New builds - how many will ever really work?

Re the Claud Hamilton:

25th April: 'Stand by for some very exciting news over the next few weeks!' - it's now July and we're still waiting, should we stop standing by?


Keith

 

Or another question could be: are you willing to actually take advice and help from anyone, and listen to those people?

 

yes i am willing to take any advice/help on board.

 

Hmm, your persistence and umpteenth project say otherwise....

 

i want to change that , but i need help

 

Starting from scratch and forgetting the past I would like to make one very serious suggestion. Get involved with your local railway and one of their restoration or maintenance projects. Get a feel for the job and more importantly learn what is required to build and maintain a steam locomotive. It goes along way on your CV when you can say hand on heart that you helped this project, worked on that loco and can demonstrate knowledge of the engineering principles of a working loco and how a new loco could be built.

The successful projects are those that have a good spread of knowledge amongst their active membership. Out of all your members you can possibly expect 1 in 10 down to 1 in 20 to actually be prepared to pick up a spanner (this goes for new builds and restorations). You will need :

• a strong engineering team to advise and build the loco,
• a sales / trading team to earn the cash to build the loco at anywhere from £1.5m upwards for a true new build (the boiler will likely set you back circa £500k)
• a management team to manage the build, control finances and arrange corporate and personal sponsorship
• a base for the loco and somewhere to assemble the parts
• a list of all of the drawings for the loco and copies (and duplicates) of them all. Remember if the NRM hold the drawings that will be £10 a time for each drawings in hard copy and a little less of digital copies (then you will need somewhere to print them). To give you an idea, Hengist has over 800 drawings. Smaller locos don't necessarily mean fewer drawings but simpler locos may cut that number down
• if your going mainline you will need a competent person / company (formerly known as a VAB) to manage the certification process
• tools, no matter how much work is done by sub-contractors there will always be something for you and your engineering team to do
• Organisation. Be prepared for a lot of paperwork which will need to remain organised and backed up over a potentially long period of time. Any loco work involves long time-scales, a lot of very hard work and dedication
• Don't try to be a one man band and accept all the help you can get no matter what the persons background. My day job is designing web applications (real web apps, not the schmoozy type), but my previous 14 odd years experience of steam allows me to confidently describe the workings of a steam loco to a novice and put spanner to metal.

This list is just scratching the surface and I am sure the other experienced teams / restorers / builders on these forums can think of 100 other items to add to that list.

Think about this :

1. Is there a need for a loco of this class / type?
2. Do you have the team to manage this project? The easiest way to build contacts and gain help is by helping out elsewhere first. The steam community is a friendly bunch in general but don't expect to take people away from their own projects to provide you with every answer you need. A lot of work you will need to do on your own to begin with.
3. Only then do you start working out the finances. Without 1 and 2 you could end up with a very heavy paperweight

All the best with your project.
Dave

 

thankyou dave that shows me abit of what i need to do and what teams i need in the group thanks again

stuart

 

Excellent advice Dave, but I'm afraid you may have wasted your time in writing this out - I gave similar advice back in March (post 363 in this thread) which was supposed to be being 'worked through' for Mr Reeder's last project, but which he has obviously forgotten about / chosen to ignore.


Keith

 

"i want to change that , but i need help " originally posted by Stuart Reeder .

How about listening to the advice given by many on this forum .

 

i am going to start doing that now and keith this time i will listen and i plan to do this properly.

stuart

 

Clearly not. The general gist is to come back to reality/get experience restoring an existing engine before, or if, you build new at all.

OK, instead of sitting back taking pot shots, I'll give you 2 cents.

You've got to forward plan. You're looking, say, 20 years to build this thing, excluding the years of experience you'll need, if you take other posters' advice, before you start. Coal and the people to run preservation are both in decline. If you want to build this on the argument that a new one will help take the strain from the oldies (the engines, i mean, not my preservation colleages ), will preservation be able to last long enough the way we know it now for your machine to be viable?

