North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Santander is a very large business. (I don't mean to imply there is anything wrong with that; it is just an observation of fact.) Businesses that get large got that way, in part, by keeping a sharp eye on the numbers. They are generally utterly unmoved by sentiment of any kind.

Whether in the case of the NYMR they were more moved by a) the value of the hard assets (buildings, etc) which were proffered to them as security, or b) their evaluation of the ability of the NYMR to operate successfully as a business, they have not, AFAIK, said.

Noel

 

True, but that analysis will also be affected by a subjective view of the strength of the underlying business - and therefore of any debts being paid

 

About 16 years ago a friend of mine started buying property. He got to the point where his business manager from the bank would call him about another new mortgage product that he was guaranteed to be accepted for and within 18 months had 19 rentals and his own run down farmhouse that he was living in and renovating. He drove a nice Range Rover and lived the good life and happily told everyone who would listen that he would never need to work again and by this time next year he would have 50 properties and was starting abroad and when he was 50 he was going to sell the lot and move into a self built mansion and have £10m minimum.
Then Northern Rock happened.
The bank pulled the plug and he couldn’t afford to keep going.
The bank took the lot.
He will be 50 next year. He still lives in his parents spare room. He couldn’t afford to pay one of his ‘suppliers’ who gave him such a beating he still walks with a limp and has a bit of a slur to his speech.
Banks will lend when they know they can’t lose, the problem is at which point they decide they need to cut and run. The more you owe the less control you have. If you can’t raise the funds for one bridge in 12 months then you are not going to raise the funds to pay the bank off within weeks.
Anyone celebrating an extended overdraft is a mug. Anyone celebrating increasing debt and therefore risk is a mug. Anyone thinking that their bank has their back needs to learn from history.

 

You're reading too much into the comment. The agreed budget included a significant saving from efficiencies one of which is turning surplus scrap into cash. It's just good financial house keeping.

 

From a management operation well known for exactly that

 

For clarity, agreed within NYMR (plc/NYMRHT) or with the bank?

 

The same is true of anyone with a mortgage and the many thousands of businessess that depend on borrowing ( as well as the UK Government!) Of course the outstanding loans and the overdraft cannot be paid off in weeks or even years which is all the more reason to support the railway. Santander are reputed to view the NYMR as a client they are proud to support but at the end of the day that depends on its continuing confidence especially in the railway's financial direction.

 

The budget is agreed within the NYMR.

 

I trust you are being careful in differentiating "scrap" from "strategic spares". As an example, we have rather more carriage bogies than carriages for them to go under. But that means from time to time, when a bogie needs an overhaul, we can swap bogies, keep the carriage running and then separately carry out the bogie overhaul. A casual look might instead just identify the fact that we have surplus bogies, and can't the surplus get scrapped? After all, they are 5 or 6 tons of scrap steel each ...

You may also run into an issue that a carriage owned by private individual A is running round on bogies owned by Company B, while the bogies owned by person A are being refurbished. So even if you have correctly identified that the carriage is not owned by the railway and therefore can't be sold, are you equally sure about each separate removable component of the carriage? That might seem a rather niche point, but I can think of a loco in which there was, shall we say, a degree of confusion about the ownership, but which was running with a boiler objectively 100% owned by the railway that was operating that loco; while the original boiler that went with the loco was rusticating on a boiler wagon somewhere. Fortunately that has been resolved to the extent that the railway now owns loco, tender and both boilers. There are many (high value) components that get swapped between locos, particularly if you have a fleet from the same stable - reversers, air pumps, injectors, lubricators etc.

I'm not saying that every piece of scrap steel disappearing into the undergrowth at every railway is a priceless heritage asset, but there are nasty traps for the unwary if you don't have a really granular asset register. Equally it would be a false economy to realise £1000 of scrap value for a bogie if you then needed to withdraw an entire carriage from service for want of an overhauled replacement. (Or withdraw a loco because you sold off that pile of springs, or firebars, or whatever...)

Tom

 

Absolutely right Tom which is why the much critised exercise includes compiling a definitive asset register. I suggest another problem is when items have been donated to the railway. If that's not properly recorded the railway may assume the items belong to it whereas donors may decide to change their mind.

 

And ownership is very difficult to track sometimes. As I mentioned on a different thread sometime back one Friday we managed to sell a B747 we no longer owned (having already sold it) to a Japanese Bank and nobody noticed until the engineer went to screw on the new owners nameplate on the Monday morning. I suspect a lot of heritage line stuff has no owners nameplates, and even with all of the airlines resources we could do that with a not exactly small piece of kit, there is plenty of scope for errors.
I guess we were lucky the engineer cared enough to ask the question.

 

There are examples in the past of items that were scrapped despite not being owned by the NYMR - a set of 4 axles owned by the LNERCA with good tyres that "disappeared" in one drive They weren't recognised as being for Mk 1s by the "expert" and so off they went, without anyone from the LNERCA being consulted. They might have saved at least one teak carriage from 2years of enforced idleness with condemned tyres.......

 

I understand your desire to defend the current leadership, but may I respectfully (really; I am not being at all sarcastic/ironic) suggest that your effort to do so is a waste of your time (which I also expect you currently have a far more important potential use for).

That's because one of two things is going to happen: either the NYMR is going to survive (in which case no defence is needed); or it is going to fail (in which case no defence will be possible).

Yes, that response to the latter eventuality might be unfair - there might be a good case that the blame is fairly more widely distributed than just to the current management (e.g. as you have correctly observed, many of the mortgages go back a long way). But the average person's take on history is, sadly, usually not performed with a microscope.

