Bluebell MK1 CK-16263 being offered up for sale

Chris

Old issues of Bluebell news have information about private owner carriages on the Bluebell and appear to contradict what Richard has written, the 'ownership' appears to have been retrospectively changed.

Af far as I understand the only private owner carriages on the railway are SR 3363, the GNR directors saloon, and SECR 950. All the other groups that owned carriages were under the umbrella of the Society, have now had their assets transferred to the plc. You may remember the review of the ownership of carriages shortly before the exodus of Bluebell C&W volunteers to the MHR etc.

Of course such carriages should be owned by the society, but as you know "the plc tail controls the society dog"

It will be good to see one of the no hoppers 5768 restored, but I do wonder if we will live to see the Maunsell CK restored (TO 1336 took 10 years to restore under the present workforce)

Anyway selling off carriages that at the present rate of work are unlikely to be restored is a good way of funding the extension!

Regards,
Tom

P.S, I believe shed observer or one of his friends has passed on asbestos information to the relevant regulatory authority.

 

I have removed a few posts in this thread.

Please keep to the topic and things relevant to the title.

Name calling, directly slagging off individuals etc will not be tolerated.

Thanks, Neil.

BTW, thanks for reporting the post, due to this it was brought to my attention within a couple of minutes of logging on as Martin (Sidmouth) mentions above.

 

Tom, I can tell you categorically that a) Doris was purchased directly by the Railway - I was at the meeting where it was recorded that the money, given to the railway for the purpose of its purchase, it had been transferred to the plc, and b) 16263 was transfered into railway ownership in exchange for shares immediately on its arrival.

The Society assets were transferred to the plc at the time of the first share issue, back in the 1980s. That was part of the process of ensuring that the Society always held a 51% controlling stake in the plc.

The "Review of Ownership" you talk about was nothing more than trying to ensure there were up-to-date agreements in place between the raiwlay and private owners. It had absolutely nothing to do with changes of ownership.

1336 took so long because the paid staff have too many other calls on their time to concentrate on a restoration project. In that decade the Bluebell's C&W department has turned out the following major rebuilds or overhauls of carriages: 7598, 394, 387, 367, 412, 1482, Car 64, 661, 114, and since 1336 was completed a year ago, 2526, with 3363 and 1520 looking good for re-entry into service in 2010, for both of them their centenary years.

The sale of a few carriages has nothing to do with raising money for the extension, and everything to do with running an efficient railway that has assessed carefully what stock it needs for operation and heritage purposes. 24458 was was obtained as an option for a wheel-chair accessible conversion. With work now started on 4941, that coach was surplus. The reason 16263 is now surplus has been discussed here.

And you forget (or possibly never knew) that the Bluebell Trust also owns most of the Victorian carriages.

Regards,
Richard

 

I am getting the impression that a good many of the assets of the BRPS have been sold or transferred elsewhere with as little or no publicity as possible.

Regards

 

I'm not sure how you get that idea. The BRPS has not owned anything except a majority shareholding in the (not-for-profit) plc for 25 years now. The Society originally owned the railway and many locos and coaches. With the formation of the plc (majority owned and controlled by the BRPS) back in the mid 1980s, all the assets (many of which had in any case been vested in the wholly owned subsiduaries Bluebell Operation Ltd and Bluebell Extension Ltd) were transferred to the new plc in exchange for shares, held by the BRPS to ensure their 51% minimum share holding. That change of ownership is the only change from BRPS ownership of assets, and was known and publicly acknowledged, not least in the various share issue documents and quite clearly in the Railway's published annual accounts (where a combined booklet contains the separate accounts for the plc, the BRPS and the Trust).

The Victorian 4-wheel coach bodies were never owned by BRPS - most were purchased by the Bluebell Railway Trust, (i.e. the trust paid for their acquisition (unless donated) and transport, plus a high-quality tarpaulin to keep them dry) and it was decided a couple of years ago that it was sensible to transfer the remaining Stroudley and Craven bodies from plc to Trust.

