The Elephant in the room...

Whether the organisation is a back garden, one open day a year affair or a multi-national conglomerate, good management is essential to success so I'm not really sure what you are trying to say. Given poor management, any scheme will fail. Given good management, a scheme might still fail if the sums don't add up and volunteers essentially provide the necessary to make the sums add up. The availability of volunteer labour is the single most important factor, simply because you have to assume good management.

 

I'm not sure how I can make my point any clearer, but here goes- you can't assume good management, because it's quite obvious that too many HRs just don't have it. This, surely, is the biggest elephant in the room! There are railways which have large numbers of volunteers, yet are still failing in financial terms and are therefore in danger of failing completely.

 

As a retired qualified Chartered Manager I am perhaps biased. Good management will generally help make a sound project work. Bad management usually wrecks even a good scheme. However managers alone cannot make something work, any project is the sum of its parts and a forceful bad apple in the ranks can destroy even the best project. Good workers help make managers good and the converse. Fully concur with flaman - good management cannot be assumed.

However back in 1978 I had an article published in the Rly Mag suggesting there were issues threatening survival of the preservation movement. Several of the issues I raised then still apply BUT to date the preservation movement has managed to find answers to overcome them, including diversifying from strict preservation to a commercially viable tourist railway model which isn't the same thing at all. Hopefully evolution will continue and railways will continue to raise enough revenue to keep the wheels rolling.

 

in some cases where the board take their collective eye off the ball, you get management that take decisions, not because its best for the railway, but because it suits their own agenda, i agree with Chris, its essential that you have good management and direction from the board, and down through the whole structure, and that decisions are made for the best outcome of the railway as a whole, not just to keep someone happy, or to silence loud voices, in many cases this does not happen, and people take the easy route, then wonder why it comes back to bite them several years later

 

Flaman your shifting your argument again, and I can't follow your thinking. You started by saying that we should not be concerned about the number of volunteers, but we should worry about the reliance on paid staff. Now it is that we should worry about the quality of management not the number of volunteers.

On the subject of management. I don't take good management for granted, and I would agree that most railways face some challenges in this area. I would not agree though that this necessarily equates as others have hinted, with a poor performing board. The board may well be doing the best it can with the paid labour available to it, a job complicated by modern employment protection laws and the politics of running a heritage railway.

Being a manager on a Heritage Railway is no sinecure. The human resources fluctuate daily. You have limited control over volunteers (leaving aside HSE or competence type issues). The financial resources are always constrained and every £1 has to be made to work, and as often as possible things need to be achieved at nil net cost to the company. As a result the sort of tactical planning and control that would be the norm in industry is very difficult to achieve. Not that I am suggesting we shouldn't aspire to it, but we must recognise the limitations.

Incidentally, our boards are (with the exception of any MDs employed by the company who sit on the board) staffed by volunteers! It takes a lot of effort to identify and bring in people with the right skills to the board, and generally speaking I think that there is a serious misunderstanding of the role of a board by many volunteers. It is not primarily a democratically elected representative body for the membership - though of course it should listen to the members and reflect their wishes to the extent that this is possible. Communication is key, but it is not easy to do, and bear in mind that Directors are volunteers as well. They might easily expend 50 hours in a month on board matters in addition to any time they spend operating the railway (as an example the MHR boards have two drivers, a station master, station inspector, and a couple of guards, dining train waiter, as well as the safety manager, volunteer liaison etc few directors don't do at least two jobs including the directorship, and some also have families and full time jobs).

It is certainly the case that some railways have not kept all the things in balance that I have mentioned in this and previous posts. There are some (quite established) lines that I know are struggling at present. However, I don't think it is as simple as cost control, and I don't think that cutting the service is necessarily the answer, unless that is what is required to restore the delicate balance. What I will say is this though....unless there is success in recruiting, enthusing and retaining volunteers, no amount of cost cutting or management will keep our railways going, and I suspect that "good" management won't always be able to mitigate the exterior effects that can interfere with the process of getting and keeping volunteers.

