Meon Valley Railway Restoration

My feelings exactly. The only 'assets' your scheme has at the moment are the people involved in it and their skills and if you are to have credibility then those people need to be named and their skills tested. You will certainly have to do this if you produce any sort of business plan or prospectus. Stating that you have members who work for First Great Western, Network Rail & South West Trains means nothing - they could be directors of those companies or they could be train catering staff with no business experience. Having someone who can do 3D drawings doesn't mean that they're an architect or structural engineer. As the project manager, can you give us an idea of the scale of projects you have managed professionally in the past? Who is your Finance Director?

More importantly, though, you say nothing about potential funding. The Welsh Highland Railway cost around £30million for a length of roughly twice that of the MVR. That restoration involved much of the same kind of work that restoring the MVR as a narrow gauge line would involve, including legal costs (including T&WA Order), replacing bridges, making alternative provision for footpaths/cycleways, and providing new stations. £15 million for the MVR has the right kind of ring about it - the three miles of track between Caernarfon and Dinas cost £750,000 and that was nearly 20 years ago. The WHR got 45% of its funding from the Millennium Commission and the European Regional Development Fund, neither of which would be available to the MVR.

 

At the end of the day this project will succeed or fail depending on what Hampshire County Council wishes to do; this is their land after all. The best chance of success would be if the County Council wanted to offload their liability for repairing the bridges and infrastructure onto an organisation wishing to take it on, though this could be a poisoned chalice. Some of the bridges on the Meon Valley are in quite poor condition, in particular the first overbridge north of Knowle Junction which is on the point of collapse. I do wish the Meon Valley revivalists every success but please sort out your website - the multiple mis-spellings and the mistaken belief that one of the original stations was called East Tisfield do little to inspire confidence!

 

This project will go the same way as the wye valley line sharpness branch whats happenend to them

 

-Post Deleted!-

 

No cheers from here. I would love to see the MVR recreated in some form or another but any plans must be realistic and my experience (which includes business management, management consultancy, senior railway management and experience of preservation) told me that your plans wouldn't stand up to the kind of scrutiny they were heading for.

If you really are serious, don't leave it five years or you'll find yourselves back at exactly the same point in their business planning cycle.

What, though, were you expecting of Hampshire County Council? Their response suggests that you were asking (or they thought you were asking) for funding from them. If that's the case, you need to be aware that most large businesses plan their finances years in advance and in the present economic climate that is very much the case with local authorities. Although they'll build in some contingencies, you'll be out of luck if you suddenly come along and ask for £5 million next year.

You must accept, though, that their '5 year plan' excuse may have been simply that. Councils are incredibly short-staffed after all the cutbacks and do not have the time to deal with what they see as no hope schemes. To get serious attention, your approach to the council must be total perfection. You must impress; you must show that your plans encompass every aspect of the business proposal, not least funding and finances; you must definitely show that you will not be reliant on the council for support, either financial or effort. Think of Dragons' Den: would you be prepared to stand in front of the Dragons with your plans and ask for their backing? What would they make of it? Would your proposal be sound enough to win their support?

 

Well said W14 , there is hope for this yet.

Chris:

 

Seems like this group is still in existence and is planning to start clearing part of the large and much more viable West Meon station site early in the New Year. Good luck to them.

 

I have just taken my realism pill. Let me know when/if they lay their first length of track. I'll not be holding my breath.

 

just read through this whole thread, and looked at their website, I do have to agree with the "realists" I find it very unlikely that this will succeed, it is based on a lot of "IFs" If droxford station is put on the market and if they can buy it, or whether it will simply be willed away whereby someone else will live there or just not sell it, If they get council permission (which has been denied already) IF they can get sufficient funds, IF they can persuade owning groups to stay at their railway (no one wants a diesel shunter and a guards van in this day and age) IF the bridges needing repair are badly damaged or not, IF they can compete with the MHR (and those that say lines close together can co-exist - THAT close together?),the list goes on and on. on the other hand, I really do wish them the best of luck, another heritage railway, if done properly, is always a good thing, and I sincerely hope they overcome all the "IFs" that I mentioned. So, good luck, but I won't be holding my breath!
Alex

ps. if it all does fall through, why not join the MHR, you can still play trains, even if you have to share them...!?

