Swanage Railway General Discussion

Yawn .... <BJ>

 

Hopefully the half term "kids for a fiver", Easter and the new Bluey event in Autumn will attract lots of families.
Seems to remember a discount on the model village?.

Swanage Railway decided to stop premium dining for various reasons, and just have premium cream teas. Maybe selling the dining coaches might help finances short term. Not sure long term?.

 

Eddystone in steam as I came back from dropping my wife off at the pier. T3 still in the shed so I guess a change of plan?

 

I thought for a minute that you had dropped her off the pier

Peter

 

Yes, change of plan due (as I understand it) to minor injector issue on 563. 34028 will replace for the weekend and start of the week.

 

Blimey, chill out. It was pretty obviously a joke…

 

The promotional fare until fairly recently was "Kids For A Quid".

As has been alluded to in other posts the risk is that by pushing up fares the number of passengers will fall and the railway will be worse off overall in terms of revenue.

The trick is to find the sweet spot which maximises revenue overall. At many attractions - though this may not apply to SR - any shortfall in maximising revenue by charging too low a fare is more than made up by the additional secondary spend of those visitors.

Yes there was a fare which included a visit to Corfe Castle Model Village.

I understand that one of the challenges with the dining train was having sufficient volunteers to deliver the dining part of the service. 2 or 3 in the bar car, 3 or 4 waiting on, 3 in the kitchen preparing and assisting with the cooking of the food and plating up NB There was a full time employed chef on SR. If all these roles had to be performed by paid staff then the service was unviable. The Wessex Belle was arguably the flagship of the SRC and it is sad that at least for now it no longer operates.

 

Obviously the root cause of this lies with the fact that wages have stagnated for 15 years (source: https://amp.theguardian.com/busines...ge-stagnation-resolution-foundation-thinktank) while the cost of everything else has gone up.

This creates a whole multitude of problems for leisure organisations such as Heritage Railways, but IMHO blame should be placed at the door of successive governments who’ve presided over this mess, not the attractions struggling to get by.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

and yet:
(1) the average attendance at premier league football matches has gone up by 10% since 2013 despite eye watering ticket prices. (and the increased cost of getting to / from the venue). The average price of a matchday ticket is now over £50 and on top of that is the cost of the traditional pie and drink at half time. (and I havent mentioned having to buy a new team shirt every year at C£75 to show your allegiance).
(2) the growth of outbound tourism over the past 10 years - 2024 forecast to be at or close to pre pandemic levels.
(3) in a record breaking year in 2023 The Tank Museum attracted over 220,000 visitors an increase of 17% on 2022.(and lets face it, Bovington isnt a short or easy journey from the big population centres).

There are a whole host of statistics that show the rise and fall of expenditure and patronage across a wide range of sectors.

The reality is that in an increasingly competitive market for the leisure or discretionary £ Swanage Railway has to find the ways and means to appeal to more customers (or at least the same it did pre covid) if it is to prosper. Those ways and means must include a better customer experience that gives a value for money experience. The results from The Polar Express prove that there are customers who are willing and able to pay what on the face of it seems an eye watering price if they receive an experience that they deem to be "worth every penny" of what they paid.
Strictly Bulleid 2 and the T3 all have the kudos to bring in those customers looking for something that bit special that justifies the price and the time it takes to get to Swanage.
Swanage Railway can prosper - it needs to be smart and it needs to be savvy.

 

I notice from the website today the high season (yellow timetable) is one steam one diesel. I guess that may be loco hauled due to possible pax volumes with a very similar green timetable but without the slightly earlier start and later last train possibly the DMU? for the non school holiday summer period.
Until I realised it was the day before the Diesel Gala I wondered what was special about May 9th. A Google search told me it is "National Lost Sock Memorial Day" among other equally bizarre things.

Whilst Bulleid attention today is probably focused on Spitfire and Tangmere I did wander out as the sun had been out all day (no sign of the forecast showers) for Eddystone on the 15:20, seen here at Quarr Farm. The sun of course partly obscured by some high cloud as it passed.

 

Yes so green timetable the 2nd service starts and ends at Corfe/Nordon which points to the DMU being used. The Yellow the 2nd starts at Swnaage so points towards a full 5 car local hauled service!
Which last summer couldn't happen as the 2nd service was ALSO the Wareham service .


Thankfully the bad off frequent schedule has been replaced with a better one.


No solid plan for Wareham for 2024... however it was well used during peak summer... Be wondering if we could have a peak summer Wareham to Nordon/Corfe service. Could run hourly (increasing turn up and go passengers) during The highest peak . Wishful thinking perhaps.

 

End of the day, football is the world's most popular sport and fans from all over the world flock to see the best league.

36,657 was the average Premier League attendance in 2013-14, so far this season it's 38,454. That's an increase of 1,797 (4.9%).

In the past decade, West Ham and Spurs have moved grounds, the combined capacity of their previous two stadia was approx 70k, now it's around 125k, Anfield has been expanded by 17k, Man City added 6k on in 2015. Then there's teams that have been promoted/relegated which can change total capacity of the 20 stadiums in any given season. Old Trafford has lost about 2k seats since 2013 due to accessible sections being added.
The vast majority of Premier League matches have been capacity crowds for many seasons, well over the past decade.

I haven't been to a PL game in nearly 6 years now, but I don't think the average ticket is £50, maybe for the best seats at top clubs, but many fans are season ticket holders and the average season ticket certainly is not £950. Away tickets are capped at £30. Man Utd didn't increase their season ticket prices for 11 seasons until this season. The same article shows the most and least expensive PL season ticket prices for each club.

Myself personally, go to about as many games as I did a decade ago. Wales ticket prices have soared ,up 222% for my equivalent seat 2014 v 2024, in that time due to our success qualifying for tournaments, and our average attendance is approx 250% what it was prior to 2014.

 

Here's a little reminder of a showery day last October half-term. It shows Manston and the T3 at work in all sorts of weather. And yes, after the T3's last train, I popped into Corfe station and left a donation. Time well spent

 

New Swanage Around from Feb:

Marks again the plan for Bulleid 2 weekend over first weekend of June as well as the return of the 3TC set later this year (again what services it will run on really is a question as we have the DMU that can already cover all 2nd sercies)


178k passengers in 2023. Which is up from I think aroynd 150k post covid (compared to 200-225k ish pre covid

 

Did it make a profit? If not then probably not worth doing it unless other income streams can support it

 

A significant number of staff and volunteers would much rather see the 3TC (and one day a 4TC) operating the diesel services instead of the DMUs. The DMUs are not historically appropriate to the railway and are much more complicated to maintain.

 

I don’t blame the attractions. Especially where, even accepting the argument of wage stagnation, their costs have risen markedly - including wages.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

I have seen photo's of a WR DMU at Swanage on a Ramblers Special.

117's also ran to Weymouth so like the 56XX while they didnt run to Swanage they did run in Dorset

 

Have they told you this?

 

The proposed Bulleid event has not been confirmed. I’m also not sure that it should be discussed on a public forum if it is still up for discussion. I believe that some of the information on the volunteer newsletters are intended to stay within the volunteer network, that way certain things don’t get leaked to the public before they are ready.