XL railtours

XL advertised a Crewe-Carlisle trip (with steam from Hellifield) which was due to run in September and postponed to October due to (according to their website at the time) problems with their online booking system. It didn't run. Surprisingly the tour was never listed on uksteam.

 

lets just give XL railtours a chance, i think promoting 3 tours is good and that i think, these trips will go ahead.

 

sounds interesting,no locos no route no specification no outline times,not even any details! Why announce a tour when they dont have an itinery!

Nice to know whos at the helm,if they are experienced it will no doubt be a sucesss.......

 

XL Railtours Limited
Mr Neil Ferguson-Lee
Dunston Innovation Centre
Dunston Road
Chesterfield
S41 8NG

0845 833 9466
01246 267989
admin@XLRailtours.co.uk
Thats their online shop address,anyone know that guy,run by Dunston innovation Centre?
There is a phone number..... and email...

Hopefully if this thread helps to promote them,it will go ahead!

 

Is this him?

http://www.blogger.com/profile/15758179407326019674

He's also listed elsewhere as a Director of Wyvern Railway.

(this is getting more like Crimewatch every day ...)

Richard

 

I thought this was Crimewatch?











Im not interested then!

 

Judging by the previous posts, these guys haven't got a chance of a fair trial. It's "shoot first, ask questions later" :smt068

 

Judging by the proposed tours for next year as stated on their website, it looks as if their preferred motive power is Great Western.
At the moment there are 1 King, 2 Castles, and 3 Halls with mainline tickets.
It looks as though the owners of the largest of these loco's are going to have some interesting runs next year.

 

2 Halls after saturday , unless someone is brave enough to include Olton in a DH

 

judging by the previous posts they already made one hash of it! :smt072

 

Re: Lack of steam tours on Lickey Incline

It says on their website's "about us" page ....

 

Directors are Neil Ferguson Lee, John Dilworth Carr and George Ian Watson, the company was incorporated 21 May 2008.

Mr Carr is also a director of Dales and Bowland Community Interest Company and Elan Public Transport Consultancy Ltd., Mr Watson is also a director of the latter, plus Wyvernrail, and Railroute Ltd.

Dave

 

I notice the 3 railtours planned by this new organisation and of which breif details were given have been deleted from their website and replaced with a statement simply saying they are planning a number of railtours of which no details are given.

 

that is because they are sorthing their website andgetting the lickey conquer on sale for christmas with their tickets prices, route info and locomotives? thats how i would see that anyway, becasue they have already advertised the proposed tours for quite a while so i think they are working on the site?

please try to prove me wrong some one?

 

HI,

I was quite amazed to see such a long thread about XL Railtours on the forum, especially as we've not really issued a great deal of publicity material.

Although we are planning to have a launch with full publicity once the railtour schedule is finalised, I think it's only right to give you some background about us and remove the sense of mystery. Similarly, we're definitely up for discussion through this forum, although please understand that we can't always be forthcoming about details concerning the railtour schedule as these things take a lot of background work that really can't be put into the public domain until they're all pinned-down.

George Watson, John Carr and myself are directors of the company. George and I are also directors of WyvernRail, the company behind the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway in Wirksworth but this is a completely separate venture. George and John both have a background in the transport industry and our office is situated at their premises in Chesterfield (where at present somebody will usually answer the phone – remember we are not yet selling any tickets). Mel Chamberlain is also involved and he is doing the legwork in arranging the operational side of the tours.

The company is a straightforward commercial undertaking and will stand or fall by the success of its product, albeit we hope that some of the future profits will be used to improve disabled access on special tours.

It would have been nice to have launched this venture in sunnier economic times, but from my observations, railtour companies seem to succeed or fail for reasons that are not necessarily connected to the general economic cycle. To this end, we're looking to running a limited number of tours each year which, hopefully, should be 'goodies' and attract a suitable response. The name is indeed a bit unfortunate; we were trying to emulate the 'XL'-timed expresses of yore and the demise of the travel company with the same initials went down like a lead balloon. So saying, I'm not keen on changing the company name as it costs plenty and I always feel that changing identity can be a bit iffy.

Job Number One at the moment is to get our 2009 schedule in place. We've had a couple of goes at this; our earlier first planned railtour over the Settle & Carlisle was pulled for several reasons, the main two being difficulties in getting our website operational (especially the payments side - you really can't afford to rush that one) and the combination of the stock market taking a nosedive while we were advertising yet another special over the S&C in a year where steam haulage almost overtook sprinters in terms of the number of trains operated. It was a pity really, because we did want to get a relatively simple tour under our belts before getting a bit more ambitious.

We decided to pull the latest list of planned tours from the website at the end of last month because we wanted to be 100% certain that what we had up there could be run. We're still planning for three tours net year and the first has been slotted-in for early May. We want to keep the details under wraps until we have finished the planning and approvals process (and paid one or two deposits), but I'm hoping that we should be able to go public in January. What I can say is that the motive power that we hope to have secured will be interesting, the routes noteworthy and, hopefully, Lickey will feature in the schedule.

So I hope that this post will help explain who we are and what we plan to do; I'm more than happy to address your questions as long as you understand that, inevitably, some stuff has to be kept under wraps until contracts are signed.

Kind regards,

Neil

 

Welcome Neil, and thanks for your post. I'm sure we all wish you the very best of luck. Your plans sound well-thought-out and deserve success.

However, personally, I have one major reservation: the involvement of Mel Chamberlain in your operation. Mr Chamberlain owed a lot of people a lot of money after the failure of Days Out, and last I heard, very few of them had been paid. It has taken the rest of the steam charter business a long time to remove the tarnish he left on the business. You need to be very careful to protect customers' ticket money and assure them that if trains don't run to plan, they will get their refunds promptly.

 

Providing Mel is kept on the operating side of things I wouldn't have any reservations about him being involved. Remember, whether for good or ill (depends on your opinion of the way things are at the moment and I'm keeping mine to myself!), he gave the railtour market a real shaking up in the 90s. Some of his ideas were good and he certainly opened up a lot of routes that previously hadn't been even dreamed of. In my opinion, for what it's worth, he failed through too much enthusiasm and a lack of business sense.
He could be an asset. He just needs someone with plenty of business sense to keep him under control!

 

I do agree, so "Mel Chamberlain is doing the legwork on the operational side". That sounds pretty worrying to me,seeing as his last effort at this was a litany of wildly over-ambitious railtours many of which never ran,culminating in a very messy and damaging (to the whole railtour business) closure of his company,in which,as has been pointed out, many customers lost money.

As a matter of interest,I seem to remember that EWS,and other companies in the rail industry also lost a lot of money when Days Out went down. Will they be happy to trade with XL,knowing of Mel Chamberlain's involvment?

 

If the XL website wasn't ready for online bookings, why publicise the railtours only to remove them a few weeks later? Seems a strange way of doing things ...

Mind you, other railtour organisers seems to specialise in promoting trips which get cancelled, postponed, or change their start/finish points. Customers will only put up with so much before they spend their time and money doing other things.

Richard

 

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