North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

So presumably the NYMR has no training for any role then? Training starts with observation.
And why does it matter if you find something attractive? This is about what everyone else thinks.

Personally I would jump at the chance to observe experienced people and slowly learn a job.

It’s becoming more and more obvious from your statements, that you want the railway to be run according to your thoughts and preferences, rather than what is best for the railway its’ volunteers and staff.

 

The usual purpose of training is that once trained you can do the job whether as an employee or volunteer. If having that opportunity is conditioned on the employee trainer deciding to leave at some point it just doesn’t seem likely to attract many. In effect your proposition is that volunteers learn how to do a job but with no assurance that once trained they’ll actually get to do it.
I’m pleased that you recognise that what’s best for paid staff is important alongside what’s best for volunteers. I happen to believe that the NYMR should be a responsible and considerate employer recognising that its paid staff have put their trust in the railway offering them and their families a reasonably secure future.

 

The more I hear both here and elsewhere the more I get the impression that it is simply a question of taking the easy option and that is to solve problems by employing people.
I do admire you for continually trying to counter all the criticism here and on other forums. Whether you believe in what you are saying or are just sticking to the Boards policies, I don’t know. It would be good if the CEO and Board chairmen participated in discussions here and elsewhere. The nearest we get is Laura on the NYMR staff & volunteers Facebook forum but that is heavily regulated and even positive non-official posts by volunteers are quickly taken down.

 

And now it’s a paid staff role the former joint chair can provide 101 reasons why the role cannot be covered going forwards by a volunteer …
Appears that staff costs can generally only increase as if a volunteer can fulfil the role ,the role isn’t obsolete .

 

For a few reasons I stepped away from this thread for a bit. I dip back in and nothing has changed. A cast of experienced people trying to explain that it matters just as much or more HOW you do things as WHAT.

There are sadly directors and trustees, and indeed senior paid staff who, in the process of trying to negotiate the very challenging times we face, forget the essential core of what made our heritage railways so vibrant a thing in the first place. We cannot go back in any way, but we should fight for the internal communities of people that are at the heart of our heritage railways. When we stop doing that they will die.

The demands of meeting the challenges we face should never be permitted to stand in the way of understanding and nurturing those internal communities.

When you focus on the railway being a business to the exclusion of its internal community the core is killed. The subsequent death may be slow and lingering, and perhaps not noticeable to start with.

I don’t think there are many railways in the UK that could be successful without volunteers. Some might be able to stagger on, but with a radically different look. (More like the P&D than the Bluebell for example). Some will find ways to arrest the decline in volunteers and others will not. My bet would be that those that do not might very well fall completely first.

Throughout this discussion what has at times left me despairing is the feeling that some of our favourite railways are in the hands of people who may not understand that these railways exist because people want them to exist, that without that fire of passion at their heart they are much less than they should be, and could be, and who have very little empathy with what all that really means for the leadership of a railway.

In these now many pages, several of us have attempted to explain the above and provide our thoughts on what is needed to nurture the internal community. It is an important discussion and it ought to have a wider audience. We must accept though that the message will not always find fertile ground.

To put it more succinctly:
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy": In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.

 

As I stated in my first reference to the re-configuring of Pickering, my input was summarily dispensed with. Indeed, so were my attempts to have a sensible discussion over turning Mulberries tea shop into something that could earn revenue and add to the Pickering offer. Finally, the Beamish reference is side-lined by going off at a tangent about paid staff v volunteers. Many feel there is much wrong with the NYMR at the moment and I'm saying the time has come for some external input in the form of a consultation exercise. Dismissing such an idea as 'expensive' without any evidence just strikes me as reinforcing the 'we know best attitude' so many are clearly fed up with.

 

Since we are discussing paid staff and their numbers it would be interesting to learn how the NYMR compares to the P&DSR in terms of their relative payrolls, given that the P&DSR has virtually no volunteers. I'm pretty sure I know the answer, but I'm quite prepared to be either surprised or for an avalanche of excuses for the reasons why if there is a big difference.......

 

Accounts show 2023 £2,833,457 / 115 employees, which will include boats and buses as well as rail

 

I'm sure it is not your intent, but this is just another post that screams "it's too hard" whenever the thought of volunteers doing key roles is considered. Moreover, the logical end point of your view is that the workforce plan (to use a modern HR term) is asymmetric: a volunteer can always be replaced by a paid member of staff, but a paid member of staff can never be replaced by a volunteer. That is a one-way ticket to increased costs in a business that is already unprofitable.

The bottom line as I see it is that that the NYMR (in common with many lines, it's not a unique position) is not currently profitable.

Broadly that leaves you four options (accepting of course that the solution might be a bit of all of them):

1. Reduce your fixed costs
2. Reduce your variable costs
3. Increase your trading income
4. Increase your non-trading income (donations etc).

