North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Bridges 24 & 25 are an absolute scandal. Heads should have rolled over them. For those that don't know, the decks are significantly higher than the originals. How such a failure of project management occurred is beyond my understanding.

Sawdust.

 

Heads did roll in that the civil engineer either resigned or was sacked. The official answer was resigned to pursue other interests.
The track is on an embankment and there is not enough width to raise the level to match.

 

It'll be expensive, but isn't the solution to lower the abutments, so the bridges are at the correct height?

Sawdust.

 

I believe the proposed remediation (which is a consequence of the initial contractor going bust) involves the building of retaining structures to secure additional ballast raising the track level either side of and between the two bridges?

 

So a bodge that will stand out as being a bodge, you think that is really acceptable? This is what comes from a culture of not questioning things. Did nobody at board level ask questions about the abutments needing alteration? Particularly as the abutments on bridge 30 needed modification. This was a major failure of project planning, it should have been spotted a long before work on site began. This kind of monumental cock up should have seen directors of both boards resign but instead the truth has been gradually becoming more widely known about.
At what point did the contractor go bust, was it before or after they were paid? If they were paid why were they paid when it was a complete **** up? Didn't they have insurers? Couldn't a claim be made against them?

Sawdust.

 

I do not know the answer to your questions, in fact I am unfamiliar with the bridges.
However you make the "solutions options" sound so simple.
Have you ever tried getting liquidated damages back on a contract that has one. Or getting an insurance claim paid, especially if the contractor has folded.
There seems to have been from what you have just said a number of parties involved in the repair of these bridges, who will be able to unscramble the party who is to blame with recourse to the courts, does the railway have the money for that? From what has been said I suspect not.
If you place the blame firmly at the project planning phase then who undertook that and against what specification? Was that an internal railway activity or subcontracted? If the railway undertook the scope and the planning who do you propose to "go after"?

 

I have no idea who to go after as you put it but as far as I can tell what actually happened was sweeping the whole affair under the carpet. What I'm saying is that through collective responsibility more than one head should have rolled. There isn't even the money for the bodge after quite a few years, let alone anything else.
But it would appear from the current farrago of bridge 42 that lessons might not have been learned.

Sawdust.

 

These are a couple of extract from a message from a former GM/CEO, who wrote it to me as he was applying for the job at the NYMR (and I was providing advice on how to win it!):

"If I am honest this looks like a massive job and knowing which part of the apple to take a bite out of is probably the biggest challenge, this is a railway that operationally is bursting at the seems, one could almost argue it's too successful. I do worry it's become too much a people mover and lost its heritage roots.

In a nut shell the challenge seems to be to maintain, (or improve) turnover whilst easing the pressure on infrastructure. This will lower the reliance on staff and should help toward re-enfranchising the volunteers, easy to say harder to deliver. I was concerned when we were presented a fact ( by Phillip Benham) that as far as the railway was concerned 1 member of paid staff = 7 volunteers. The fact somebody has even come up with this equation is a worry, I wouldn’t dare present that in open forum, a quicker way to demotivate volunteers I have yet to see.

Volunteers are customers, (well stakeholders at least) and to a certain extent need to be treated in the same way. They are rightly proud of their railway and need to be made to feel part of it.

The Talyllyn actually has more volunteers than the NYMR which in its self is a worry as the NYMR has 10,000 members and the TR has 3,800. The marketing department needs to be fully engaged in this process as it is of equal importance to getting the bums on seats.....This is however, only possible with a good PR and Marketing team, I worry that they currently are spending too long arranging story telling days and booking tribute acts.

I was also impressed that every station is based in a period of time, I was less impressed to find out that the passengers have no idea this is the case. Heritage sells and it also engages with the customers encourage them to spend a day on the railway and not just ride from end to end.

I am worried about the Whitby link? It would seem a great achievement but has it left the tail wagging the dog? 21 (28 in total) coaches and 3 locomotives (4 in total) are required every day for through running which drives up staff costs and sucks up volunteers, the fitness to run exams are a big task on there own. The NYMR seems to have become a network rail branch line operated with old maintenance hungry machinery. Surely the Whitby link should be operated as such with 1 locomotive and 7 carriages? I know my view maybe simplistic but does this train of thought have any merits? Selling higher priced (per mile) short trips to Grosmont from Whitby with the option of a through ticket option would potentially drive up income over that stretch and ease loadings on the NYMR whilst still maintaining income."

Some thoughts were there and got beaten out of him but really do still need to be acted on - but at the time he was working with a strong-minded chairman, whose thoughts seem to have been inclined in the opposite way!






"

It's funny how people's perspective changes!

 

What insurance do you think would pay the claim?
Workmanship is not generally insured.
Professional Indemnity IF there was some by the relevant party, and IF the work was negligent. (This, btw, is why doing too much in house is a risk - if you give them defective instructions, you may have done the negligence for them).
Can't see any obvious product liability
Liquidated damages will have gone the moment the contractor went bust.
Paying insolvent contractors is sometimes obligatory, depending on the form of contract and the timing. The Insolvency Practitioner will not be backward in coming forwards if they think there's a claim.
Frankly, working on a 150-yr old structure maintained by amateurs, I'd be very careful about the risks I assumed.
The average margin in the industry is around 3%

 

Well, I didn't say it thinking there would be a great chance of success. These were outright replacement bridges, the irony being the new structures were meant to look like the ones that they were replacing. Which of course they don't as the girders are now considerably taller than the ones they replaced. I am curious how much design work has gone into building supporting structures to retain more ballast, to allow the track to be raised adequately. Doing so at the top edge of an embankment sounds quite tricky to me, goodness knows what the National Park would think of it.
On a different topic it is nice to hear of a bit inter heritage railway cooperation taking place with three NYMR mark 1s going on loan to the KWVR, with movement by rail.
(0W37 & 7D37 on the 10/11/2026).

Sawdust.

 

Can't do a bit of weeding in case it disturbs the local ecosystem, but full scale rebuilds of embankments with extra structures are OK?