Lynton and Barnstaple - Operations and Development

The L and B is like an orchestra without a conductor. All the right elements to play a symphony, but not a hope of doing so all the way to the finale.

Unless and until a group of people emerges who can rally around in a coordinated fashion and accept one voice that sets the tempo this project will fail to meet its objective.

As a new member of the association I don’t know who could pull it together or even if that person(s) exist. There needs to be a considerable uplift in performance for this most ambitious of projects not to permanently stall. There are too many uncoordinated voices for this to happen right now.

 

Whilst appreciating that there are several things that could have/should have been done better, I think that the L&B revival is still steadily taking place. The major stations on the route have been purchased, more lengths of track bed have been purchased, bridges have been rebuilt. More volunteers are working regularly on more sites. I look forward to seeing these pearls gradually getting joined together.

 

Without any disrespect whatever to the gems being created, they are 11+ preservation and the connection of the gems to make necklace is Phd level.

 

Plenty of projects started in a pretty ramshackle fashion and have had to become more businesslike over the years. There have been mutterings on here that some of them have even become too businesslike at the cost of losing their original ethos. Parts of the L&B family seem to have clear ideas of their respective roles in the overall project and to be carrying those roles out competently. One part of the family is not looking so good and needs a reboot.

 

@21B , the problem is that the L&B has, in Peter Miles, someone who seems have a need to be in charge of everything and wants to operate without regards to the rules, fair play or accountability.

Mr Miles, and those on the Board who facilitate his behaviour - as far as I can see, actively in the shameful case of Mr Nicholson and Mr Cowling, and at best by refusing to do their jobs for everyone else with the lonely and honourable exception of Chris Duffell - need to have a long look in the mirror and ask whether this is working, and whether it has any chance of working in the future.

You'd have thought that Mr Miles et al would have treated the response to their attempted rigging of the Trust election and the loss of planning as a wake up call.

Sadly, it seems not to be the case.

 

One of the issues we have had for many years is the length of the possible railway, the first time we looked at Blackmoor we has a different management team in place. Then we had another team in place when we tried for Hole Ground at the Barnstaple end of the line. Then we had yet a third and a fourth team at Woody Bay. May be and this is only a suggestion, rebuilding the L&BR might need to take on a more co-operative outlooking body where sections of the railway are rebuilt by smaller groups, but are still linked into the main charity.

I do know that we have members who only want to see a Barnstaple to Blackmoor section open, yet we also have members who are just as keen to see a Lynton end of the line open. Then we have a few that have expressed an interest in only working at a museum at one or other of the stations.

Finding some one to bring this all together is almost impossible from the current membership, I would suggest that this person will need to come from the outside and who is not weighed down with all the current baggage and also does not have an axe to grind.

The only railway I knew of to operate on this basis was the Worth Valley Railway, but since I haven't looked at that railway for some time, I am not sure if it still works like that.

The fully reopened L&BR will have six major stations from Lynton to Barnstaple to operate and no doubt each station will in time gather together a small group of members who will give their time only to their one chosen station.

We are already beginning to see a small split between those wanting to continue at Woody Bay and those wanting to move on to the Blackmoor site.

I do get the feeling that you are never to going to please all the members all the time no matter what you do.

 

Quite so. However, very few that have created something quite so large and impressive as the fully complete L&B would be. Also, ramshackle is one thing, but in a world where the standards are higher and the amount of volunteering with the right practical skill sets is lower, being ramshackle is one thing but being disorganised is a death knell for progress.

 

Those splits largely derive from the lack of visible achievement of the strategic goals of the L&B over the last few years. People will look at things that interest them more, and put emphasis on those.

The issue is not about organisation - and almost certainly not about allowing all of them to run separately and concurrently (IMHO a surefire way to create yet more fracture lines and relationship issues). Instead, it’s about ensuring that there is a vision that is being followed, and showing a path towards success.

There is no doubt in my mind that the current trustees and directors are committed to the future of the L&B. This is not akin to the SVR in the Nabarro era, or the suspicions of the WSRA “ex6+1” motives a few years ago.

Rather, it’s about whether they’ve the energy or ideas to deliver a future for the L&B in light of the failure to secure planning previously. The focus on internal opposition and control suggests too much energy is going in the wrong directions, and that new blood and focus are needed, probably requiring a changing of the guard.


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@35B is spot on here: the language has been always 'one more heave' to get the railway extended - I was one (I suspect of many) who desperately wanted the s73 application to succeed in order to make some sort of start. But continously marched up to the top of the hill only to be marched down again is going to be deflating and then to open those who are leading to some pretty probing questions. Sadly, when those questions get asked, there are no reliable answers and we have the spectacle of Mr Miles and company publicly villifying ENPA and "keyboard warriors" in Lynton.

Again, @35B is quite right. It shouldn't be too hard to agree on what we're trying to acheive - something like "to reinstate as much of the L&B between its two namesake towns in as historically accurate a manner as possible" is something that I think most of us could agree on. 100% fidelity to a date is probably impossible and arguably undesirable - Bluebell amongst others successfully portrays (if that's the right word, @Jamessquared ) a series of time snapshots of the line's history at the different stations. Indeed, if 100% fidelity to a particular era was the L&B's mantra, presumably the first act would be to paint the carriages green!

