North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

You could make them time-dependent. i.e. "Pickering - Whitby is £49,50, Whitby - Pickering is £25 but only valid on trains leaving before 12:00 etc".

I know the tradition on heritage railways has tended to one price - but times are changing and all that. In any case - even the old "day rover, one price" model is no longer really true: at most railways you will pay different amounts depending whether you pay online in advance; on the day at a station; with or without a membership card; arrive as part of a coach party act. It would not be unusual to have half a dozen people on a train who have all paid different amounts for the same journey.

The bottom line to me is:

• The NYMR is losing money
• It can't increase capacity on its most popular journey, due to a combination of pathing and rolling stock availability constraints
• In order to deliver its most popular journey (Pickering to Whitby am, return pm) it ends up having to transport an awful lot of fresh air on the reverse workings

It shouldn't be rocket science to work out that the obvious growth opportunity has to be doing something about the fresh air ...

To0m

 

I see where you are going with that, but on the current timetable which I only looked at to see how it would work, on a Blue day not at all and on a red day it would be 10:00 from Whitby back on the 15:10, does that carry a lot of fresh air? if not probably does not help. It could also work on the 12:35 from Whitby for those that want nothing more than a ride with a 20 minute turnround at Pickering. Also of course existing 15:10 loading dependent.
It is a sort of super off peak, but if you sell on line and have insufficient TTI's may be subject to abuse?

 

The 10:00 from Whitby usually has a decent load and picks up at Grosmont. The 12:35 from Whitby is normally light (my experience on Saturdays).

 

The 12.35 is lightly loaded as it really provides nothing but a return journey to Pickering. There’s hardly enough time to visit the station gift shop before being transported back to Whitby. Not a good idea to leave your seat as those people who travelled to Pickering on the 10.00 ex Whitby are looking to return on this, the last train, and are looking for any spare seats. The 12.35 ex Whitby has to run, though, for that very reason, empty seats or not. That is why Paul Lewin philosophy on train operations just won’t work. The NYMR tried restricting those travelling from Pickering on the 09.20 to returning on the 12.35 after Covid but it was unpopular as Whitby is a full day destination for most, especially if you include fish and chips or any other meal in that day.
Fitting in between the Northern T/T really does make it awkward.

 

So other than that 12:35 from Whitby where is all this "fresh air" that is apparently being carried around then?
It is the same at Swanage with the first train from Swanage and the last from Norden, but there is no way of avoiding it.

 

The internal services don’t tend to load too well as they only go to Grosmont and, now the teaks aren’t in use there is little incentive for many people, given the high fare. I think it has been 3 coaches this year and frequently a diesel, as well. Doing away with them would leave big gaps in the T/T, though.

 

So what would be your masterplan to fill the trains and return the railway to profitability?

 

My master plan is quite simple. Give the public what they are looking for which is value for money and a train ride to where they want to go, generally behind a steam loco. Oh, and address the elephant in the room which is the excessive number of paid staff. It also needs a management that has a can do attitude instead of the current can’t do one and knows the value and ability of its volunteers and supporters.
Getting that sea change won’t be easy, though.

 

I'd also suggest that looking at why people were willing to travel in the middle of the day on "internal" trains before, and how that was sold, might give some answers.

 

I will throw in this grenade. Did the railway make a surplus before running to Whitby?

 

IMO this is the answer. The railway didn't go to Whitby for a long time and yet was still among the highest passenger figures for preserved lines, if not the highest, during those times. They used to be very successful at pulling people in through various means, but with everything now about Whitby those ideas all seem forgotten now. When you think about recent decisions like taking service coaches off the diner, making that path unavailable most days for regular passengers, and getting rid of the Grosmont Rover, they have actively pushed people away from the internal services. Then they wonder why they are running with more 'air' in them. Then add in the loss of the Teak's and it just magnifies the loss.
The long and short of it is that if they want to fill those trains they need to find a way to push them with some sort of incentive that used to be there but isn't for the moment.

The you throw in that even with the current services the fact that the Whitby sets are down to six coaches instead of sevens (or even eights seen in the late 00's) says a lot. If you are struggling to fill particular trains (internal in this case), but have others overloaded at least make sure the overloaded ones have every coach you can put on it. Not having enough coaches for those trains is a terrible state to be in. I do hope that its a shorter term problem to be in and there is a proverbial production line ramped up in the background sorting out the apparent coaching stock shortage.

 

Something like a 'peak' and 'off-peak' pricing structure? Racking my brains... where I have heard that idea before?

At the risk of being boring, I'll re-state my previous point. Effectively price fares in two tiers, Pickering to Grosmont and Grosmont to Whitby.

Pickering to Grosmont section = Fare structure 1
Grosmont to Whitby section = (relatively higher) Fare structure 2
Pickering to Whitby (through fare) = Fare structure 1+Fare 2.

If Grosmont to Pickering in the morning and Pickering to Grosmont in the late afternoon is a more viably-priced option, some of that fresh air would surely replaced by passengers?

To me it seems a fairly (farely?) obvious thing to do. What am I missing?

 

Unfortunately the current six coach Whitby trains aren’t full to overflowing. On the day I travelled on the 09.20 you could have comfortably got everyone getting on at Pickering on a four coach set. That was perhaps fortunate as one coach was reserved for a coach party travelling from Goathland to Whitby so effectively ran empty from Pickering.
You have highlighted what you to consider to be retrograde steps, such as removing passenger accommodation on the diner and the sidelining of the teaks. All these with the exception of the short sets have been management decisions. The short sets have largely been due to the rough shunt last year which took eleven coaches out of use. Fortunately, after much work by the good lads in C&W these are nearly all back in service.