In fact we have been acquiring more of our stock over the years - the H-class loco was owned by a separate Trust, but is now owned by the Bluebell Trust. The Dukedog, Baxter and P-class 178 similarly were at one time in private control but now belong to the plc. Then there are the associated groups, such as the Maunsell Loco Society, who purchased "Stowe" from its previous owner to ensure it could remain on the Bluebell. U-class 1638 is still owned by the Bluebell, but was placed on a 50 year lease to the MLS, as a means of ensuring its restoration by that group, for operation on the Bluebell. Similarly "Sir Archibald Sinclair" and the 9F, both obtained by private fund-raising groups from Barry scrapyard for use on the Bluebell, were transferred to the plc in exchange for shares vested in BRPS on the formation of the plc 25 years ago.

The Bluebell is quite possibly the only major standard gauge heritage line which actually owns outright the vast majority of its rolling stock. Where we lead, others follow - witness the Mid Hants, West Somerset and NYMR recently purchasing locos.

 

Thank you for the clarification.

 

Wandering quite a bit off the original topic but relevent to what Richard has said about the structure and how the Bluebell plc was set up, we expected the same on the NYMR when forming a PLC was first examined. However, the result was different in that the Trust (the membership body) retained ownership of the Railway and invested just £50,000 in shares in the PLC - but these are the only voting shares. The shares sold to the public carry benefits (free journeys etc.) but no votes. This way ensures that there is no need to worry about successive share issues diluting the Trust holding and hence control.

I have a feeling this approach arose becuase the NYMR has been owned by a charitable trust since 1971 and hence the Charity Commissioners were involved in the formation of the PLC and approval of the mechanism etc.

I think the reason that the NYMR owned so little stick originally was lack of money - many of the ordinary Mark 1 coaches were owned by the Railway but many were also owned by members. Valuable assets (the Pullmans, for example) were sold off in the late 1970s to raise cash. In recent years, we have been able to buy back assets but, unlike some of the longer established Railways, we do not have great cash reserves (possibly a disadvantage of the "supporters association" being the owner and operator of the train service) and all the purchases have been funded by donations or mainly borrowings, including the most recent - 76079 has been bought on HP!

Steven

 

I have been a member of the BRPS for a fair few years now and I have always wondered just why it is that there is so much in-fighting in the railway. Richard's reply has made it clear; basically it's the structure.

Like most members of a society, any society, I'm guilty of not reading the small print, if only because it's embarrassing when you need a magnifying glass - and I'm not joking, I do. Depth of field and close focus are serious issues.

I had always assumed that the BRPS, the charity for taxation reasons, owned the railway and the PLC operated it. Clearly, from Richard's reply, the structure on the Bluebell is a good deal more ambiguous than this, if not downright muddy.

The only clear way of running a heritage railway seems to me is that a society owns the infrastructure and everything that runs thereon and has a PLC which actually operates the railway and acts as an agent of, and contractor to, the society. The PLC hires the societies property to run the railway and then pays the society profits generated at the end of the financial year. The society then uses the profits for maintenance of its property and further acquisitions. This way everybody knows the costs of running the railway and the profits and there is clarity, a quality which is lacking at the BB.

It is not good enough in my view that the society has a 51% controlling interest in the PLC. Although theoretically that gives the society control of the railway, in practice because of the friendship groups in the railway it only adds to the confusion. This is because in a volunteer organisation friendship groups are everything, they make it tick. If a chairman of the society exercised the privileges contained in that 51% majority he would be cutting across friendship groups, betraying the trust and fellowship that a friendship group represents and quite simply destroying the ties that bind the society, any society. No chairman would do that lightly, it's very much the nuclear option.

In the present structure, because of the destructive possibilities of the 51% shareholding, the PLC has the upper hand, a pre-eminence which, it appears to me, it uses quite ruthlessly. Instead of the PLC being the agent and contractor of the BRPS, the society is reduced to simply being a supplier of free labour and finance to the PLC. This isn't right, it isn't right at all.

I can understand why, 25 years ago, the present structure was thought of as an improvement over what existed previously. Then the Bluebell Railway was very small; now it has a turnover of around £3m. Quite simply the railway needs a different structure, it has outgrown that cast a quarter of a century ago.