 

I am in general agreement with your statements but I view it from a slightly different perspective having been a trade union rep (Prospect). I have seen well oiled outfits wrecked when a poor manager was parashuted in. Equally I have seen a good manager deal with the bad apple by taking the rest of the group with him/her. Sometimes poor managers get the bad apples they deserve. IMHO Red Robbo got his power from the poor judgement and excessivly aggressive management style of Edwards. Similar clashes have occurred in heritage railways. I witnessed a thriving PW department fall apart because the new manager, a PW professional, tried to drive the volunteers as if they were employees.

Comunication is essential. Try this game. You have a tin cup and a drum stick and 20 paricipants in a management conference (yes I did sit both sides of the fence) who are blindfolded and placed randomly around a lawn. The task is to get all 20 through a gate using only the drumstick and cup. It is possible but demonstrates how much time can be wasted without effective comunication and joint discussion

 

Your comment about Michael Edwards is unfounded IMHO at British Leyland . He was a good man who saved the company, "Red Robbo" as the power hungry man he was wanted to destroy it.

The rest of your post is noted and agreed with.

Regards
Chris:

 

Given there were over 500 walk outs in two years (78 and 79) it is perhaps not surprising that Edwardes was aggressive. Also some left-wing observers have suggested that Robbo was as much a victim of even more extreme factions as Edwardes and that in fact he was trying to control the number of unofficial walk outs. Truth is probably that the managements that pre-dated Edwardes were weak and inefficient and largely responsible for creating the mess that he was sent in to try to clear up. He was the one who for example started the process of slimming the model range so that Austin and Morris and Triumph were not all competing with each other.

 

Chris, 21B - As this thread is about heritage railways and we don't want to go off at a tangent re BL in the 70s can we agree to differ and move on

 

I fear that 21Bs problem is that he can't follow the thinking of anyone whose opinions differ from his! Were he to read my first post on this thread, no.46, he might realise that I am as keen as anyone to see more volunteers. However, I am concerned about the future availability of volunteers, for reasons set out in that post and those mentioned elsewhere in this thread. A fall in revenue, reducing the ability to employ paid staff, together with a fall in volunteer numbers will force railways to live within their means- how confident are we that the managements of railways which are already in difficulties can manage that?

 

Has anyone ever done a survey of how many Heritage Railways are in trouble?

CHRIS

 

Governance of heritage railways can be a bit of a minefield. Most have a society with a membership and that membership elects people to a board (or whatever it is called). In elections, it is generally the rule that the most popular people are voted in and not necessarily the most competent for the job. Where there is a PLC or other operating organisation in parallel, sometimes the board of this is the same as the society; in others, it is a separate body of people, generally appointed for their management or other skills. Ensuring harmony between the two can be difficult because the latter body is effectively controlling the railway. In both recent times and times past, there has been conflict on heritage railways where the railway's management and the membership have not seen eye-to-eye on direction and governance and it can be a difficult one to resolve.

 

Chris, are there any that are not?? every heritage railway is in a fight to attract the paying public at a time when their disposable income is not as healthy as it once was, so the sucessful ones market thimselves find corporate events, look for new markets, the unsucessful ones collectivly put their heads in a bucket saying, it worked before it will work again. until they find it does not work. take the santa specials, how many railways are sticking with the same old formula that they have had since 2000? todays market is different.

 

What is going to be defined as trouble? Is it cash flow, infrastructure decay, lack of volunteers, disgruntled volunteers, poor management, or what? Not many heritage railways sit pretty on all counts.

 

Flaman, I have read all your posts. The only thing I really take issue with in your thinking is that volunteers are not the number one economic problem. I am sorry you've taken offence to my strenuous efforts to keep up with your questions. I don't disagree that the other factors are important, but as I have said before, without volunteers we don't exist.

I am quite sure that most managements will deal with the challenges that lie ahead as well as they have dealt with those of the last 50 years, and yes I am quite sure that providing that the need for the balance I described at length is understood and practiced they will succeed.

That does not mean every railway existing today will still exist in 30 years time, but the "movement" is likely to be with us still in 2043, and actually one of the key reasons why I believe this, is this very debate and others of its type. There is very little complacency in the Heritage Railway industry, and that is probably its greatest strength.

 

You have a point , agreed

Chris: