West Somerset Railway General Discussion

The obvious carriage would indeed be a brake and I would suggest that it was open inside and something you could easily reclassify either First Class or Third - not
a spacious brake part with space for a lot of parcels, luggage and all etc. and - ideally - for the passengers two separate. Otherwise outside and practically for its own maintenance whatever best fits in, could be any brake composite though.

The one other vehicle, worth considering would be a buffet car but with disposable cups and plates that could be improvised in any luggage space.

I could not agree with you more about having enough spares to hand and would add a spare door - or a few more if you had a number of carriages they would be interchangeable among - some seat cushions too.

 

It is the obvious thing to take what ever is needed off another coach, and no harm if this is temporary and the coach goes back into use.
However unless they can be kept under cover it is best to keep them in traffic where they are ventilated and indeed heated, keeping mould and rot at bay.
The problem is if you remove some thing vital from a carriage it presumably becomes immobilised and if it stays outside on a siding quite probably cannibalised for
further spares this is not good for its long term outlook - at best it means more work when is tackled and quite possibly nothing done eventually broken up.

NB Given most railways have at best limited storage under cover, there is a good argument for not having more carriages than you need but organising, spending to
look after them. Having both spare bogies complete, ready to swap in and the kit to do it is a good example.
Some overkill to have at hand when volunteers get round to it is actually needful, unless you have paid staff who can be directed immediately at the drop of a hat.

 

carriages which are “serviceable” can easily have tens of thousands of pounds spent on them in repair work. Usual issues of doors, door pillars and ends on a MK1 which gradually deteriorate over time.

 

Plus there will often be the "Botch job" done previously to just keep it going instead of metal being cut out, it would be patched then filled until the water got behind the patch, and blew it out, I have seen first hand, instances of when you are sanding back the body, you find a large bit of filler, you thought it was just a skim, and you find chicken wire behind it, ply board, and a very corroded frame,

 

If that is the case then that is a worrying position, it suggests that there is ambiguity between serviceable and not serviceable.

It's either fit for use or not.

It's safe to use or not.

If you start saying it's a sliding scale, with no hard cut off points, people will start to blur the line. leading to incidents like the SDR floor.

Chris

 

Surely there are two separate scales.

One is the absolute "is it safe to allow in traffic" scale, which is about whether it can run or not.

The other is a looser definition, which is about whether the carriage is considered part of the operational fleet - or not.

On the first, I absolutely agree - and the standards need to be absolute. The second is more subjective, and may see a carriage withdrawn from traffic in one place, treated as a seasonal reserve somewhere else, and left in the core fleet elsewhere.

 

Surely WSR knew that this expense would occur in the future. a prudent management would have squirrelled away in nan untouchable fund to make sure they were able to meet their obligations whatever happened. To suddenly discover that this accounted for Half of one seasons lossses strikes me as poor money management.

 

Provision in the p&l account and cold hard cash are not the same thing.

 

It takes cold hard cash to restore a loco, not an entry in an accounting ledger.

Not setting aside the required funds is at best, incompetence.

 

It’s a reasonable accounting treatment, crystallising the loss when it becomes certain. The question for me is where the cash to meet the liability is or will be found from, about which I’ve seen nothing stated.

 

It feels to me quite a good bit of financial risk mitigation by the plc. In effect they’ve swapped an uncertain (but likely £200k +) liability that, when the time came, they’d have to find over a fairly short duration of perhaps two years, into a fairly controlled, but modest, expenditure of £3,500 per month for 5 years.

For the SDRT, it feels a mixed bag. On the positive they have a definitive conclusion to the saga and can plan for the future with clarity. But on the downside they will have to accept that it will be five years before they have all the money, so to get the loco overhauled quicker will mean they will need to raise substantial funds in the interim. Or else they progress an overhaul slowly as funds allow, but in effect that amounts to the same thing.

Tom

 

Promise of money tomorrow, don't pay the bills today, At best the trust will have to raise that money themselves, and put some of the instalments when they receive them, into the kitty for future overhauls, because they would hope to have the engine back in traffic with in 5 years, A lot can happen in 5 years, and What if the WSR don't have the funds when the instalments become due and can't make payment, what then? there's still an engine to overhaul, If I were on the board of the S&DRT, I would be urging not to rely on promissed funding, but to appeal to your members to ensure that you keep funds coming in, so that you can continue with the overhaul, One option might be that the Mid hants, themselves loan the trust, either in materials, or manpower, equivalent money to the trust of what the WSR are promising,, and the trust repay the MHR.

 

Of course it doesn't, but neither does a promise of an overhaul tomorrow get it overhauled today.

To me, it looks like both sides get something of value from this arrangement. The WSR plc swap having to find a large sum at some future point into a relatively controllable set of monthly payments. (For five years, the equivalent of 3 or 4 tickets per day will be going to meet that requirement). For the S&DRT, they get certainty and an ability to plan with confidence.

What you don't get is an overhauled loco tomorrow, or possibly not for five years. But there was no likelihood of that before: the original requirement as I recall had 2030 as a date for the loco to be returned to operational condition, which is six years from now. The WSR plc could have been quite within their rights to have just sat on the liability for five years and left the S&DRT in limbo for the next six years. So to me, it looks like both sides get something of value out of this deal: the WSR plc gets a controlled impact on their cashflow, and the S&DRT get more certainty for future planning.

Tom

 

I agree. It is a pragmatic arrangement. The WSR, including Christmas services, in 2024 is operating
revenue earning services for c.170 days i.e it requires c. 7 Rover tickets (£35 per ticket) per day to
account for £42K p.a.

( there are a few days when Steam Enginemam courses run when there are no passenger services )

Over the last two years cash balances ( as per audited accounts ) have fallen from c.£530K to c.470K to 400K
(figures from my memory, but I know the £400K is correct. )

if 42K had been taken from £400K the resulting £358K would be barely adequate to cover the three
months statutory company operating costs requirement.

The provision of £42K pa for the next five years is as things currently stand I suggest challenging.

There is much to be done by the WSR Board ( plus affiliated charities ) in seeking out possible
Benefactors, Covenanters, legacies and donations; the £42K adds to the challenge..
A situation not uncommon to the Heritage Railway fraternity unfortunately.

Michael Rowe

 

There is considerably more to be done than there would be if potential grant awarders had not be scared off.

 

Oh really? - independant loco owning groups aside I doubt that there are many railways in the land who are depositing actual cash in a metaphorical building society account with the engine number on the cover of the pass book.

 

Have just thought more about this.......The loss of £400000 is from the last operating year. The payment for 53808 is monthly payments over the NEXT year the figures just don't match

 

When it's someone else's loco on a run and repair basis, that would be a responsible course of action i.e. the work is fully funded by a portion of the revenue generated through running the loco. Are you saying that the S&D expected the work to be funded at the speed of a dripping tap ?

A PAYG model makes more sense.

 

When the loss is recognised in the P&L and the cashflow when payments are actually made can (and it seems in this case are) different.

 

The biggest issue to me, is this, These scheduled payments are on the basis that the WSR has the money from revenue to pay them over the next 5 years, But only recently, there was appeals for money to help the railway remain solvent, now there's a further liability in the moneys due to the S&DRMT, So what happens if revenue continues to decline, month on month, and there is not enough to meet your liabilities, ? might the railway be forced to sell assets to find the money, or offer some items, such as coaches, to the trust in leu of payment?