Of those three, the biggest single fixed cost is staffing - but the most obvious response available (place greater reliance on volunteers) seems to be put firmly in the "too hard" camp. So on cost reductions, the plan seems to be firmly "reduce variable costs" i.e. run fewer trains. But fewer trains carries the very real risk of fewer passengers, which means the fixed costs are spread over fewer people, i.e. each passenger carries more of the fixed overhead. That puts an inevitable upward pressure on ticket prices.

On the increase income side, point 3 means more sales. It's hard to see how that will materialise if you run fewer trains on fewer days, and with upward pressure on ticket prices. For those who are price sensitive, if I couldn't be induced to visit when the fare was £49.50 but allowed unlimited returns, how will a ticket price of £49.50 without unlimited returns and available at more limited times make me more likely to visit? So I am struggling to see what the business strategy is for driving increased trading income.

That leaves option 4, but here the focus seems to be on grants from grant-awarding bodies. Those come with costs to deliver the objective for which the grant was obtained. In other words, you may win a grant and in the process you become a bigger and more diverse organisation, but that grant doesn't necessarily plug a budget gap. (And it may of course leave you with higher fixed costs when the grant has run out but the "thing" it has built still requires running into the future). That leaves more altruistic donation, but the mood music that members are a burden, not an asset, seems hardly designed to motivate giving from that source.

So the score card seems to be:

1. Reduce your fixed costs - too hard
2. Reduce your variable costs - being pursued, but it has knock-on impacts on how the fixed cost is spread across a smaller base
3. Increase your trading income - unclear that there is any coherent strategy for that
4. Increase your non-trading income (donations etc) - the wrong sources of funding being pursued, and better sources are being actively discouraged

From afar, it doesn't feel to me that the strategy being pursued is a winning one.

Tom

 

A very thoughtful post with sentiments that I agree with. After all despite an erroneous attempts at mindreading in a previous post my true motivation is to help secure the future of the railway on which I've been fortunate to volunteer for the last 19 years. Yes, absolutely a key part of what keeps me coming back is the sense of belonging to a community. That commnuity includes the paid staff who I'm proud to work with, encourage and support. Yet to read some posts on here you'd think they're, at best, an unfortunate but tolerated deviation from the ideal of an entirely volunteer organanisation. They have skin in the game. Their livelihoods and that of their families depend on the railway. They deserve better than being treated as an aberration that can be tolerated but should be dispensed with. whenever the opportunity arises.
Pournelle's Law describes accurately the regulatory burden that is being heaped on heritage railways. They have to cope with a blizzard of bureaucratic initiatives which demand more and more resource in areas that rarely appeal to volunteers. Thank goodness we have those in our communities able to take on the challenge of responding to them.

 

There seems to me that there's no real evidence of the current strategy having worked so far, and I do feel that the ticket prices for this year will only make things worse, but it seems as though the current strategy is the only one being considered, and that seems both idiotic and incompetent on the part of those at the helm.

 

Pournelle's Law can operate at a number of levels; my experience in a number of places is that a very high degree of self-reflection is required to avoid succumbing on behalf of one's own organisation.

As for the interpretation of your posts what you write, I can only refer you back to my earlier posts #3888 and #3903.

 

Last year, the significant inducement to buy a high priced ticket was the 12 month pass, enabling free return visits.
To continue the same price ticket, but valid for just one day seems madness.

An immediate price cut to something like £30 would encourage visitors. Short journey tickets and singles for impromptu visits should be available. The greater the variety, the more chance of sales.
Being closed one day is bearable, but to be closed two days seems drastic and may be harmful.
How will this play in the press? Will it be seen as a railway in crisis?

 

Assuming this was intended as a response to my post, thank you, I am trying to be constructive.
I was actually though applying Pournelle’s law to the internal structure of a heritage railway, it’s board(s), management and to an extent in my experience, it’s paid staff.

I have a massive respect for paid staff. I’ve been there myself and even for a committed volunteer as I was before I went on the payroll there was a significant and quite difficult transition. Some of the biggest volunteers in terms of hours given regularly without pay can be the paid staff. It is also a difficult job to manage volunteers effectively, and it can all feel very thankless too when there is always an expert who can tell how they would have done it better themselves or that wasn’t how so and so would have done it.

However, there is also plenty of evidence that too many paid staff who don’t themselves come from a volunteering background, preferably railways, do create a community of their own within the organisation. One which struggles to relate to the rest.

The aim of a management brought in from outside will be to sustain the railway, but not necessarily for the same reasons that the main body of the railway. This is where the grit starts to enter the mechanism.

The communities at the heart of a heritage railway came together in order to run trains on a particular stretch of abandoned railway. The trains run because that community sustained itself and that central desire.

