West Somerset Railway General Discussion

I am reluctant to make any substantial donation to the WSR until I can be reasonably certain there is sound management. I was hoping to take a trip on the line and stay a few days in Minehead as I have done every few years. This year there is little point in visiting, I will go somewhere else and my money will go to another railway.

 

Actually, my first reaction when seeing that 'Cambrian' photo was to think that it all looked too good - if you can run an engine and a train in scenery like that, who needs £1M anyway? Would it not attract more money if they used a shot of something which is actually 'wrong' at the moment, saying 'this is what we need to fix' and then compare it with a 'this is what we want to recreate' shot?

 

Eh ?

The plc failed in their second bid because they did not qualify as a not for profit organisation. The WSRHT qualified but just passed the money through ? Did I read that correctly ?

 

The WSRHT cannot just "pass money through" as it has to use its funds to support its charitable activities. I'm not sure exactly which sums are which without checking, but a large wodge of money was used for the museum access road, and another is earmarked to pay for relaying track through blue anchor to heritage levels, including the reinstatement of the catch point. It's an important distinction between supporting the railway and supporting a plc. The two are different.

 

Remember that about half of what was "raised" last time was actually raided from station funds and similar, so wasn't actually new donated money.

I was surprised how many negative comments I found on the railway's main Facebook page when I looked the other day, seemingly from "normal" members of the public, names I didn't recognise from here or any of the WSR's usual Facebook groups. The general perception does seem to be a lack of confidence in the management. Doesnt bode well for the appeal, but I'm sure we shall see soon.

 

The Whirlwind?

 

Also notable that a lot of reasonable visitor-orientated questions, basic stuff like can I bring my dog, and ticket-y questions, have remained completely unanswered, along with all comments about when trains will run to Minehead again.

 

Clkearly the Management are not interested in attracting members of the public then, I imagine that the WSR facebook page is was only set up as a way to massage someone's ego, not to answer questions, unless of course they are primed questions asking for those who do not share in the the joy of the dear leader to be expelled from the railway.
So the WSR needs a million each year to survive, and of course it will never be the managements fault if people decide, I don't like bullies, and send their money elsewhere, I would imagine the various new locations for the S&D Trust could use similar donations to rebuild .

 

There are a small number of railways that have raised > £1m per year for multiple years on end; however there are some common threads:

1. None of them has done it overnight
2. As far as I am aware, all of them have done it with the primary focus on the charitable part of the railway, not the commercial part.
3. Understandably, such donations have tended to be for "development" type activities, less so on "maintenance" or "operational support". (*)

To expand a bit on the last point, I appreciate that in a sense all money is to a degree fungible, so it is somewhat grey whether money paid to a charity is ultimately paying for operational things. But if for example you set out an appeal to build a carriage shed, then if you pitch it right it stands a good chance of being successful. If you set out an appeal to "paint our carriages", the natural inclination is to ask "shouldn't you be doing that already?" The carriage shed looks like an "invest to save" which people will support whereas painting the carriages more frequently is an operational cost that the natural feeling is should come from the fare box.

A couple of other things leapt out at me from the article quoted.

The railway says it is investigating whether a new share offering is a possibility. Now, firstly, I'm not aware of any railway that has successfully raised £1m+ by shares multiple years running. Secondly, the current WSR capitalisation is ~ £2m and they sell a few tens of thousands of pounds of new shares each year. So to consider that it is feasible to suddenly sell, in one year, 50% of all the shares that they have thus far sold in the last forty years feels to me - let's say, brave...

More significantly in that shareholding view of fundraising is that the compliance costs of a share issue on that scale are likely to be very substantial. A potential six figure sum to raise £1m that lasts for one year - where is the money going to come from, given that there apparently isn't a six figure sum available to make the transformative change to a new charitable structure that potentially has benefits for decades to come? I think the board need to answer some pretty hard questions about why one of those is affordable but the other, recommended path to a new structure, isn't. You either have the money for the compliance costs of the share issue or you don't - but if you do, why not spend it on the new charitable structural reorganisation instead?

The other point is that whatever his other qualities, someone needs to put a communications professional in front of the chairman. Reading his extended quote, it instantly starts off on the back foot, bemoaning the failure to win the second round DCMS money "despite lodging two very strong appeals against their earlier rejection decision." Having thus started on a failure, the rest of the tone is pleading for support, but entirely bereft of any vision of how such funds would transform the railway. Speaking personally, I need a positive vision to support something, not a negative one.

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(*) As a little jeu d'esprit for the honourable member for Havant: historically it has always seemed easier to raise money for new things than maintaining existing things. Infrastructure maintenance is especially hard to raise money for, though extensions seem easier. One is also aware of the discussions around optimal length for a railway line.

Taken together, that suggests that the perfect preserved railway scheme is a cross-country line about 30 or so miles long. The railway company starts by re-opening five miles or so of line, which it brings up to an operational standard. It then has a big fundraising push on a five mile extension, but once open, it quietly closes the original five miles so as to cut operational costs to a sustainable level. It continues thus over many decades, always pushing forward with new extension appeals but quietly closing what is behind so that operational costs don't spiral. When eventually it reaches the end of the line, it turns round and comes back ...

Tom

 

It's the point above that matters to me - why should I care about his project as opposed to all the others asking for my money? My immediate reaction is not just to switch off, but to start to be suspicious - it draws my attention to the lack of a central cause to appeal to, and alerts me to the existence of an apparent vacuum.