Lynton and Barnstaple - Operations and Development

Those are tactics - strategy needs to line up first.

 

Made clear by whom? Not something I've heard as a member.

Are you seriously suggesting that we raise enough money to rebuild the whole railway from Lynton and Barnstaple before we start? That's how your comment reads which is strange since you are always saying that you want to see progress now.

 

In my opinion the railway needs to stop, as Chris Duffell has said to take stock of the situation, it needs to concentrate on steadying the reputation of the railway and rebuilding any damage done by the recent failings within the heritage movement and within the membership itself, tourist visitors wont really be affected by what has happened as its an attraction to visit whilst in the area, the Trust whether they like it or not firstly have to give a full explanation of what went wrong, why things did or didn't happen and what this has all cost, an independent assessment would be even better but everything must be made available and open to scrutiny, also because the Trust holds the A class shares in the Blackmoor company and has apparently given a loan to help with the purchase then all the detail of the OSHI purchase and conditions must be made available to members too and included in the assessment, only once this has been done and we know the situation in full can the railway move on, what i think is also important is the success of the pub, we know that Wetherspoons is unloading a lot of pubs as are Marston's and many local pubs are struggling or running limited opening times which shows that the pub industry is under immense pressure to survive, even though we have been told time and again that Blackmoor plc is separate to the railway, from the outside world looking in it is one and the same ,especially with the sale being plastered over all the local news platforms so the pub has to perform as well as, if not better than the railway but likewise if the OSHI is run poorly or fails it will have a negative effect on the railways reputation and will play into the hands of any future objectors who would no doubt suggest 'they cant run a pub let alone a longer railway' so for those reasons the Trust should concentrate on Woody Bay and the pub alone for the next 12-18-24 months and should be duty bound to bail out the pub if need be simply because OSHI cannot now be allowed to fail as the two businesses are inextricably linked especially in the eyes of the general public, this pause and reset of the railway will allow for much more thought as to where it heads in the future, the balls -up has been made, it is back to square one and the cobbled together option A,B,C or D reaction by the Trust is asking for trouble as things stand at the moment.

 

When the OSHI purchase was being talked about on here before Christmas one commentor said 'get the deal done and worry about the detail after', well, as they say 'the devil is in the detail' and part of the detail is that the current owners are staying on in the house for 2 years, as was stated by themselves on the OSHI Facebook page, there is however a whisper and it is just a whisper because the 'detail' has been kept quiet that because the private garden of the house is on the alignment needed for the railway that no work will start there for those two years but irrespective of how genuine that rumour is there are conditions attached to the consented planning that have to be changed before any work could start, the whole layout of the outside of the pub would have to be remodelled for work to start ect as the existing entrance is AIUI where the new formation will run

 

Thanks

 

You can't fundraise, or even reliably cost, the whole project when there is such a mismatch between "where you are" and "where you want to be". Operationally, "where you want to be" is 20 times bigger than "where you are". So it is not just about land, and track, and planning consent (vital though those are); it has to be accompanied by a big influx of locomotives, carriages and operational staff (*). That will take years to achieve, so if you do as you suggest - raise all the money first, then build it, you'll find that the money has been eroded by inflation.

I think everyone agrees on the core part of the vision - reinstate the line as close as possible to its original route between Lynton and Barnstaple, using as far as possible original structures (bridges, stations etc). I would also suggest that the vision should include operating as far as possible with historic, or replica, locomotives and carriages. Some may disagree on that point, but you really need to settle it in the vision bit, because a significant deviation has costly impacts on the infrastructure. If, for example, your vision says "South African Garretts pulling nine coach trains" then all your stations need designing for that length; and the bridges may need amending for a larger envelope.

But beyond that: the strategy needs to think in bite-size chunks, in which the fundraising, planning, land acquisition, rolling stock and staffing work in concert. Many lines have found to their cost that even relatively modest extensions put significant strains on their locomotive, carriage and volunteer resources, particularly when you cross a threshold from needing n to n+1 trains in operation to run a reasonable service. No-one to my knowledge has planned to extend from 1 operational mile to 20 miles without doing so in numerous stages.

(*) As a simple example: the rate that you can pass out newly qualified drivers and guards - even with a ready supply of volunteers at the bottom of the ladder - is constrained by the number of turns you can offer now. Looking at the timetable, the L&B currently runs 7 round trips with one loco on about 170 days of the year. There's simply not enough turns available to to do anything other than a very gradual increase in the number of qualified staff. So you can build up organically, but you can't make a big step change in staff; the consequence of a big extension all at once is that the existing operational staff get run ragged for several years until the increased opportunities for training allow newly-qualified staff to catch up.

Tom

 

I am reminded of 'How do you eat an elphant? One bite at a time"

 

Tom you might be surprised but some people have been looking at this:- https://www.bluebell-railway.co.uk/bluebell/soc/ps_manual/
As a basis of concept for the L&BR version.

You are also right about increasing the number of locos and carriage will take time, but personally I know of a few L&BR members who are not on NP but share the same idea of rebuilding the last SR narrow gauge train set (2 locos and 9 carriage) by 2035. May be not a big thing, in the long term, but something which is do able before that.

