West Somerset Railway General Discussion

Is anything to do with the WSR normal anymore??

 

In this day and age, the Minehead visits appear to be good value for money. <BJ>

Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th July. Saturday 1st August and Sunday 2nd August

''Take some time out and come and visit us on Minehead Station on one of these days between 10.00 am and 4.00 pm. We will be Covid-19 secure and ready to welcome you. Visits will be in 3 time-slots 10am, 12pm and 2pm, each time-slot will allow up to 2 hours to explore and enjoy the activities on the platform.

The turntable will be in action with the opportunity for some vistors to have a go at turning the locomotive! This will be on a first come first served basis and opportunities will be limited.

The Turntable Café, Buffer Stop Shop and the well-known second hand Readers Halt bookstall will be open. Many of our locomotives will be on display, and there will be (socially distanced) access to a steam engine footplate and the driving cab of a Diesel Multiple Unit. Qualified staff will be on hand to explain how to operate!

On Minehead Station platform (the longest on a heritage railway) there will be a number of interesting and exciting stalls and stands for you to browse. At the end of the platform there will be shunting demonstrations to observe.

Conducted tours of our steam engine workshops and depot (normally out of bounds to members of the public) will also be available, so you will be able to get up close to engines under restoration including the Great Western King Class locomotive, which has been hidden from public view for some time.

And there will be free vintage double deck bus rides around Minehead which is included in the admission''.

Admission is £5 for adults, £3 for children (5- 17).

 

That is a very harsh thing to say. Steve has been running the site for over 20 years and it is superb. As a moderator, that is terrible thing to write. You should apologise.

 

I'm not sure what you're reading, but nowhere did @Big Al suggest that Steve's site is anything other than excellent.
I too have long thought it an anomoly that the WSR's web presence is as it is. I'd be wary of trying to fiddle with it though purely as it might risk Steve's site doing anything other than continuing as it does.

 

The only thing I would disagree wit is the description of £300k as a "stonking" or "outrageous" profit. It's better described as an operating surplus. The PLC can't pay dividends so any surplus is reinvested in the business. That's the criterion for what is often described as a "not for profit" organisation. Perhaps more should be made of that as otherwise people might assume the surplus generates income for shareholders.

The other vital bit of information that's needed, on top of Tom's list, is how much must be invested in the railway each year just for it to stand still? If there's a backlog of capital works, or development projects need funding, then additional investment will be required.

My reasonably informed guess is that for a line of the WSR's length a £300k annual surplus is around half of what is needed to keep the railway going. The balance can come from grants, donations etc. which is why a structure that can fully benefit from tax concessions is so important. Viewed from the perspective of what the railway needs the "outrageous profit" is really evidence of s substantial deficit.

Heritage railways can struggle on for a while with deficits against what they should be re-investing annually but all they are doing is mortgaging their future. Eventually the cumulative bill has to be confronted.

 

I’d not be so damning. The site is excellent, but @Big Al isn’t the only one who finds it odd that such a core part of the WSR web presence is at arms length like that.

The only near parallel that comes to mind is the excellent enthusiast oriented content curated by Richard Salmon for the Bluebell. But that has for some years been integrated with (and shown up...) the “corporate” site.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Hardly doing the same thing Al. The wsr.org website consistently promotes the railway. The other just sits on it's hands and begs for your money. <BJ>

 

But they are not doing the same thing! The PLC website provides the casual visitor with the information they need to plan their day, as every other preserved railways' website does, Steve's site goes further and gives more information for the enthusiast, eg up-to-date photos, which, unless I'm mistaken, very few other railways do, so in that respect it is not 'normal' . Also, Steve's site may not be 'officially supported by the PLC' as you put it - do you mean financially?, but it has their full backing in publishing what he does.

 

We are both right but the previous GM was removed from the board because he was deemed answerable to the board and should not be involved with strategic decisions, subsequently summarily dismissed.

