West Somerset Railway General Discussion

Ah ! The Micawber principle : "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."
It's surprising how many don't understand it.

 

You are missing the Starmer Principle Annual Income twenty pounds Annual Expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, Annual Additional Borrowing Two Pounds Result Happiness for those getting pay awards.

All joking apart many heritage railways are becoming increasingly reliant on legacies and donations and one has to wonder how long that will plug the gap.

 

A good question. Legacies and donations have long been essential for investment purchases. More receipt is increasingly obvious that they are needed for revenue support too.

I hope that this is a bleak patch and that as the economy recovers the fortunes of HR will also. However, the bigger issue is the permanent cost change for staff. The ability to rely on volunteers is much reduced. We need to treasure volunteers.

 

The question has to be "how" when people seem to be much more sensitive and take their bat and ball home when not getting their own way or the slightest perceived criticism.

 

Try telling the RNLI that!
Approx 80% of their income is from legacies and donations.
Their commercial activities; flogging tea towels etc, is a minor part of their income.

 

My experience (non HR) is that volunteers tend to stick around if they feel valued and respected.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Even if we accept that this is true, which I don’t, then there is no option but to adapt. There is plenty of opportunity to show how you value people, most of which costs nothing. Strategy will vary from place to place, but heritage railways exist to preserve artifacts and skills of the past , NOT the cultures, attitudes and crappy management styles of the past. People expect fairness, safety, engagement, training and straightforwardness. How you. Deliver that can vary, but if you miss on any of them, the future is bleak.

 

well if we accept for a moment that you’re right (just for the sake of argument) then an obvious solution would be to put these new people in charge and allow them to shape what’s needed in the future, now, while there’s time.

Because of course as you suggest the more ‘robust’ generations will be able to suck it up and work for the different people, providing the base level of donkey work without complaint… problem solved.

 

I tend to agree. Reduction in legacy income is often predicted but rarely do those assertions come with evidence to back it up. People are going to carry on dying in the future and, for a proportion of those people, they will leave legacies - the real question is what makes us attractive as recipients? Of course, legacy income can be quite variable from year to year, so it is not something that can be relied on as a source of cashflow.

On the input side, the major problems to me seem more about reduced levels of disposable income, and reduced volunteering capacity. The first of those is hopefully cyclical, and in time prosperity will increase. The other is more significant; and comes with a compounding effect, which is that fewer volunteers have practical mechanical skills, so more tasks that might previously have been done by volunteers are now done professionally, driving extra cost.

Which comes back to @21B 's point that we need to treasure volunteers.

Tom

 

All very true. Perhaps I can add that the easy option is to employ people rather than find suitable willing volunteers. The trouble with the easy option is that it’s rarely the best option in the long run.

 

And that’s for genuinely specialist roles. I then worry a lot where permanent staff are relied upon for generic skills


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

The hard bit, that I don’t think any heritage railway has fully addressed yet, though I note the FR is starting, is training. I don’t mean operational grades, but simple stuff like needle gunning or fitting tasks like filing, etc.

The issue is that you need a critical mass of people and type of work to be able to deliver effective training.

It’s a while since I last had the opportunity, but I learnt a bit of simple green sand casting years ago as part of my degree and subsequent employment. There’s a pretty small number of people now using that technique.

How many school children do DT? And of those how many get to use hand tools and manual machine tools? Not enough. And these skills are uncommon in the modern workplace. (Although still relevant at my robotics company for prototyping).

We take the easy option of hiring people to do the job, not to teach the job to others. It’s hard, really really hard when we don’t have enough people (paid or volunteer) but we have to find a way to increase the training availability.

I do wonder if it would be more sensible to concentrate engineering into fewer shared facilities which explicitly offer volunteer opportunities. Imagine a joint Bluebell, KESR, SR and MHR engineering team. It might or might not have a shared location. Maybe each would focus on certain tasks it did well and do them for everyone in the group. Boilers at Ropley, chassis at Sheffield Park hypothetically.

Yes we all cooperate, but there’s opportunities for more. It might feel a bit radical, but perhaps a bit of radical is necessary?

 

The WSR DMU was basking in the Minehead sunshine this afternoon at the end of the run-round headhunt siding.

Any news on the DMU appeal?

 

Fully agree and this is something I started pushing on the NYMR Unofficial Forum a few weeks back. To my mind all heritage railways should be instituting training programmes for volunteers and paid staff alike, as appropriate. In the latter case it would bet to keep them up to date in their own particular field and associated areas such as H & S etc., but for volunteers there is the whole gamut of skills from wirebrushing upwards to welding and turning. Manual skills are becoming ever less prevalent in the general workforce so we cannot simply rely on suitable people coming forward . Nowadays people call themselves "mechanics" when for the most part their "repair" work consists of fitting new spare parts straight from a box, with very little experience of doing much more than using a spanner. Most heritage railways use mechanical signalling and old-fashioned S & T technology whose mechanisms would probably be familiar to Alexander Graham Bell; the generation that understood their workings, and how to maintain them, is probably diminishing rapidly. Unless we want to abandon all that heritage equipment we're going to understand that we're going to have to train a new generation of such people v- and for most heritage railways this necessarily means that the majority of them will need to be volunteers.

 

As you well know, this appeal is promoted by the West Somerset Railway Association, not by WSR plc.
As I’ve suggested before (if you’re really interested) you should contact the WSRA.

 

If the WSRA is to raise £220,000 for the DMU they need to put rather a lot more effort in than at present. I made a contribution but received no response and saying thankyou is a very important part as it also establishes a connection. Finding this amount of money for a DMU is always going to be an upward struggle. But, I've had the same experience with appeals by loco-owning groups. "Give us your money then go away?" Finding people with the right skill sets for fund raising is as difficult as finding those to fix the loco.

 

Had a very interesting trip the other day. we wondered about the carriage in the yard at Washford. the covering was coming apart exposing the interior, or lack of it! If this is the "bow ended" coach awaiting "restoration" it looks as if a total rebuild is required. How much of the original remains ?