Over time as part of the sustaining that passion we’ve done various things to raise funds including becoming charitable in most cases. Reasonably that requires conformity to some rules. The wiser heads in my view see this as “how do we bend enough to the rules to get what the community needs”.

Over time we have employed people to help where it is required.

These two factors (probably some others too) combine to create a Bureaucracy that may start to have an agenda to sustain the organisation. This looks and has looked very similar to the run trains in this stretch of railway. In fact it is quite different and without the sort of clarity that the long held and carefully managed objectives that the likes of the FR, Bluebell, IoW, WLLR, KWVR, GWR, (maybe SVR is regaining), have there will be a significant issue.

It seems to this outsider (not just relying on this conversation) that the NYMR does not have a shared vision about what it is trying to do and how. No amount of writings from the top will fix that. The misalignment may be very small in reality, but it exists and until the bureaucracy is seen to listen more than it talks, the misalignment will grow.

The only solution is for the bureaucracy to become part of the community. There may still be disagreement from time to time, but unless the bureaucracy sees itself as part of the community of the railway and there primarily to support that community and its aim, I think the gap only widens.

 

The press have much more interesting things to be talking about than whether a heritage railway closes one day or two per week.

Passionate people always forget that the internal politics they deal with in their niche field of interest are of very little interest to anyone outside of that bubble. For instance, I volunteered on the NYMR for one summer as a teenager, and then I left the UK and never had a chance to do so again. But I still hold the line in really high regard and I like to follow the goings-on from afar and occasionally return for a ride on what is, in my opinion, the UK's finest heritage railway (alongside the Ffestiniog).

Reading the endless pages of bickering in this thread an outsider would probably have the impression that the Moors is well and truly on fire and halfway up sh!t creek already - a terrible advert for the organisation really. But if I weigh up the price of a ticket and decide to visit this summer, I'm sure I'll have a wonderful day, as a good 95% of visitors will.

I hope in a year or two when I dip into this thread again there'll be a bit more unity on the direction of things. All this mud slinging makes for a pretty ugly read.

 

Another very thoughtful and thought provoking post. It highlights a view I formed some time ago that heritage railways have been an extraordinarily successful social experiment initiated by Tom Rolt on the Tallyllyn in 1951. The concept of volunteers running a railway (sometimes tinged with the desire to cock a snook at Dr Beeching) has huge appeal. It's meant that in most cases , but not all, preservation and operation of the abandoned lines you mention has become synonymous with volunteering. That social experiment has come under increasing pressure for all the reasons well rehearsed on here. The response suggests that its continued success is seen as equally important, if not more so, than the survival of the railways themselves. The community you mention appears to be seen by many as the volunteer comnunity reflecting the Tom Rolt idea on with the experiment is founded. As will be obvious from earlier comments I believe in the world of today (in contrast to a past one we might all prefer) that community also involves increasing numbers of paid staff. That trend is consistemt across the sector. I accept that achieving a common purpose, identity, sense of belonging and commitment between the NYMR's circa 100 employees and 900 or so volunteers is critical. However, there is a serious question posed by your analysis particulalry for a charity. Which is more important... the continued existence of the organistion or the success of the social experiment? Ideally both of course but that's not an easy trick to pull off.

 

The NYMR will be far from the only line that does not operate every day. The WSR last year and I see this year is a 5 day a week operation (or less) Swanage has not operated on a Monday and Friday for some of the season for a few years now, although this year there appears to be less of it. The ELR appears not to be a 7 day opertion even in August. I believe the Bluebell is not a 7 day a week operation for the whole summer and neither is the MHR. However the last two mentioned appear to to have published a full timetable yet.
So it may be a change for the NYMR, but it will not make them an outlier.

 

My view of heritage railways started on the voluntary model is that their continued existence is dependent on what you describe as the "social experiment". Without the volunteering at the core of the organisation, there is unlikely to be a charity - or any means to fulfil the charitable purposes. This is partly about economics, but also about the ability to find people willing to do demanding roles at anti-social times.

I frequently refer back to church experience. The CofE uses paid staff. But where those staff are successful, they unlock the power of the wider community. Many of the current issues within the CofE, and the challenges to its operation, are about the perception that "the centre" is taking too much power, and disempowering "the people in the pews". Some of that is because change can require a level of bureaucracy, and confusion arises between purposes and means. But a lot of it is that "the centre" are "telling" people what to do, and how, and the effect is to break loyalties.

I've referred back to previous posts of mine on tone. I make no apologies for doing so - like @21B I suspect the differences at NYMR aren't actually that wide. But where the impression is left that we're in a "staff good, volunteers not good" mould, that gap can't close.

 

Agreed, but if you look back through many posts on here and elsewhere they're the other way round....volunteers good, paid staff bad. Ensuring a sense of community and closing any gap requires acceptance that both are good.