Applying the peak oil theory, ~250 years worth of coal remain, but within 30-40 years, pessimistically speaking, it will be a lot more expensive for preserved lines to justify using. Of course, there could be the perfect alternative out there (who ever finds it will be a VERY rich man), but that's not likely at the moment.
(anyone further into their geology degree, or the profession, than me may wish to further my point about how long coal will last)

The average age of people into railway preservation is hovering around late 50s, based on the graph the ELRPS published in one of their mags (2010 or 2011, i can't remember which), so in 20 years when your machine is running, they will be late 70s, a bit too long in the tooth to be operating and maintaining all these locos [preserved + umpteen new builds] (you and I will be hovering around 40 for a start, food for thought). Sure, there are younger ones coming in, but the age structure is markedly top heavy, so you've got an operating problem for your machine right there. (age problem also applicable to sourcing the funding)

Actually, anyone planning/constructing a new build has these same problems. And that's just the tip of the iceberg

*glass-half-empty mode: now off

But you do need to listen to and consider all that; as they say, nothing lasts forever.

 

This is a very sensible posting. Yet we are not dealing with something which is sensible. Someone I know draws a parallel between footbal supporters and railway enthusiasts. (He is both an active preservationist and a football fan). Both are extremely tribal, want their own dunghill to crow on and are full of grandiose ideas which they have no idea how to pay for. Ask them to share a football stadium or pool effort to get one new build loco project finished and running before another is started and they are not interested.

 

You said that last time - see post #365 on this thread. If you were really being sensible about a new-build project, you would have worked through those 9 points before you chose a loco or setup a facebook page.

As has been recommended to you repeatedly, you would be better to join an existing loco project and gain some experience and rebuild some reputation, as I really really doubt if anyone would invest in a project you are involved with after the J39 / L1 / Southern L1 / V3 / Southern L1 (again) fiascos.

Keith

 

I think the point has been made.

No need for a witch hunt on the lad. We were all new to the reality of the hobby at some point.

Hopefully his next post will tell us more about where has joined and plans to volunteer, and hopefully that group taking his enthusiasm on board and showing him the ropes. There's no shortage of groups looking for young enthusiasts I hope.

 

I think credibility is extremely important here.

Judging by figures for other projects, a "typical" new build is going to come in at somewhere round £1 - £1.5million for a mid-size mainline engine. Add more on for a larger engine (like Tornado) or if you want to go mainline (by which point you might be talking £3million or more, judged by Tornado standards). Knock a bit off if you have substantial components to act as donors, like Beachy Head or the GW Saint (though I'd suspect the options for that are probably now almost exhausted, give or take an LSWR T1 or a new Dean goods).

You are also probably looking at a 10 - 20 year build time: to my knowledge, no standard guage new build project (except maybe the Stephenson-era replicas - I don't know) has been done or is planned to be done in less than 10 years, while if you take more than about 20, it is very hard to keep the project together as progress will appear so slow. Moreover, the longer the project goes on, the more inflation eats away at the budget, which will inevitably have to rise.

So: £1m - £1.5million to raise; 10 - 20 years to do it in; inflation putting the budget up all the time. That means you need to be prepared to raise about £100k per year, sustainably, for the next 10 - 20 years of your life. That's quite a big ask! OK, in the first year or two of the project the funding demands are likely to be lower, while you go about all the minutiae of setting up the project, collecting drawings etc. But sooner or later you need to rent some space and cut some metal, and by then you had better be reasonably confident that the money will come in. You aren't going to raise £100k just by shaking a tin on your favourite station platform (even if you found a railway that would allow that), so you are talking having and enthusing a large pool of regular donors and probably hoping for some substantial legacy bequests.

If you found a donor willing to fund, say, £10 per month - a not unreasonable sum - you still need to find more than 800 of them to fund your project. I'd suggest it would be hard to even find that many supporters unless you either have the backing of a major heritage railway, and can use their members as a starting point (Beachy Head, the GWS projects; 82045 etc); or unless you find a significant prototype that enthuses a great number of people and also you are incredibly personally persuasive - in which case your name is most likely Mark Allatt. Even latching onto a major railway isn't a sinecure: people join for all sorts of reasons, and so only a minority go further and fund projects like these. The Bluebell (to take just one example) has about 10,000 members, but only a minority are involved in funding Beachy Head. I'm sure the principle holds with 82045 at the SVR and with many others of the more-established new builds at Didcot, Llangollen etc. If the best you manage is to attach yourself to the Much Muddling and Little Snoring Railway Preservation Society (membership: 2 and a dachsund called Colin), don't be too surprised if Colin and his two mates can't magic up £100k per year in regular subscriptions.