 

I feel sometimes that it is a chicken and an egg situation.

 

You'll never raise the likely £10 - 20m+ you are likely to need in one hit - and even if you did, your capacity to actually spend it quickly would be constrained by other resources, such that the money raised would degrade by inflation.

You might have a fighting chance to raise that amount (at today's prices) at £500k - £1m per year for twenty years, focused on specific projects. (Even that would put you right at the very top of heritage railway fundraising: only a handful are consistently raising those sums every year). But to do that, you need numerous smaller projects, each of which is individually achievable, but which collectively contribute to the overall vision.

To be fair, the wider L&B collective has already shown considerable success in that way - a new locomotive, several carriage restorations, significant land purchases for the future track bed etc. are by no means a shabby achievement. To my (outside) eyes the issues seem to be more around joining all those separate achievements up into a cohesive whole, rather than fundraising per se. (And the operator in me is acutely aware of the difficulties of rapid change of scale in operations).

Tom

 

Have you missed a 0 off? My rugby club, 5 years ago, spent £5m on a stand that seats 750, and a 300 cover banqueting operation. If the L&B can really be done for £10m either my rugby club was ripped off or we genuinely ought to be looking at just borrowing it!

That is facetious by the way, but I think we're looking at well north of £20m to rebuild 19 miles of line.

 

I was being cautious to avoid scaring the horses

Tom

 

I think it was costed at £30 million about 20 years ago

 

Yes I do, but when it come to the money you still need to identify where most of the money is going to be spent, so you can then set the fund raising targets for each extension.

The thing is, if you are asking a private donors for support, you only get one go at it. So you would look stupid if having received from them say £1 million pounds, you then find that the project will cost you twice as much, they are not going to be too pleased if you go and ask them again to top up the pot for a second time.

As big capital project like this, you have to tread the fine line of having enough money to do it well or doing it on a shoe string over a ten or twenty years period. I am convinced that if the project had, had enough money in its bank account, we might not be having some of these problems now.

 

I think the horses have already bolted but we do have some Pilton ponies

 

Agreed, but you look equally stupid if you set targets now, and raise funds off the back of those, then find costs have risen and you have to go back round.

I keep coming back to the need to distinguish tactics from strategy. The strategy may be to reopen a section at a time, and have a ballpark price tag of £x. But the tactics need to focus on each section, and the total that's required for that, to allow the components to build up. And there, my instinct is that doing it on a shoestring over 10-20 years is not a bad thing, but a necessity. It took 14 years for the Ffestiniog to reopen the whole WHR, and that was with the aid of grants of a kind that are unlikely to be available today.

My fundraising experience is limited but, where I have been involved, my experience has been that donors are willing to give multiple times - bluntly, it's often easier for them to give £10,000 a year for 10 years, than £100,000 in one lump sum. They are also, generally, practical people who recognise that projects happen over a time, and that the requirement for cash won't be even.

As for the amount of cash in the bank, I'm not sure whether or not I agree with you - I'm just not close enough to comment usefully. However, when I've wondered where I might spend my winnings from the Euromillions draw I don't enter, one thought that's consistently occurred to me has been about the ability of any of the possible targets of my generosity to absorb that cash. The L&B is, whether we like it or not, a small operation today. Had the extension from Killington Lane to Blackmoor been successful, I still think that the key challenge would have been stepping up the staffing to support that longer operation, as new volunteers would have needed to be recruited, trained, and kept skilled.

 

What is the hurry about starting work at Blackmoor? All in good time.

Surely one part of the strategy that is quite clear is to buy sections of the route as and when possible. It is, and has to be, one bite at a time, and I see nothing wrong in principle in having multiple bodies doing the biting, provided there is effective co-ordination.

 

I think the hurry up is coming from members that are more desperate than I am. My understanding is that we have a window of two years before anything can happen at Blackmoor. In this period we need learn from what went wrong and how to avoid it happening again.

Also in this period I would suggest getting the members views of what it is they would like to see at Blackmoor. Once such a plan has been agreed. I would suggest that three things then need to happen:-

1 Appoint a working group to over see the project these people would have nothing to do with either the Trust or the CIC but are profession construction engineers and planners. The project team will be required to submit update reports to both the Trust and the CIC.
2 Submit the new plans to both NDC and ENPA .
3 Start the fund raising campaign so there is money in the bank before any of the work is started.

 

2 more locos and 5 more coaches? In 12 years time? With storage at Woody Bay already at a premium?

 

Absolutely. If the L&B were to adopt Colin's plan of 'raise all the money and do the whole thing in one job', I could be 99.9% certain that the prices for the trackbed parcels would massively increase overnight...

I assume you are going to raise an extra £200-250k (conservative) to cover the staff you mention in point 1? If they are to be truly independent, then they will need to be professionals who will need to be paid.

How do you reconcile your plan above, which is likely to take at least 3-4 years to see physical work starting and your desire/demand to see an extension asap?

If your plan was implemented and the extension was not built after let's say 5 years, maybe because a landowner doesn't want to sell, or the planners are taking forever/placing many restrictions on the work, or you haven't raised enough money, would you be calling it a c*ck up and demanding the trustees all resign (bearing in mind it's your plan they've been following)?