 

Have just had it pointed out to me that on this groups Web Site they say have talked to one of the owners of the Lymington CIGs. They do not say which unit or what the reply was, but as someone who has invested a lot of time, money, and effort in 1497 that is on the MNR (as well as a phase 1 buffet to make it a useful 4BIG), I do not think the unit will be leaving the Mid Norfolk.

We are looking at getting 1497 compressors and MG set running again medium term but this will not be via Batteries, current focus is to reseal the gutters and stop rain water getting inside and rotting the hidden support wood for the side upholstery pads.

Even an £80 million euro millions winner would struggle to finance the ambitions of this group.

Brian

 

Steve, the route from Butts Junction to the far side of the A31 has been obliterated, requiring well over a kilometre of embankment crowned by a motorway style bridge to cross over the A31-A32 roundabout which now sits adjacent to the course of the old line so you have a bridged span of around 100 metres. That's a lot of reinforced concrete. A rough estimate of bridge plus approaches + civil engineering plus land purchase would be around £25-£35 million. And all that gets you into a farmers field half way to Faringdon. As chief planner you have probably calculated that your operating profit on a £10 ticket is about £1 (based on MHR plc returns) so you are going to need something like the equivalent of every single passenger journey ever undertaken on the MHR since it opened 30+ years ago to pay for just this first mile of track to nowhere. Can you please tell me where my simple arithmetic has gone so horribly wrong?

 

I think you have underestimated the scale of the challenge by a factor of ten...

(Say, £30million cost over 30 years is £1million per year: if the MHR are making £1 per ticket, that means one million tickets per year, which in round figures is probably about a factor of ten too many. So realistically, the payback time on this may be 300 years, not 30 - assuming your bridge costings are correct. I can't comment on that, except to say that any possibility of the DfT or HCC allowing the disruption associated with bridging two major trunk roads is very much in the outer fringe of cloud cuckoo land - in my opinion...)

And that is assuming you could charge £10 fare for a one mile each-way trip! A quick survey of fares per mile shows that they tend to be a little higher for short lines, and less for longer ones, but even so, not many places are charging much above £1 / mile for a round trip (ignoring the fact that rovers allow multiple journeys), unless there is considerably more to see, such as at a centre like Didcot. For example, the MHR charges £14 for a twenty mile round trip, which is 70 pence per mile. Certainly not the £5 per mile than a £10 ticket on a one mile line would imply...

Tom

 

From a point about 1/4mile from the A31/A32 traffic island the Meon Valley track bed is owned by MHR Ltd all the way into Alton apart from the area in the immediate vicinity of plat 3, which is leased from Network Rail. Alton is only a single platform on the MHR side, with no room to expand, so accommodating another railway's services might be challenging.

Crossing the A31/A32 is really a non-starter, but there are problems with the route before you even get there. Faringdon is an industrial estate.

There are places along the line where some kind of railway presence could be re-established on the track-bed, but the Alton end is not one of them.

 

Damn. I had better resign from my position as head of HS2 Financial Planning immediately.

 

You mean HS2 has a Head of Financial Planning? I thought they just plucked random numbers out of thin air, and when no-one believed them, did it again ... and again ... and again ...

Tom

 

I hate to pour more cold water on this scheme but it seems so full of holes as to make me think of paddling across the Channel in a colander.

A website that starts off with errors on its home page isn't a good start. A few parts of the West Meon to Alton stretch of the line, while they may be, strictly speaking, private property, have either dedicated or permissive rights of way running over them. These include Chawton to Farringdon (a very pleasant walk) and shorter sections north and south of East Tisted. A look at the Ordnance Survey map will reveal these. Surely the group has invested in such a map. In addition, the whole of the trackbed south of West Meon, excepting that through Droxford station (where the path diverts through the old goods yard), is a permissive path (most north of Soberton) or dedicated right of way (Soberton to Knowle plus a short length of bridleway near Exton).

