Popular Heritage sites

Hello,

I've always wondered what the most popular heritage railway locations (in terms of visitor numbers) are in Britain outside of the National Railway Museum?

Is there a top ten, for example?

Cheers

EdwardHP

p.s. sorry if I'm posting in the wrong area - I'm new to the site today.

 

Welcome to the forum, EdwardPH. I've moved this thread to the "Heritage railways and centres" forum.

But I don't know if there are any published visitor numbers for the UK. Anyone else any ideas?

Richard

 

NYMR gets over 300k a year, which puts them at least 50k ahead of their nearest rivals, if not more at the moment. SVR used to get in the region of 250k a year, WSR is over the 200k. I would be very interested to know how many passengers the PDSR carries, but have never seen it mentioned.

 

Annual numbers at the Bluebell are about 175,000 I believe, putting us not quite at the top but I'd imagine in a notional top 10.

Tom

 

the Plym Valley rly??????:evil:

 

NYMR in 2010 was 355,000 passengers. We added 1,000 for non-travelling visitors but frankly that is proabbly way too low. As we don't operate closed platforms, and Grosmont has a level crossing in the station, people who "visit" the line could be a very high number!

AFAIK, the top 5 for last year was:

NYMR 355,000
SVR 225,570
WSR 214,053
Swanage 210,000+
P & DSR 187,500? (Not including boats)

Not sure where Festiniog is these days but I would say in the top 10. Bluebell sounds as though it is also well in there. KWVR I believe is well up there, around 150,000 mark - I know last year was up 7% but no actual figure was quoted in the newspaper article I found on the web!

The Lakeside & Haverthwaite always had pretty high figures - over around 130,000 mark I seem to recall.

Steven

 

Swanage Railway in 2010 carried 202,069 passengers.

As Steven said with the NYMR, Swanage don't count non ticket purchasing visitors. Given that the stations at Swanage and Corfe are situated right in the centre of popular tourist destinations, it is highly likely that the number of casual visitors seeing the trains is significantly higher than that.

As I understand it, this figure also only includes SR tickets. I don't believe (although I'm happy to be corrected if I'm mistaken) that it includes passengers on incoming main line railtours.

 

This would be a very interesting article actually. I would be very interested to see no's for lines.

 

Whilst a slight deviation steam centres and museums would probably make interesting reading as well.

MoSI visitor numbers were over 600,000 over the last year. info on website.

 

You first have to define the question. What defines a "visitor"? Perhaps the OP would care to establish that definition before we go any further.

Steve

 

That's a surprise, a very welcome surprise as I had no idea that the numbers were so high. Excellent news!