The BRPS should be the sole owner of the railway's infrastructure, locos and rolling stock. Where there are locos and items of rolling stock on the railway owned by other groups or individuals there should be agreements with those groups and individuals concerning the use and maintenance of their property. The PLC should act solely as the BRPS' agent and contractor in the matter of operating the railway; it should hire the BRPS' property to run the railway and return the profits to the BRPS.

And, because of the enormous turnover, there should be full time salaried professionals in both the PLC and BRPS - but particularly in the PLC - to run the railway, but always answerable to the members of the BRPS, for it is, or should be, their railway. Right now it isn't, members of the BRPS are just seen as suppliers of free labour or money, and as a result it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the atmosphere on the BB is, at times, so poisonous.

Regards

 

Orion, it's not that even simple - the BRPS is not a charity (such is the penalty of being so early in the field) - We also have the Bluebell Railway Trust which is a charity. Yes, that makes for a tri-partate system which is even harder than the muddy model you descibe. When the Trust was set up it was viewed with mis-trust by many, but over the last decade we have worked to ensure its openness and transparency, and have rebuilt that trust to the extent that it is the generally accepted route for all major fund-raising. But in practice the BRPS should and does control the plc so far as policy is concerned, and the majority of plc directors are also elected BRPS Trustees.

There is a problem in Charity Law with railway charities holding shares in their railways. The NYMR model appears a good way around the problem, or the plc can be a wholly owned subsiduary of the charity (charity law was changed recently to make this sort of thing easier, though the creation of a legal entity called a charitable company), but in general any shares held must be held as an investment as part of a sound investment policy, taking advice from external investment advisers. If a charity buys shares in a railway as a means of pumping capital into a risky venture with no hope of ever getting that money back, then no matter what the intention, it would be considered as an inappropriate use of charity money. I do know of one railway trust warned by the Charity Commission that they were at risk of loosing their charitable status for so doing.

Coming back to the Bluebell:
BRPS policy is set in the long-term plan, at the BRPS AGM, and though departmental sub-committees. For example, the Rolling Stock sub-committee discussed and drafted a Heritage Wagon policy. That was passed to the BRPS committee who came back with some questions and concerns, which we addressed. It has now been formally accepted by the BRPS committee, and we are holding the plc to that stategy, in spite of the fact that commercially "heritage"" wagons have very little use on the railway.

The long-term plan, the Traction & Rolling Stock Collection policy and Heritage Wagon Policy are available on the Bluebell website via the page for BRPS notices:
http://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/bluebell/soc/

What has been agreed by the BRPS committee is that the current structure is not ideal, but to change it while we are in the process of working through our multi-million pound project with the HLF, and the extension to East Grinstead, would be folly. The HLF-funded Operation Undercover Phase 3 project should be completed around the end of 2010, and once that and the Extension are complete we will certainly see big changes to the structure (and several of the current trustees/directors (and both chairmen) want a break from the considerable pressure they've been under whilst seeing through the completion of the extension, but they are absolutely committed to seeing it though first). Community interest partnerships have been mentioned, but nothing decided.

Bean Counter - I don't know whether you are suggesting the Bluebell has "vast reserves of cash" - we don't and never have, but we've also never allowed ourselves to get into the situation many other railways have where the indebtedness of the railway has caused concern to the banks! Thus we've never had to consider selling assets to repay overdrafts, and that's been down to tight financial control: i.e. only spending money we have. Because the South East of England has never attracted development funding, until the recent HLF grant (which is built on us having raised £400,000 in donations to buy the portion of the Woodpax site and kick off the project - without that fund-raising the plc could not have gone ahead with the purchase of the site) the only grant we historically obtained was for 17% of the Restaurant building - we've had to raise everything else from scratch. We own most of our own locos either because we bought them straight from BR (although that had to stop when in 1965-68 it was a question of putting all available cash into the line purchase or close down), or because we had fund-raising groups within the railway recycling newspapers etc to enable us to purchase ex-barry locos and ex-departmental coaches. That those groups vested ownership in the society through the plc, to boost the society shareholding at the point where we formed the plc, is the reason most are owned by the railway, and not by individuals/groups, because we have as individuals and groups been happy throw everything into the big pot. Other items obtained more recently have been sold to the railway at considerably below market value simply because their owners wished very strongly to see them remain on the Bluebell in perpetuity.

