West Somerset Railway General Discussion

The initial HCP grant was successful, but the second was not due the company's status being regarded as different. Something changed and was not entirely due to different people. Questions are raised here but answered.

 

What exactly would the railway going into administration involve?

 

The short answer is: Administration involves appointing administrators to try and rescue the company ie something might rise out of the ashes; receivership involves winding up the company.

 

Not from the loco ash-pit at MD, I doubt

 

Going back to a point made a few pages ago regarding lack of activity at Minehead, would it not be possible to operate brakevan rides within the station limits and occasionally turn something on the turntable at pre-advertised times? The Barry tourist railway has been running brakevan trips for the last few weekends at £10 a veranda for a 10min journey and they are completely selling out so I think there is a market there.

 

If the PLC were to go insolvent, is there any possibility that the WSRA could mount a rescue operation of the type being pursued by the Llangollen Railway Trust? Unfortunately, I don't think it owns many coaches beyond the QB set.

 

I'm not sure, but I think the key difference is that the Llangollen Railway Trust held a controlling shareholding in the plc there. As regular readers will know, the WSR PLC shareholding is somewhat more diffusely held.

 

LLangollen had the advantage that many of the assets were under the ownership of the Trust; not so with the WSR, unfortunately. I also believe the necessary paperwork to operate is in the name of the plc, as is, I believe, the lease from SCC.

 

Plus there is the fact that no one really knows what the £1 million is actually for. There have been various vague statements claiming it's to cover operational expenses or maintenance or routine expenses like utility bills or whatever but never anything detailed or specific.
It seems to me that the board has just picked a figure out of thin air, hoping to get as much as they can simply by relying on the old 'Save the Railway' mantra to persuade people to donate. Rather a lazy way of getting funds but I suppose it saves them from having to think of genuine ways to generate income - and maybe carrying the can when those ideas (if any) don't work.

 

I'm not so sure there was a change in criteria - many lines were successful in both rounds, including those in which the lead applicant was a plc. So I think it was much more likely down to the specific way that each application was judged, i.e. what was being requested and for what purpose.

Tom

 

Indeed. Only two years ago, and after selling 4110, the Plc issued a press statement saying the railway had been rescued ‘from the brink of collapse’.

However they now seem to be teetering ‘on the brink of collapse’ more than ever, with a pressing need for £1M.

 

The whole tenure of this board has been characterised by a reluctance to do the difficult stuff. While the volunteers slaved away to try and keep the show on the road, the management appears to have taken the easy route every time. Given @Jamessquared 's comment above, there is the suspicion, that after the success of the first bid, there was a feeling, well, that wasn't so difficult, let's not waste too much time on it the second time around, Mr Manyhats can do it on his own.

 

Does that mean the administrators would be telling the present management how to run the company? I can see that going down like a lead balloon.

 

If it gets to the point that administrators are appointed, then clearly some new ideas are needed within management.

 

Much depends on the circumstances of administration. If a creditor - let's say a bank - calls in it's debts, then the company management have next to no control over the course of the administration process. There are circumstances, however, where a company can be lined up for administration in what's called a "pre pack administration", where the existing owners can maintain much more control and effectively dissolve the old company to replace it with a new, unencumbered, company. It's not, however, obvious that the WSR is a good candidate for this given the diffuse shareholding and management's lack of a working majority of shareholders.

As we're seeing from Llangollen, though, even an administration process leaving existing corporate structures relatively unaffected can be extremely disruptive. Setting aside the decidedly non-trivial issues around whether owners of locomotives and stock will allow them to remain, the Light Railway Order is tied up in the PLC, so any transfer would open up the question of who is allowed to operate trains, and under what authority. Consensus on here a while ago (pre Llangollen administration) was that this would be both expensive and time consuming.

All of which depressing talk pushes up, again, the question of how the WSR manages itself so that it does not need to contemplate such drastic measures.