other potential savings).

Tom

 

I don’t think anyone assumes that an operational railway could be salvaged I think everyone knows that it would be extremely difficult and highly unlikely. I think what pretty much everyone knows is that if the current regime are allowed to continue we will be in exactly the same place where it will collapse and it will be extremely difficult and highly unlikely to be saved and rebuilt and if it is it would be a shadow of what it was.
I don’t know if lineisclear is failing to grasp the problem or if he is just waffling his way around it but in very simple terms the NYMR has a terminal disease and the only hope of survival is major and risky surgery. The ones who are talking of the phoenix rising are at the point where they think that some form of overthrow must happen if the railway is to have any chance of survival and maybe that death on the operating table is better than the lingering painful death we are witnessing. Those who are less militant know that this risky surgery is going to be the removal of at least the CEO and possibly others which will make the financial backers very wary and possibly impact on any further required borrowing and will be a very unsettling time for the organisation. The sad truth is that one of these must happen and it must happen quickly before the illness has progressed to the point that the body (railway) couldn’t survive the required surgery.
Any talk of setting anything else up (in my view) is absolute madness. You can give a dying man new clothes, a new job, a new title and pretty much anything else new but you can’t change the fact that he is dying. For those who like to refer to the Titanic it didn’t matter if you were on the Titanic or a small fishing boat you were still in exactly the same s***. Nobody will be writing that the NYMR was a plc and a charitable trust or a community benefit organisation it will just say NYMR collapses.

 

..... but you still haven't answered my question about what it would cost in terms of legal fees etc. to make the changes that you hope will make the members and supporters willing to invest. That really has to include redundancy for the CEO as she is stuck in a very hard place - as an inexperienced, first time CEO she needs to prove herself in the role, and so needs to bring success from the jaws of defeat if she hopes to stand a chance of ever getting another job, beyond that of a supermarket checkout "colleague. She'll stick to her highly paid post like a barnacle, I fear, and will have to be levered out, because she really hasn't shown any evidence whatsoever of having any ability to turn things round......
.....although, there may be a glimmer of hope for her - I read today in Heritage Railway that a new christmas movie is to be made at the NYMR - hopefully the SMT will have the nous to realise that they could have an opportunity of an alternative to Polar Express, and at a cheaper cost.

 

And just in case anyone is still wondering if there was a steam ban this year or not… I asked at customer services and was told there had not been a steam ban this year, if there had been there would have been notices up and these never went up. There was a problem with steam availability and crewing and sometimes diesel was used just because it was in the right place.

 

I'm not sure that a return to the passenger numbers that have existed in the past is possible in the current economic situation, at least covering costs/ breaking even. Im not aware of any heritage railway that is achieving the passenger numbers that it experienced prior to Covid. I think that most lines started a decline around 2008/10 probably earliest in the south. It also took a few years for the trend to become apparent. Survival since then has mostly centred on increasing the take per passenger to stabalise income and controlling costs.

 

The problem though is that the railway appears to be long past the point where expecting the management and board to be backed is forlorn. That kind of cry can only work when they have the confidence of the organisation, and pretty clearly that is at least questionable.

There is ONLY one starting point for a route out of this situation and that is to build trust. I don’t believe that will be possible without some outside help.

 

I basically agree with your post, overall, but I wanted to comment on this particular point. While my knowledge of the NYMR is not super-deep, I have the strong impression that it is correct to say that it was in fairly poor shape, financially, when the current management team (at all levels) took over. (Yes, the current management team has done a very poor job - not controlling spending as hard as they could being merely one fault. But...) So, I reckon the blame is rightly spread more widely than just the current management team.

Mind, I don't know enough to try and fairly and accurately apportion blame. I have no interest in learning enough to be able to do so; to me, playing 'your end of the ship is sinking' is an utter waste of time.

Discussion on how (if it is possible) to save the NYMR is the only thing that's really a good use of time at this point. Mind, 'Titanic deckchairs' like schedule tweaks, and conversion into a CCBS, aren't going to do it.

Noel

 

So are the trustees who agreed to using trust assets as collateral for PLC debts ,not personally liable for any losses incurred to the trust ?
I cannot remember the membership being asked to agree to any such action .

 

I doubt that you were alone in your mistaken belief but the situation where the two companies are treated as one for the purposes of security over assets existed long before I started volunteering 20 years ago. In fact the balance of outstanding loans is now much lower as the result of action by current management to reduce debt.

 

I wholly agree; the NYMR has the structure it has, and no amount of "if only" will change that.

This is not a logical consequence of what comes before. It reminds me of Charles Clarke when at the Home Office when he pleaded for his job on the basis (I paraphrase) of "I broke it - let me fix it".

In that situation, you are asking people who currently give to subscribe to the "we've got so far, we've got to keep going" school of thought. If I have no confidence in an organisation's leadership*, however much I value the organisation, the last thing that it is rational to do is to empower that leadership by continuing to offer them support. If confidence is so far gone, then the choice resolves to three options:
1. Keep supporting in the hope that something will turn up
2. Stop supporting to stop the personal losses
3. Force a change of leadership.

You are arguing from a position where the existing leadership is a given; that leaves options 1 and 2.

In this and other threads, there have been discussions about the meaning of "vote of no confidence". What's been posted by @Kirk Oswald and @Steve from their recent visits is what "no confidence" really looks like - a slow leakage of air, where people simply can't and won't do anything to support a leadership that they think has failed. If we look at politics, it was the pattern visible with May, Johnson, Truss, Sunak and Starmer - as their authority waned, no one would defend them, and they turned inward to the small number who provided confidence until the end came. Truss was lucky in that her agony only lasted a few weeks; May's agony was drawn out over two years. The outcome was the same.

* - I am deliberately using "leadership" as a collective noun because I don't want to get caught up on the finer details of which role or committee - they are in my view collectively responsible for either setting or implementing the strategy.

 

I think that is largely true, but this summer's passenger numbers aren't even what they were post covid, ie only 2 or 3 years ago. The NYMR used to claim 300,000 passengers per annum (though how this was calculated they refused to disclose). The SMT no longer release any passenger figures but from my own experience I'd estimate it won't exceed 100,000 this year. Again, purely a personal view, I'd say that was mainly due to lack of steam and poor information/marketing.

If anyone wants to dispute such an estimate or can give a more accurate figure I'm happy to be corrected but it is so bad that numerous business owners in Pickering have identified the significant decline and blame Park Street for much of that shortfall.

I also agree with your point about the necessity of increasing take per passenger but I don't see much evidence of efforts to do so. Controlling costs has only been preactised in very recent times and long after such controls should have been implemented. Unfortunately the savings chosen seem to centre on inadequate maintenance of both structures and motive power whilst salaries remain unaffected and too often undeserved.

 

This is a genuine educational query (i.e. an attempt to educate myself about something I do not know about), not snark or anything resembling that.

Given that, if my memory is correct (and I cheerfully admit it might not be), the PLC has had operating losses for several years now, how were the balance of outstanding loans paid down?

Noel