The feeling of discord you may get if you read this forum is rather different from reality on the ground, thanks to the postings of one or two individuals here. Yes there are problems of structure and accountability, but those of us actually involved as volunteers do our best to pull together and get on with running a railway, and to solve those problems, and ignore those who generate poisonous hot air and discontent from afar. That's why (regretfully) I rarely read this forum!

Regards,
Richard

 

While nobody would disagree with Richard on the structure of the Bluebell set up, there are a few points I feel should be raised here.

Richard says that the BRPS controls the PLC?, surely he means the other way round when you have a "conflict of interests" with Directors who are also Trustees of the Society who can easily put on different hats when it suits them. Also that alleged 51% control by the Society is more like 84% according to the Honoury General Secetary.

One last point if I may ,I am sure that Richard will reply to me and I stand to be corrected, however if he does can this be done in the more polite manner that he has given to others other the the more condescending and obnoxious way he has done to me in the past? It would appear that as far as Richard and myself are concerned , nobody is allowed an opinion other than him. I could be wrong but that is certainly what comes over.

We appear to have gone off topic somewhat, and the question regarding the Asbestos problem still goes unanswered, (sigh).

BTW message to Orion , I totally agree with your comments.

Regards
Chris

 

Richard,

Thank you for your reply. It's a source of amazement to me that the real situation re the structure of the BB is actually worse than I thought, but there is comfort in knowing that the issue is recognised at SP.

I can understand that you and others find that NP and its controversies are annoying, but on the other hand it is a welcome change that someone at the BB is actually willing to explain, to actually talk. Communication skills are not to good on the BB. Please continue and encourage others to participate also.

Regards

 

Chris, after your last intemporate and extremely rude post on this thread attacking me (now removed by the moderators), I decline to discuss this further with you.

Richard

 

One last point if I may ,I am sure that Richard will reply to me and I stand to be corrected, however if he does can this be done in the more polite manner that he has given to others other the the more condescending and obnoxious way he has done to me in the past? It would appear that as far as Richard and myself are concerned , nobody is allowed an opinion other than him. I could be wrong but that is certainly what comes over.

That is one staggering statement from someone whose post was removed for abusive language!

I have said before on this board that I wish my railway was suffering from the same sort of crisis in the C & W dept that is allegd to exist on the Bluebell - the amount and quality of work being turned out puts everyone else in the shade. I have a suspicion that the "mass walkout" by volunteers was probably mostly people who would have been good candidates ffor the Golgafringan B Ark (A "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy" Reference, for the unenlightened!)

 

I appreciate that two wrongs do not make a right , but it does appear that appear that it is OK for you to be rude to others but you get uppity when others are rude to you.

Remember please that you started the rudeness , not I.

Regards
Chris

 

Well that is your opinion Martin, of course you are entitled to that opinion as we all are although I notice that you too did not reply to my private E-mail as you have obviously made your mind up, such is democracy.

When Nat/Pres went to it,s new server, mine and others signing in details were lost in the upgrades . It was the Moderators idea that I started again under Coalwagon, it is no secret.

Regards
Chris

 

61624:

Did I mention " mass walkout " by volunteers?, NO.

Were you there at the Bluebell of have first hand inside information?, NO.

Have i disputed the ampont of work and quality of work turned out ?, NO


However than you for your post and opinion, a right we are all entitled to.

Just my opinion.

Regards
Chris

 

I can't believe the sale of one or two MK1 coaches can cause so much debate & argument, 3 pages & 40 odd posts. Even some posts had to removed by the mods. It's getting boring now.
This topic should now be locked.

 

The person who 'gave' the money for Doris, had said to me he was buying it, it seems he changed his mind (I did tell him there was little hope to see it running in the near future)
16263 was usually described by the previous trustees / directors as Roger's carriage and not the railways...

As for the sale of carriages, I look forward to seeing the money raised added to the C&W budget for next year... it could pay for the repair of the hundred seater withdrawn from traffic or the stalled restoration of the LCDR brake.

I have never seen the trust as being separate from the railway, when it was set up we were told it would be the arm of the railway that would be able to be a charity and raise money in ways the society or plc could not. Anyway the assets of the trust could hardly be described as 'private'.

Regards,
Tom