Steam engines available for traffic in 2014

Who said I was concerned? I find the whole reliance on Wikipedia as a source of information rather amusing, to be honest.

If people want to write about my projects on there, and write rubbish, that's fine with me. Life is too short to worry about these things. The correct information is out there for anyone interested enough to do proper research.

 

Tom, the efficency thing is the rub. At the moment there are EIGHT tractor/trailer combinations being used pretty much full time on heritage related road moves. If they all do one heritage job a day, that is £24,000 going out of the movement. At the time of writing there is an 8 working day wait to get one. So between now and next Thursday £200,000 will leach out of MPD or promotional budgets or private owners pockets and be gone forever. Projected over a year as a worst case that is about 7% of the total annual turnover (by sales income) of the entire movement. It demands that 500,000 passengers a year turn up and pay just to cover it, never mind coal, insurance or the hire fee. It is about the same , I think, as the total payroll of paid staff - which is about 2000 bodies.

At the same time 30% or so of complete kettles are lying idle, undergoing painfully slow repair, or reduced to earning a few pennies by being "display engines", while they wait in the works queue or for the Money Fairy to bale the owner out for the next 10 yearly overhaul. So Yes, Tom, if it really is efficient then it is the right way to go. But it doesn't look very efficient to me. It looks to me like we are standing in a hot shower, wearing an Armani suit and tearing up £50 notes. Still, what do I know....it's only money after all.

 

Neil - how many of those lorry moves are for moving gala visitors on very short term hire? Personally, I am sceptical about the economics of galas, but presumably those railways that hold them know whether bringing in a visitor is cost effective?

I was thinking, rather, about railways having long-term visitors, i.e. for a whole season, in which the move cost becomes a relatively small part of the whole. Many railways seem to go from feast to famine in motive power terms if left to their own devices (just look at the recent history and projections for 2014-15 on the Bluebell for proof of that!) If spreading the available pool more widely, it might be possible to balance supply and demand more closely, which was really my efficiency point. For example, the Bluebell broadly needs around ten locos, and for a lot of the last decade it has had about ten locos. Just for much of that time, one or more of them has been on long-term hire.

The other point is maintaining the service, for which hiring loco may be preferable to not running the service. For example, I wasn't much of a fan of the DMMU on the Bluebell while the line was severed between the engine shed and the rest of the network. But when all is said and done, it generated many thousands of pounds of income over and above the hire, fuel and move costs, at a time when we would otherwise have been shut. That money is available for re-investment elsewhere, notably in infrastructure. As Beancounter frequently points out, a lot of your costs are fixed, especially infrastructure - so broadly, if hiring an engine means you can continue to run a service that otherwise wouldn't run, providing you at least meet the marginal costs (including movement and hire fees), having the engine on hire is better than not, even if those marginal costs are higher than they would be if you used on of the "home" fleet.

Tom

 

GFG - How is the number of eight rigs arrived at? I can easily believe that there are eight units doing railway work (Moveright have one, Allelys at least two and there are others in the "game" too). But from personal experience they are all moving fGW stuff or Northern Whotsit or something whenever I want one, and they are also busy moving all manner of other heavy things - the rig that moved a loco for us not long ago showed up at work the other day to move 60tons of subsea cable. I am not sure that there are eight rigs fully employed by the heritage railway industry every day though. Also if I am splitting hairs I think that the £3000 per day per rig estimate doesn't quite align with my experience of hiring them, being about double (though it depends on the length of the movement). Now having said all that, I can believe that last week there were eight moves associated with the movements to the WSR gala (four from the MHR alone), but that is not a typical day. Gala season at the start and end of the year is a bit busy, but it generally quietens down the rest of the time. In short then, I don't think the amount "leaching" from the movement is quite as alarming as you suggest - fortunately.

I think it is fair question to ask why more of the money spent on transport cant be spent on individual locos, but the problem is that it is different pockets. The locos needing the work don't belong to the same people as those shelling out for the lowloaders, and there is no way to aggregate the money together to spend on restorations. Added to which the total value of all road and rail (which is generally cheaper btw) movements by most railways in a year wouldn't make much of a dent in the overhaul of loco ( It might pay for 20% of the overhaul, and what do you do while you wait 5 years for the overhaul to complete), and providing the railway has its sums correctly done, the transport of a visitor ought to be an investment with a pretty immediate payback - whether in terms of a successful gala or a loco to haul trains for a period.

To Tom's question, galas do make sense and can make a return, providing that the cost side of the equations is well balanced with the revenue available. I have my doubts too about the "mega" galas, and I have heard some railway managements say that their gala does no more than breakeven. Personally that seems like a lot of effort to go to if the best you can do is cover your costs. I have heard that from sufficient places to think that breakeven galas are not uncommon. Hence I am sometimes sceptical about the value of "enthusiast events". Our bread and butter is the ordinary day to day visitor with no especial interest market. That said, galas can make a decent return as I said at the start.

 

A number of those moves are also related to maintenance, for example the EMF decided to ship Bradley Manor to Tyseley for a quick overhaul rather than waiting in the queue at Bridgnorth. Sound commercial decision IMHO by a well organised owning group keen to get their loco up and running again quickly. I think as time passes we are likely to see more locos being shipped around for maintenance - the shiny new works at Tyseley already looks a bit under sized, and I very much doubt Ian Riley will move into smaller premises when he leaves the ELR.

 

And at the GWSR, with 2807 still on extended winter maintenance at tyseley and I believe 7903 will be making her way there too for her overhaul once she's been dismantled.