 

I come in peace. This isn't having a go, honest.

If I click on the main wsr website (where the large banners are) it clicks through to "West Somerset Railway has decided it has to postpone the first running services of the season [sic] [..] We will be putting out an update every fortnight at least, so watch for further news." It could perhaps include a link to where the fortnightly updates are, the news section doesn't have what I'd take to be fortnightly updates. It doesn't link to the appeal.

I just think it could be improved to the benefit of the WSR.

Patrick

 

I agree, however at the time, that £300k was very loudly trumpeted by the plc as a profit. Had it been explained as a surplus from the summer operations that would be ploughed back into vital infrastructure renewal, it would have been a rather more honest portrayal.

Hence my contention that the communications is all over the place. Describing money as a profit while you are gradually accruing a backlog of repairs was in my mind a communications own goal of rather large proportions.

Tom

 

Looking at the last fundraising update the PLC requires 50-60k a month on a care and maintenance basis (presumably excluding rail replacement costs), so around 220k for the four month closure to date. The plc's raised 110k externally and 42k from stations and looks to me to be eating into its 300k* cash pile to the tune of around 70k, leaving around 4 months cash in hand.

*That excludes the 100k it said it owed the WSRA over which there was a kerfuffle.

From July to March 2021, were it to continue on a care and maintenance basis, it needs around 440k, say 200k more than its cash reserves. That equates to fundraising at 6k p.w., and the week previous to the last update it had raised 2k.

All from publicly available info and open to correction.

Life can change a lot over a few months but it looks tight to me. I think it suggests the WSR could do with a combination of trading income (beyond HOPS?), grant income, increased fundraising, surplus asset sales and, possibly, secured or unsecured borrowings. From the information published it doesn't look like a business in imminent danger, but to add to @Jamessquared comments a clearer explanation of the finances/cash flow might help the WSR's cause.

Note - the WSRA's necessary rail replacement appeal has raised 33k but is reserved funds, presumably not available for 'care and maintenance'.

Patrick

EDIT: the variable will be staff costs - furlough, end of furlough scheme, redundancies et al, and how that changes the 50-60k per month

 

When the WSR begins to be run along the lines of a commercial heritage line, instead of a High Street department store (and look where many of them have found themselves financially in recent times) then maybe those, other than the dedicated WSR supporters, may come to support and view the line in a different way.

 

I spend a lot of my spare time on wsr.org.uk so that folks can easily visit and see what is going on across the whole railway. I'm not sure I have the time to update other websites, like this forum, by hand on a regular basis. I'd assumed most people would not find visiting wsr.org.uk now and again too onerous.

However, folks can get some newsy stuff automatically by way of an RSS feed:
www.wsr.org.uk/wsr.rss
just get an RSS app or simply activate the RSS reader on your browser, use www.wsr.org.uk/wsr.rss and newsy stuff will come to you every day. See something of interest, click the link and bingo.

Thinking on, there used to be an RSS reader page on this forum too. I'm sure I once added my feed to it. Can a NP techie advise?

Steve

 

He didn't say it was excellent at all. He quoted somebody else.

 

We have a modest virtuous fundraising example on the WSR from last spring - the work to complete the overhaul of 9351.

Building on the work done at Minehead, we showed the work stage by stage At Williton and raised the £30,000 to complete the works.

Then at the end of December we took the donors out for a ride behind 9351 in the Hawksworth Saloon (including a footplate ride or two which came as. an unexpected extra for donors or their partners) and generated donations for other causes.

Lessons: Clear objective and budget; open process, engagement with donors: success.

It isn’t difficult but it does require some changes of approach. I’m pleased to be part of a group leading the work to get those messages out within the WSR organisations and so more widely.

There is, of course, much, much more to be done.

Robin

 

Well you read it a different way then. I didn't think @Big Al was taking anything away from Steve's site at all, merely highlighting a slight anomaly in the WSR's web presence, which is totally separate to how good individual sites are.