North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Sorry but that really does miss the point! Steve's suggestion was that the mantra should apply to ALL heritage railway General Managers. It may have been on this this thread but it was clearly intended to encompass other heritage railways including those that have a policy of not using volunteers.

 

That is really splitting hairs. Anyone with even the slightest bit of common sense would realise that it was aimed at those railways (and indeed other organisations) that use volunteers. I've just returned from a visit to the Scarborough Fair Collection and that relies on volunteers to operate. The original statement by 21B that I referred to said "my job is to ensure that the railway doesn’t pay for any job that a volunteer could do” and can be applied there and to the GM's of any organisation that utilises volunteers.

 

Isn’t the change from 7-day to 5-day per week operations a bit of a red herring? My understanding of the GA rules is that the free return had to apply on days you were open, but didn’t mandate when those were, or how many days per week. Indeed, in your own case when you were running that scheme, you nonetheless had months of the year when you were closed completely, but that didn’t seem to make the “free returns” offer less viable on either customer or HMRC grounds.

It seems to me that in your accounts from a couple of years ago, the board loudly trumpeted the success of the scheme and said that the success had seen the decision to offer that scheme as “vindicated”, yet two years later it has been dropped and fig leaves are being put up about only running five days per week. Go figure!

Tom

 

The railways senior management may well know but, like lot of things related to the NYMR's traffic figures, it remains a closely guarded secret. That's probably because the information is embarrassing. At the last open forum, that question of visitor numbers was asked directly of the CEO who dismissed it as irrelevant and refused to answer even though it was a simple question that required a simple numeric answer. The fact that the 2023/4 gift aid scheme has been discontinued really does indicate that it was a dismal failure in real terms and your argument that it was deflecting income from special events doesn't really hold water as Santa Specials, diners, the SNG visit and much more are exempt from the free travel requirement as they don't go the full length of the line to Whitby.

 

Not been for a few years since the tide turned as it were. Saw they had day rovers available on Groupon which don’t exclude the first general running days for Tornado. Grand total cost of £22.99 including extra discount. Far cry from the £49 fare the management started the year so confidently with.

 

The gift aid model was so successful as summarised by the CEO in a recent issue of the quarterly sales brochure (prior to dispatching into recycling )…initially uptake was good with strong demand but then previous purchasers kept returning for free trips ..well I never …nobody in the SMT saw that coming ?

 

The NYMR seems to have ended up with the worst of both worlds though. PDSR have 150 employees across the business, including buses and ferries, so aren't really comparable. Brecon employ 30 odd staff, as do VoR and have a similar number of operating days, but much shorter route mileage and service provision.

The nearest comparable railways in terms of mileage and amount of operating days are SVR and GWSR. The former have 80 paid staff including ones doing contract work that brings in extra cash. The latter have 22 paid staff, up from 12 the previous year. The Moors have 17 in admin and marketing alone! GWSR have a third of the income of the NYMR yet only employ a sixth of the staff.

GWSR's income for the last set of accounts was £2.67m. The NYMR's wage bill was £3.44m, including £223k for the directors. That's just staggering - nearly half of the annual turnover going on paying staff on what is meant to be a mainly volunteer organisation. It's a bloated mess that is neither earning enough to become a fully commercial operation, yet has become so bogged down with employing staff that it can't afford to significantly reduce numbers.

I fully realise one size doesn't fit all, but the NYMR is an outlier that appears to have become a uncontrollable behemoth compared to all the rest.

 

wrt the 12 month annual pass…
Nope. 5 days there is less capacity to accommodate the 12 month annual pass returnees.

 

There will be a reckoning before long. "Thas can't carry on like that, lad"

 

The GWSR staff increase is explained by bringing the Cotswolds Halt cafe franchise in house. As a franchise, those staff didn't appear in the plc accounts. But in recent years the franchise didn't earn us any money, on the contrary.
Now the plc is operating the café, and the staff are on board.
I understand that we are now earning money from it, although the transfer only happened a year ago, it's early days and we are seeing what works best.

 

The NYMR is indeed a bloated mess, and there are no signs indicating that it will stop growing ever more bloated till it becomes like Mr. Creosote in "The Meaning of Life" - and explodes. There seems to be a fixation with grants being the ability to cure it all, and no recognition that grants are becoming harder to obtain, and also that they tend to increase fixed costs and do not address the underlying problem of fixed costs! Until there is a management in place that recognises these fundamental truths there really isn't a lot of hope to be had from the current dogma-bound bunch.

 

Lineisclear suggests there aren't that many returnees. Yet a 'successful' scheme was ditched.

Without a consistent fare scheme it must be harder to assess the impact of changes on revenue.

 

Mixed messages! Lineisclear may have said there were relatively few returnees, but the CEO doesn't seem to have agreed! So, who's right? I think the clue to the answer is in their replies!

 

Well, you’re at the coal face when it comes to ticket sales so, even though you may not be party to the actual figures, you’ll have a good grasp of the number of returnees. I’m dubious about the suggestion that the change away from the 12 month gift aid scheme was because of going to five day working, though. It needed to happen even if seven day working had continued.
Incidentally, I’m told by someone who should know that the driver for the five day week was to give the railway a chance of getting through the season in terms of infrastructure, locos and stock and not simple economics.

 

Both could be right. I know the concessionary bus pass scheme is different but in that scheme it is not unusual for 80% of the trips to be made by 20% of the passholders. So you have a bimodal distribution with one peak at one return trip and another peak at four or five.

 

As has been pointed out many times there is only lost revenue form a free return visit if the passenger would otherwise have paid. If those returns, for which a further ticket is required each time, are only made because they are free there is no revenue loss unless other fare paying passengers are deterred from travelling. Some posters on here have seized on five day operation as the reason for withdrawal of the free return option. As explained in an earlier post, the main drawback is the five day limit on excluded days which limits ability to charge more for special experiences and events. With the emphasis moving more in that direction the Gift Aided free return option became less beneficial when, as is the case now, the alternative Gift Aid recovery model can still be used.

 

Please remind us how that model works. Is that the one only applicable to tickets for the whole distance to Whitby and back, with minimal opportunity to view all the heritage stuff?

 

I agree, this is a spurious argument, most special events are limited to Grosmont-Pickering, and it would be easy to do so and suspend Whitby services on those days, thereby excluding "free/multiple return visitors. People who still want to travel to Whitby could always change trains and catch an EVL service at Grosmont.

 

I think you’ve misunderstood the nature of the 12 month free return option. It ‘s for any service or event not just the opportunity to make another trip to Whitby. The only limit is a maximum of five days in the 12 month period. That’s why when the move is to sale of experiences and special events that may well be at higher prices than the normal day to day service the 12 month free return option becomes less financially beneficial.