 

The moves to/from main works are exactly what Tom identified - a possible efficiency because overhauls will probably move to a few centres of excellence - certainly boiler work will because Insurers want ever more assurance. But if the 32% is right only 60 engines (with the industrials) will go to or from works in a year.

21B, my price was based on 160 miles, with VAT, booked today. Yes, mileage plays a part, and negotiating with the haulier does too and if you have a tender engine and the rig can't do two trips in one day that will affect it also. If you can get one for £1500 inc VAT as you suggest, do PM me and I will buy all my road moves through you and pay you a commission for your trouble. The eight number came from one of the firms you mention. And I would be just as thrilled if you could get something moved by rail for less than £3k. Coal, track access and something for West Coast's trouble for crewing and pathing it, can only ever be cheaper if it is a tender engine and you need to take the POB with you and even then it will be close. And if it registered to run or be towed on NR: out of the total of 320 odd that work - and therefore will go, or be due to go, to works in the next ten years - how many meet that standard? 30 at best I suggest. And to go back to Tom's point about efficient overhauls, most of those 30 are based at main works depots anyway.

Our inability to link this item of cost with unrepaired engines is simply an endorsement of Paul Hitch's theme of Byzantinism. The two standard gauge steam railways that return a real dividend to their owners - Lakeside and Paignton - rarely have visiting engines and don't often hire theirs out either. I am not suggesting we all follow their boring business models, but let us try to understand what we are really doing.

 

The number of locos that can be moved by rail is limited at a stroke by the number of lines actually connected to the national network.

 

Every time a loco moves, whether it is on a low loader or even hauling a train, there is a cost implication. Hopefully, someone will have done their sums and the benefit of that loco moving will outway the costs. If that is the case, and the contribution is more than the cost, it can also be argued that it is not leaching money, it is speculating to accumulate.
I haven't hired a low loader for a while, but the last time I did (Oct 2012) it was one of the larger ones and cost £1600 (+vat) for a 250 mile trip. I feel £3K is a bit on the high side for most moves, unless it's for a tender loco. I also find it difficult to come to terms with the idea of 8 moves/day for heritage locos. That's forty moves/week, or 2000 a year, if we give the drivers the weekend off. You might get somewhere near that if you include all the big railway road movements, as well.

 

Going back to the original question, I can't give the answer, but I'd express it in another way. Broadly speaking, there are as many railways running steam services as there were 10 years ago, perhaps slightly more. Whilst there may be one or two struggling to maintain their steam fleets at full strength, on the whole there has not been widespread dieselisation so I would conclude that the overall working fleet is probably about the same, and perhaps even slightly greater, than it was 10 years ago, but also perhaps slightly redistributed.

 

On the fireless front one operated well at Manchester for some years charged off a feed from the main gas steam boiler on site.

Duncan

 

GFG - I think we have been talking slightly apples and pears. I was thinking £1500 per low loader, so moving a tender engine would be closer to your £3k, though I still feel that that total is a little high, so I will do a bit of digging for you and PM you.

I wasn't defending the structure of the heritage "movement" particularly though I will observe that short of some kind of nationalisation of all the railways I can't really see how you would address the inherent messiness and, yes, inefficiency. I'd also observe that this messiness may in fact be the underpinning strength that allows such a vibrant "movement" to exist in stark contrast to most places around the world. I have often thought why don't the heritage railways to club together and create their own "main works", but on reflection I think that that would very likely kill the "movement", slowly and painfully. Centralising the works would preclude many volunteers from participating.

 

Now this thread is taking an interesting turn! Is it cheaper to carry out major repairs "on site" or to incur transport charges to cart the machinery to and from specialist workshops furnished with all the equipment needed? There is no way I can answer this and it would be interesting to find out if anyone can. Rather different circumstances applied in "the old days" but it was never considered appropriate to equip running sheds for general repairs which is what, in effect, is happening now.

Now we return to my "too many Pacifics, too few tank locomotives" theme! Something of more moderate size is not only cheaper to operate, in the circumstances of a tourist railway, but is cheaper to transport as well. Few, if any, tourist railways have any need, as opposed to wish, to operate behemoths. Those who do so choose will have a price to pay and whether this is affordable in the medium to long term, will be seen.

PH

 

Simon,

For "messiness" IMHO read "Byzantine"! I await attempts to find someone who can build the boilers for the more likely of the current new builds with interest. No medium/large loco. boilers have been built in the UK for fifty years and this would be one aspect in which some form of joint enterprise might have been an assistance.

Paul H

 

Not necessarily a matter of cost. A loco owner at site A may find that workshop capacity means a wait to get the overhaul done but site B has the capacity to start straight away. This moving the loco from A to B enables the job to be done quicker. Exactly why we moved 34081 from NNR to NVR - ok there were other considerations - but we are months if not years ahead with the overhaul as a result of that move. Thus the expense of the move has been justified.

 

Accords very much with what I mean by "Byzantine" I fear.

PH

 

I disagree. The admin involved in restoring a loco is much the same no matter where it is carried out. If it was that complicated I doubt people would send their locos and rolling to Ian Riley, Crewe, Tyseley, Carnforth or elsewhere for overhaul. For owners without manpower resources of their own, it's a simple business decision. Quotes are received for the work required and the loco, carriage or whatever is moved to whichever works has won the contract.

 

This is in danger of becoming like a badminton game alas.

It's the ownership patterns of equipment and its relationship to "host" organisations I find Byzantine, not who does the actual maintenance.

P.H.

 

I see. But surely this "Byzantine" arrangement developed because quite simply no one organisation could afford to fund everything needed to run a railway.