 

Operationally the answer was generally yes but that surplus was spent on infrastructure work on bridges and the track. There was always a strong civils programme every year.

 

Yes - and for many years after. I have gone through the NYMR PLC accounts since 2000, and summarised them below (apologies for any typos). There was a change in 2015 when the accounting year changed from December to Februar, so the 2016 figure relates to Jan 2015 to Feb 2016.

2000 £286,897 profit
2001 £314,350 profit
2002 £324,317 profit
2003 £394,731 profit
2004 £394,031 profit
2005 £506,870 profit
2006 £489,495 profit
2007 £602,094 profit
2008 £790,855 profit
2009 £646,760 profit
2010 £531,714 profit
2011 £538,501 profit
2012 £488,279 profit
2013 £509,328 profit
2014 £561,722 profit
2016 £393,876 profit (14 months)
2017 £614,659 profit
2018 £757,234 profit
2019 £799,547 profit
2020 £571,182 profit
2021 £560,923 loss
2022 £5,209 profit
2023 £1,017,282 loss
2024 £633,118 loss

 

Aren't those are the consolidated Trust accounts not just those of the PLC?

Interesting that as regular services to and from Whitby resumed around 2006 the figures suggest that Whitby operations are not the cause of later operating losses. The figures also fail to take account of the hugely distorting effect of grants such as the NLHF YMJ funding which under charity accounting rules must be shown in full as income in the financial year in which it is received even though the spending it supports falls in later years. Consequently the profit shown for 2017 to 2021 is much higher than the reality of the underlying financial situation. That's a distorting effect of charity accounting rules that the Finance Director has drawn attention to on many occasions.

The popular view is that the move into operating losses is caused by employing too many staff but staff numbers are not materially different from the years of healthy surpluses. Whilst recent employment cost changes, such as those in the last budget, certainly don't help that suggests the principal cause is unsustainable cost increases in other areas such as material costs, insurance, fuel, infrastructure repair and replacement and regulatory compliance costs. Couple those with the decline in consumer spending across the hospitality sector and it's not surprising that the NYMR and a number of other heritage railways are incurring operating losses.

 

So it fell of a cliff post Covid. Is that not the case for most attractions let alone Heritage Railways, where perhaps post Putin adventures cost have risen to a higher percentage than other sectors?
Most railways are running far fewer trains, often less steam when they do. I know my local line pax numbers are well down from pre Covid levels.
So fares have risen, because they have had to because costs have risen. Infrastructure costs have risen as BR stuff wears out or lines find out what a cheap job had been done in the past in BR days or earlier. As @Steve mentioned the NYMR has not exactly been holding back on infrastructure expenditure.
Add to all this a cost of living crisis for many (unless you are in the NB, Statesman, Belmond sector, maybe even Saphos) then loads generally down.
There are a few lines that appear to be doing well, and others such as the Bluebell heavily into diversification which is really helping them, but service wise they are a shadow of their former self in the early 2000's. On top of all this those that remember steam are dying off, or like me suffering post Covid and surrounded by other ill people. I have not been to a Heritage Line other than the one I can see out of the window since October and to the younger folks it will be of a day out than a regular repeat event I suspect.

I see comments on many threads about lines running too many diesels, needing to run more trains etc, yet strangely most HR Senior Management teams do not think that is the answer.

I know little of the management history of the NYMR other than I have read on here and maybe it does have too many paid staff, I do not know. But to me it is a line far from big habitation centres Google tells me Grosmont is 41 miles from York and 72 miles from Leeds and none on very good roads. So that will hinder volunteer numbers as they age (for a line that runs 5 days a week in a lot of the summer) and ridership I suspect.

I see lots about the Grosmont Pickering section and if you are a walker I suspect there may be an appeal at getting off at the intermediate stations, but to me even the shed at Grosmont is probably little more than an hour of entertainment. Maybe I am wrong but if you have been to Goathland before I see little that the intermediate stations offer.

The teaks if they were available may look different and appeal, but I doubt if many of "Joe Public" would make a point of going there to travel on them, even a Mk1 exceeds the rubbish most of the modern trains are.

Personally I feel the HR model is close to be broken on a non gala or event basis, hope I am wrong, but I do not envy any of the leadership teams, which is why they have such a high turn over thse days I suspect.

 

Are you sure about the accounting rules? A non-accountant here, but I've been in a situation where an appeal has been mounted, and the matching principle has required that the income be recognised in connection with the expenditure.

I also challenge the response to the "too many paid staff" hypothesis. As presented, it appears to present staffing as a fixed cost, to be incurred regardless of income. If the income has fallen, then the affordable level of expenditure also falls.

I'd like to thank @The Black Watch for the analysis - it would be interesting to see that expanded to show income and expenditure as well as totals to help corroborate the hypothesis.

 

Correction: Steve said there was a strong civils programme each year when speaking about pre-Whitby times.

 

The figures came from https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/02490244/filing-history which is the NYMR PLC filing history on Companies House. I've not looked at the Trust accounts which are at https://register-of-charities.chari...ty-details/501388/accounts-and-annual-returns

Non-accountant here too! More detailed info on income and expenditure can be found in the NYMR PLC link above. Sadly I don't think I've time to do much more analysis, but if anyone else wishes to, I would also be interested!