North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Thanks- I was looking at the main railway thread.

 

If Gift Aid brings in £400k, that equates to around one carriage of passengers per day over the season.
If 60 or so people are put off by the high fares each day, that equals all of the GA takings.

Less passengers does mean less income. Even with higher fares.

Last year there was no morning service to Whitby on Sundays. A morning train loading up to 200 passengers could bring in up to £300k at best over the season. This year there's a morning train and it will make a difference.

 

The point here is not Gift Aid/no Gift Aid, but the combination of a) a further price rise into luxury day out territory and b) a shift in how Gift Aid works. It is a change from the 2024 pricing, where Gift Aid provided something of genuine value to the donor, to the higher 2025 fare, where the Gift Aid offering is much less generous in nature - and for someone doing a day trip to Whitby, very possibly unusable if taking a full day there.

At ~£50/return, the offer of a repeat visit that I may well not use is of value. A voucher for 15% of what I've paid, subject to quite tight conditions, and which the railway may prevent me from using by dint of its shop/cafe opening times, is not. The deal may work for me, as a higher rate taxpayer, because I'll get 15% back when I do my tax return next year, but that awareness puts me in a minority - and I've still to overcome the wallet shock of a £50+ return fare.

The interesting counter-factual would be to look at what would have happened if the donation fare had been kept at £49.50, but the non-donation fare reduced from the 2024 level. My unscientific hunch is that this would have been more remunerative, by not discouraging volume, and keeping fares below an important psychological threshold.

 

It will be difficult to assess the impact of the higher fares on ridership due to the steam ban, which is now almost eight weeks long.

At least steam is now beginning to re-appear and this should provide a boost to takings.

 

Nice idea but unfortunately Gift Aid rules don’t allow it. The same admission charge has to be available to purchasers whether or not they choose to Gift Aid.

 

In which case I was imagining the fares table on https://www.nymr.co.uk/pages/category/book-tickets, which lists separate Donation and Standard fares - and where my reference to non-donation was to what is described as "Standard" online.

That's entirely fair - teasing out separate factors is always difficult.

Absolutely

 

New roster

https://www.nymr.co.uk/Handlers/Download.ashx?IDMF=e134816c-69be-457c-94c4-fef0d226e353

Update

https://www.nymr.co.uk/news/additional-class-37-joins-the-annual-diesel-gala

 

You seem very bullish on the Welsh market. The chairman's column in the latest TR News commenting on the season to date seems to be saying much the opposite e.g. "Passenger numbers on some days of the week simply do not justify the cost of running trains." I gather the TR has reduced the number of trains but numbers per train have stayed much the same (I presume the goal is to make the remaining trains busier). To successfully shrink to profitability may need a more Wallace Arnold type operation as on the Ffestiniog where one is encouraged to actually book a particular return train.

 

Which takes us to a different question, which is about the willingness of potential customers to be corralled in this way - which then also plays to the question of where you balance margin per train with the level of absolute return required to cover the fixed costs. And that brings me round to my bugbear about how those fixed costs are allocated - put too much of the fixed cost into your assumed cost per mile, and you deter operations that will add more income than they cost to actually run; too little, and you'll look like you're making a profit per seat but not cover the costs of actually having a railway

 

Then how does it work for the National Trust and English Heritage, etc?



With some attractions they also have separate prices, both with and without donation, if you want to visit the whole site or just part of it.



I honestly can't see how the NYMR can't offer other GA and non-GA prices. And I really don't see why it has to be a full line Pickering to Whitby ticket only that counts, as surely the trust's influence and management of the section between Grosmont and Whitby is minimal? The booking office/shop excepted.

 

In fairness to @Lineisclear, I think he'd misread my meaning. The wider question about HMRC rules is more interesting and I suspect speaks to NYMR's urgency in getting things sorted.

 

I think it depends on whether you offer the twelve month free return option.
Whilst it’s true that the Network Rail section is not owned or managed by the charity it is running heritage trains over it which is part of it charitable purposes so in terms of paying an admission charge to view the work of the charity the HMRC decision has some logic.

 

Logic, which with 20:20 hindsight, is far from compelling - especially without the annual return option. However, I suspect that NYMR are and were in a weak position to challenge the interpretation by HMRC given the mix of financial significance and urgency.

 

I sort of get that point, though it still begs the wider question - why can’t you also have Gift Aid price on the core Picketing - Grosmont section? The equivalent of a “House and garden” or “garden only” price at a stately home.

You have mentioned earlier reluctance to rock the boat with HMRC and jeopardise the concession you do have. But if your perception is that your ability to claim Gift Aid is on such fragile grounds, should it not be recorded in your strategic risks that your business model is dependent on a tax concession that could be removed at any time?

Tom

 

The same could be said of any other tax change such as those in the recent budget. The risk register includes an assessment of the risk.

 

Anecdote (even mine) isn’t data. My observation was specifically about one place too. The WHR already has a very limited timetable.
I also separately said that we need to watch this year as it is the first that looks like it might be “normal”
Since Covid.
I think that different railways have totally different customer bases and quite different behaviours. It has for some time puzzled me why anyone thinks that what works at one will work at the next. It seems to me that as an industry we have generally spent very little effort truly understanding our customers, and even less on adapting product offers to that knowledge we do have.
Yes we can learn from others, but I suspect that the FR/WHR offer and its success is down to factors about the area and the journeys that are very specific. These may not transfer to the TR.

 

Er…. that’s the case with the 12 month version but not the one currently being employed by the NYMR. I believe @35B s suggestion was to keep the Gift aided fare at the previous £49.50 and make the non-Gift aided fare appropriately less (10%) rather than the over £50 it presently is.

 

The FR & WHR I think probably have a completely different passenger profile to most other railways as they appear to have a high percentage of coach traffic on their trains which do a full line trip, with a reasonable percentage travelling one way. I doubt many other railways have the same

 

Do the WHR/FR load 250 to 300 passengers on their first train of the day?
It's a different railway.
The NYMR is not Tallyllyn either.