(Readers should feel free to skip the following semi-off-topic; and apologies in advance for it, but it is, however, very apropos to the point above, and also of considerable interest to me, as a deep student of this period. Anyway, as an example of that kind of poor analysis, ask the average person how much blame Chamberlain should get for WWII. Most would give him a lot; I would say 'some', but it is complicated. E.g. in the late 30's, Churchill was trying to raise the alarm - but politicians, and voters, on both sides of the aisle, had little use for him. Did Chamberlain fundamentally misread things? Yes. But he also did things like fund the Chain Home system [deployed 1937-39], which played a key role in saving everyone's bacon, soon after he fell. So it's complicated.)

So, if things go bad, the current management, as those whose hands were last on the wheel, will get blamed for it. Right or wrong, that's human nature; one might as well complain about gravity; don't waste your time trying to bring correct justice. (Anyway, there are more important things to worry about.)

I'm sure that if the worst happens, everyone here will be almost equally devastated.

Noel

 

You are quite right in both respects Noel (both NYMR and Chamberlain). Not every problem on the NYMR was caused by the current regime. They have however made every problem much worse by pursuing misguided policies, farcical spending decisions, appalling advertising and unjustified salaries.

If we were earning sufficient revenue such mistakes and even certain extravagances could be afforded but recent decisions to almost abandon steam usage, promote loss-making events and waste unearned income on delusional vanity projects show a lack of judgment bordering on insanity.

The way to resolve increasing debt isn't to spend money and Santander isn't going to finance us indefinitely.
Bridge 42 deserves support. Senior management cries out for immediate demolition.

 

I get that people are frustrated by the level of diesel operation but the NYMR is far from unique in having to respond to the fire risk in conditions that look less likely to be unusual. What is a particular challenge is having a large proportion of the railway and adjacent land designated as Sites of Special Scientific Interest. That imposes an additional constraint on coal powered steam operation. There are reports from
Some heritage lines that revenue falls by up to 40% when diesel replaces steam. With normal diesel now around £2 a litre it’s not a cheap option either!

 

What a coincidence. I was just logging on to write a few bits about my visit today when a comment is posted about diesel operation and Firecon.
Spent a day around the line today, seemed to be good numbers about and steam in operation with an unexpected diesel substitution but this didn’t ruin the day.
What did put a dampener on the day was catching up with a long long served staff member who was almost in tears at one point in the conversation.
Regarding diesels and fire risk - according to him at no point was diesel traction required due to fire risk level, he said the shed was equally frustrated as steam was available but diesel was rostered out of ease more than anything else. Whilst steam availability had been a problem earlier in the season there was as many as 3 available that were not used including Omaha which nobody he knew seemed to understand why. I’m not sure where this fits with lineisclear’s statement on this but this throws a bit of doubt on it.
Secondly it sounds like the SMT is starting to fall apart. He said that one of the managers left a few weeks ago and another threw in the towel last week both stating to staff that they couldn’t work this way any longer. Not sure what the spin will be on this but I’m guessing they will both have been useless and it’s good that they have gone and they will be replaced by some people that have some link to the current top team and get a higher salary and live in a different country and come to Park Street for a couple of days a quarter . I’m sure lineisclear will have the reasons and tell us all soon.
Thirdly he said that his team has lost half of its paid staff and a few volunteers and that the paid staff aren’t getting replaced which means that they can’t do half of the jobs they need to do.
Last point but probably the most worrying, the former head of civils who then didn’t want to be head of civils but was happy to be a contractor and had to have a contractor project manager is now working on funding bids as he isn’t a qualified engineer and the project manager he brought in is now the head of civils. This means that the paid head of civils who left a couple of years ago has been replaced by 2 contractors both rumoured to be on excess of £500 per day.
If this is true and I have no reason to doubt any of it based on my 30+ years of friendship with this person then a railway that is by all accounts on the edge of bankruptcy has added another £5k a week to its staffing costs plus the new director of commercial who will be at least another £1k a week which is just unforgivable.

Although I’m not in the big bucks league of legacy leavers my £130k ish legacy is now going elsewhere.

 

I paid a very enjoyable visit to the NYMR today, despite having 47077 as motive power instead of theplanned 92134. I spoke to several people and learned from a 'horses mouth' about what was happening with regard to people going around and identifying assets. Apparently, it is an attempt to identify what belongs to the NYMR and what is privately owned, and by who, with different colours being applied to aid this. You can read into this what you like. I wasn't made aware of why it was being done now, other than being told it is a long overdue exercise.

 

Nope, red is to scrap and yellow is potentially to scrap but check first, as per a man at the shed. Some stuff that isn’t theirs has been marked as red which is causing some trouble

 

The conversation regarding diesel usage and firecon cropped up in my discussions, as well. I was told that the railway has had no lineside fires this year despite using coal fired steam locos when available. Steam has never been banned. The use of diesels had largely been due to lack of suitable steam locos for whatever reason. Cracked regulators (44806), leaking smokebox tubeplate rivets (92134) and leaking foundation ring rivets (45428) being three that were mentioned, none being five minute fixes. The delayed appearance of 926 and non-appearance of 2238 contributed to the problem. With regard to the S160, as I have said previously, its lack of use has been entirely due to the lack of qualified crews or undertaking alterations to improve the locos combustion. I'm told that the latter problem has now effectively been overcome and the locomotive is now sreaming satisfactorily but an additional air tube is to be installed in the ashpan, the dampers of which have now been sealed. This should eliminate the remaining bit of smoke.
I also heard of boardroom fallings out but that's not something for me to go into detail about.