As others have pointed out, Alton to West Meon is a non-starter. The rebuilding needed would be far too costly:

• New viaduct spanning the A31/A32 roundabout on a very shallow diagonal (the roundabout itself is on the line of the trackbed)
• Removing the filled-in cutting south of the A32
• Purchasing and demolishing the industrial site at Farringdon
• New bridge across the A32 at Farringdon
• Removing the filled-in cutting south of Annetts Farm at Farringdon
• Purchase and demolition of houses built on the trackbed north of Tisted station
• Removing the filled-in cutting south of Tisted station
• Replacing the bridge over the A32 at Hedge Corner, where the road has been straightened since closure to remove a dangerous Z-bend under the old bridge
• a number of other bridges to replace
• as well as the purchase of the land and station sites from a large number of possibly less than cooperative landowners

Oh, and I almost forgot, the slight matter of rebuilding West Meon Viaduct.

It all makes the Bluebell's northern extension look like a very small task - and that took about 40 years.

The clearance working party at West Meon now seems to have been postponed to February 2014 after 'a misunderstanding with Hampshire County Council'. That doesn't seem to be a good start. Then, there was an appeal for participants to bring 'your own gardening tools as we currently do not have any i.e. rakes, gloves, spades, brushes, cutters, saws, forks etc...' Have you seen West Meon station site?



A fleet of chain saws and some hefty plant might be more useful! A three-hour work session isn't going to make any noticeable difference unless about 500 people turn up. And if the group doesn't have any tools, has it got public liability insurance, because HCC is very unlikely to allow work to be carried out without it.

Besides which, HCC would no doubt be very happy for volunteers to carry out vegetation removal along the line. For far too long the trail has been like a green tunnel. HCC started doing some clearance on various bits of the line but its funds are very limited, so any group offering to help will be most welcomed. However, welcoming help doesn't mean that HCC will allow them to build a new railway. And does the group actually have HCC permission to take 'artefacts off site for safe storage till such a time they can be shown to the public'? In any case, any artefacts that were easily removable have long since gone and any that remain should be left there to enhance the trail.

How can approval for plans to clear Wickham station site be a 'provisional yes' when it is owned by another party who are very hard to get hold of and the group are still waiting a letter back from them? So that's actually a 'provisional no idea'.

The website states, in less than perfect grammar, that 'We like to tell everyone that we have no interest in closing any parts of the Meon Trail, as the Meon Valley Railway was built as a double track but only a single track laid with passing loops at the main stops, we do plan on doing the same, this will allow the other side to remain open for the bridle way users...' Actually, no. Like most single track railways, enough land was bought for a double track formation and bridges, etc were built for double track but cuttings and embankments weren't. This is just south of West Meon. Room for a railway and a path?







The website explains, as the example which they plan to follow, how the Avon Valley Railway and the Bristol-Bath Railway Path co-exist but that only works because the Mangotsfield to Bath line of the Midland Railway was actually built and operated as a double-track line. Has anyone from the group actually looked at the survey documents of the Meon Valley line? Are they even aware that they still exist?

It does look as though none of the advice sincerely given earlier in this thread has been taken any notice of. This is turning into a totally crackpot scheme that, whilst proposed with all good intentions, has every prospect of being such a failure that it will turn local authorities and others against any future dealings with preserved railways.

 

Unbelievable!

This from their Facebook page: "The email I got stated we have permission to clear the site, instead it was in-reference to another email I (Steve) had sent a few weeks prior to that, for permission to clear the Pumping and water well area. The email I got, did not contain any information to any previous emails I had sent so it was misinterpreted by us on the board as an agreement to clear the whole of West Meon Station."

What next? "We thought we had permission to relay the whole railway. We didn't realise that they'd only said yes to us putting down one track panel."