But once we have an agreed aim that all are comfortable working towards, we need to develop a plan to deliver it that all - including the CIC and volunteers, YVT/EA and the owners of various bits of the infrastructure within the L&B family (OSHI/LBBC, Rowley timeshares, Distant Point partnership, 762 Club plus any others I'm not aware of) - can buy into and that we can make best use of the skills in the organisation to make progress. It is for this reason - as well as the currently limited pool of volunteers - that I'm cautious to operating several bits of railway, or having a further proliferation of organisations - simplicity (ideally, including simplifying and consolidating the existing range of organisations) should be our medium term goal (I'd like it to be sooner, but I understand that this will need time to evolve and for personalities to change in order to deliver this.)

The foundation of this is openness, honesty, transparency and trust. And the actions of Mr Miles and his friends in the last 12 months fall well short on all of these, which is tragic as well as damaging to the organisation.

 

>>>But continously marched up to the top of the hill only to be marched down again....

In the case of the Sec73, I got the impression that the 'troops' were left alone somewhere half-way up and had to make their own way back down :-(

 

It's not so much the guard that needs changing so much as the drivers who don't know how to (drive or change)! (Sorry!)

 

If this were to be the 'mantra', which particular era should we be maintaining 'fidelity' towards? The original L&B, which ran the service from 1899 to 1923 (24 years) or the Southern from 1923 to 1935 (a mere 12 years). I suspect that the keenness for the Southern is because so many supporters still remember the latter green days of the Southern Region of BR. I like the Bluebell Railway idea of different operating periods for different stations. I like the K&ESR approach even more and yes I do know of its history. I don't see a mix of liveries for stations, locomotives or coaches as unhealthy and I wonder if one of the Manning Wardle tanks (if they were to be built) might be bedecked in L&BR livery? (All the locomotives don't have to be garishly labelled with SOUTHERN do they??) And before the 'keyboard warriors' mount their hefty iron steeds I present this in a light-hearted effort to bring some levity to Our Difficult Situation, if only for a while.

 

What's all this swearing I see? Green carriages? Southern?

 

Absolutely right, the L&B Railway Company ceased to exist after 1923, afterwards it was just a branch line of the Southern.
But, the Southern era is the closest in living memory (only just now for those who actually rode on the railway, I know of a few still), but many who also remember their parents and grandparents speaking about travelling in the later years before Southern decided to close it.

 

There are many (well, several at least) Southern-era heritage railways - there is only one Lynton & Barnstaple. As I understand it, the plan has always been to build a rake of replica Southern green carriages to complement the rebuilt originals. I agree that the L&B loco liveries deserve to be represented too.

 

The relevance of Southern livery to fundraising through nostalgia is I would suggest rapidly waning. One engine and a set of coaches in that livery and the rest L and B would be my personal choice.

 

It would certainly be the case IMHO that at least one loco and set of coaches in L&BR livery [#] would be a USP that no other railway could or should have, whereas the same would not apply to SR livery.

[#] without getting into any discussions yet at to 'which' L&BR livery

 

There are different approaches you could take. One would be to choose an arbitrary date and make everything fit that: "the railway will appear as it would have done on 1 July 1930". Almost certainly that will upset more people than it pleases, regardless of date chosen.

The other option, which probably fits the educational ethos better, is to have a range representing the full history of the original line. It's a reasonable assumption in any case that liveries - of both rolling stock and buildings - didn't change overnight, so some cross over in which, for example, SR-liveried stock ran through buildings still sporting L&B painting schemes is probably historically appropriate; likewise no doubt - the historians could look this up with painting dates - SR-liveried locos pulling L&B-liveried wagons and carriages (or vice versa).

All that is before you get into the operational realities of both maintenance schedules and painting schedules: if some years down the line your poor Operations Manager suddenly realises that the only SR-liveried loco is on wash out while the SR-liveried brake coach has had to be pulled to remediate wheel flats, you are hardly going to cancel the service because the only available train that can be pressed into service has a mix of liveries ...

So to me, a mixture of both station presentation and loco and carriage liveries is both inevitable and also educationally desirable. What I would say though is that - particularly for buildings, which tend to be long-lived - you make two things clear:

1. For each station, you explicitly state what period you aim to recreate, so everyone knows and agrees; and you define the boundary within which that policy applies
2. As far as is practicable within the constraints of available infrastructure and current operational necessities, you interpret a decision that "Station X will be presented in early 1930s appearance" to mean "as Station X appeared from evidence of photographs etc. from that period", not "according to the then current painting standards". That is something I think we don't get particularly right on the Bluebell; hence Kingscote being a chocolate box 1950s station, whereas photos from the 1950s show that it must actually have still been in late 1930s colours well into the 1950s and still had wooden post lower-quadrant LBSCR signals.

Tom

 

I agree with Tom and others that a coherent range of liveries and periods would be a sensible approach. The GCR is another railway that has that ethos.

 

We already run a mixed livery through a 1930s station.
Carriages are 1913, Lyn is Southern as is Woody Bay.
Carriages are time locked to 1913 as that is when carriage 17 was built and the first livery it had.
Afterwards we cannot say if the fleet was ever all in one livery as many were trialled/used afterwards and most of the time was probably somewhat mixed.
At the moment the livery we have definitely draws the public in, it's commented on very often. It's a corporate image, it's L&B, and it stands out.
At some point a nod can be made to the southern era, but right now, any change would be a mistake in my view.
If it wasn't for the carriages many wouldn't even realise its actually a Victorian railway, and yes, that's has been said to me by visitors.