Which isn't meant to put you off, but it is worth considering just how you are going to set aside the next 10 - 20 years of your life to raise substantial amounts of money. So, if as others have suggested, getting yor hands dirty helping out with an existing restoration project doesn't appeal, you might instead want to serve an apprenticeship trying to raise money for an existing project for a few years until you see the magnitude of the task. Plus, it would also give you some credibility and credentials when - if - you do choose to launch your own project.

Tom

 

If all 13,000 members of the SVR were interested in 82045 we'd be onto 82047 by now...it's a noticeably perennial feature of the 82045 fund-raising paperwork that a very small proportion of the SVR membership are regular contributors to 82045.

 

if only the heritage lottery covered new builds...

 

Exactly.

In any organisation, some will join because they are a "hard core" supporter of the cause. Some will be wives and girlfriends. Some will join because of the travel concession or other reason. Some will join because they like the magazine. Some will be a "hard core" supporter of another railway, but join three or four other railways for interest. Even amongst the "hard core", there will be competing interests: some will be primarily interested in locos, or rolling stock, or buildings, or completing an extension, or signalling, or any of a hundred other sub-projects underneath the overall society umbrella. For even the most high profile, number one priority of any given railway, I doubt whether more than about 1 in 25 of members actually make a direct financial contribution to that specific project (they may well be funding another project) over and above their normal subs. For a project that is not the number one priority, I suspect that ratio could easily drop to 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 for even a well promoted project. To take the SVR example (and I don't have hard figures, this is supposition on my part), if out of 13,000 nominal members, one in 50 supported 82045, that would mean 260 supporters from within the SVR membership. Even if each of them contributed £10 per month on average (not a miniscule sum: that means £120 per year), you only make £31,200 per year from that route; say £39,000 with gift aid. That is less than half the amount that I reckon any new build needs to raise to be viable. (In that context, it is worth mentioning that the Brighton Atlantic spent £121k last year, so my figure of £100k per year is not too far off beam).

And that is within the ranks of the SVR, which I believe is the largest heritage railway by membership in the country. If instead you form a strategic alliance with the Much Muddling and Little Snoring RPS, it's probably not surprising if you don't get much further than the proverbial smokebox number plate and mocked-up cab side - unless you have a very wealthy donor lined up in the wings who just happen to believe the Mr RH Crankpin's seminal MM&LSR 2-4-0 branch passenger loco is the most significant loco missing from the preservation world today and is willing to put their money where their mouth is to fund a new build.

Tom

 

Good well reasoned posts Tom. People take note.

 

Actually no, in my opinion. While I am a supporter of a new build project, I think it is better from a heritage point of view that the lottery supports restoration of heritage projects or projects that help conserve heritage items. Thus it is entirely proper (in my view) that the IoWSR just got nearly £1million for a carriage shed that will significantly improve the long-term survival chances of not just their existing coaches, but many other grounded bodies currently stuck outside, whereas had that money gone to a new-build loco, the heritage gain would have been more difficult to prove. (And I know we can have an argument about preserving soon-to-be-forgotten traditional engineering skills as a heritage outcome, but that can be done just as well by giving lottery money for restoring extant heritage items rather than building new).

So in my view, Heritage Lottery money should be used for conserving heritage items, or building infrastructure and skills to help improve the capacity to do so. New builds are a valuable part of the modern "heritage" scene, but should draw on other sources for funding - not the least of which is that there might be (a-la 82045) a commercial viability for preserved railways to build new kit for day-in, day-out service rather than keep patching up ancient artefacts.

Incidentally, in the aeroplane world, there are numerous replica aircraft (mostly old ones) that have been built in order to have a role in films. Many of these replicas are now in museums, sitting quite unashamedly next to "genuine" vintage aircraft. For example, the Sopwith Pup is a significant aeroplane in the history of the Fleet Air Arm, but is represented in the FAA museum by a replica. So have any railway locomotives or vehicles been funded solely in connection with a movie, or are trains considered too "generic" for people to bother too much about period accuracy - hence Mk 1 carriages in World War II films?

Tom


Tom