North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Re my above comments, I do see things as I volunteer in the Pickering Booking Office, TTI once a week and as part of the station staff. I also work alongside paid staff who if they weren’t working would probably mean no Customer Service and half the booking offices randomly closed due to lack of volunteers. Ps personally wouldn’t like to volunteer in Customer Services given the level of abuse they often receive over the phone, particularly since COVID. If I were to suffer abuse just once then that would be the end of my volunteer days.

 

"Chief executive Laura Strangeway told The Yorkshire Post: “There is no change of policy or objective - it is always the case that if we can use a volunteer we will."

 

Fair point regarding 60163 - but when it was hired in there was already a steam ban in place that reduced the number of days it proved to be available, and secondly - has the uptick in visitor numbers been large enough to cover the extra costs? I suspect not, but I'm willing to be dissuaded by some genuine numbers; but I'm afraid your impressions are as subjective as those others who have noted lots of empty seats at times. As for lambasting - well if it did provide a genuine return on the investment then congrats for its speedy booking, but brickbats if it actually ended up costing more than it brought in.

 

A very interesting statement. I would like to think that if I were a senior manager or director of a company where some of my staff were continually receiving abuse from customers(?) that I would be investigating the reasons. I would agree that, for some reason, post-covid we have become a far less tolerant or respectful society ( well some have) but is the underlying reason that the NYMR has a sub optimal product and the customers are venting their feelings on the staff?

 

Was there? I thought the ban came in just as it arrived, a little after the visit was announced?

Jon

 

104 paid staff sounds like a lot, don't some of the other big heritage railways manage with half that number, or am I misremembering?

 

You’re not wrong.

 

That’s well down on the 150 recorded in the 2024 accounts.

 

Re the timing of hiring the Tornado when there was a steam ban, I recall Tornado arrived Tuesday the day after the major fire in Langdale Moor started (6pm Monday), and who could have foretold the impact of that fire.

My impressions are more than subjective, both selling tickets at Pickering (Tuesday) for the 10.55 departure both before and since Tornado arrived using EPOS which tells me the loadings on the 10.55, and as a member of station staff at Grosmont (Fridays) for the 16.40 departure when I can see the visual impact.

Re does it provide a genuine return on investment, I am not party to the numbers, but I’m sure that “management” have considered the financial risks as worth taking. All life is a risk, even if it is just crossing the road every morning.

 

It is not continuous abuse, but occasional when things go t*ts up eg if there has been a lineside fire necessitating the temporary halting of trains. 99.99% of passengers are totally understanding provided they are kept informed but its the odd one (and the odd one would be enough for me), and yes there is a feeling that post COVId some customers are less tolerant.

 

Agreed

 

I’d disagree. When I gave up my role doing footplate rostering there was no plea for a volunteer replacement; it was given to paid staff. Similar happened when the volunteer doing the other half of the job gave up the other month. When travelling ground frame operators were introduced to Whitby it was always a paid staff job. I’m sure that there would be people who would enjoy a day travelling back and forth on the footplate between Grosmont and Whitby but, as far as I know it’s a job that’s never been offered to volunteers. At the higher end of the scale there was no attempt to find a volunteer replacement civil engineer when the long standing volunteer incumbent finally retired.
That’s not to say that volunteers aren’t welcomed but the railways approach always seems to be to go for the easy option and employ someone to do the job.

 

Then it would be a great shame if you allowed that 0.01% to put you off volunteering. I do hope that staff are never put in a position of being alone when dealing with such complaints.

 

And in addition, the NYMR uses a media agency (CAB Campaign) to manage its PR.

 

I think there can be a telling difference between saying that and actually looking for and welcoming volunteers. It's been a few years since I was a volunteer at the NYMR but I cannot say that I've heard stories from my contacts still there of the present CEO putting MBWA into practice.

 

I have no personal experience, but the statement by the CEO seemed to me to be different from the impression that @Lineisclear has given at times — statements like needing 5 volunteers to replace one staff member for example.

 

My experience of talking to leaders of other heritage railways is that ratio is broadly recognised. It doesn't mean that preference should not be given to volunteers merely that the challenge is finding enough of them. Take my own volunteering area of signalling for example. Each of the two lines I volunteer on has around 45/50 part time volunteer signalmen to work four boxes. The same resource could be provided with around 6/7 full time employees. Incidentally Steve is wrong to quote the erstwhile civil engineer as an example of a volunteer. That may have been true at one time but my understanding is that for some years his services were contracted to the railway via a well rewarded company.

 

Blimey, so they'll need 35 people to run the dreadful website and marketing campaigns?!

 

So those 40/50 volunteers save GWR £150k plus of wage costs …one of the reasons that line isn’t on its knees ,along with other similar savings in the guards department ,MPD etc ..

 

I suspect the ratio of 1 FTE = {high single figures} volunteers comes from some simple maths. For example, if you have a full time employee doing a 40 hour week for, say, 45 weeks per year (allowing for holidays etc) then nominally you have 2,200 hours to fill per year. Replace that with a volunteer doing three 8 hour days per month (probably fairly typical in an operational or restoration role) and you apparently get about 7.5 volunteers needed to cover that full time position. I strongly suspect that statements along the lines of "we need x volunteers to replace each member of paid staff" are broadly calculated along those lines, i.e. a very labour-based way of calculating requirement: how many hours do we need to fill?

What that misses is the extent to which roles on a heritage railway are often "micro roles", i.e. there are many tasks that need covering which don't necessarily make up a full time job individually. That sort of role profile is well suited to being filled by numerous volunteers, each of whom put in just a few hours per week. It's probably quite hard to find someone who will tend the station flowerbeds, carry out light building maintenance, edit a newsletter, compile the guards' roster and maintain the membership database - but each of those micro-roles is potentially amenable to being done by a volunteer.

The difficulty comes that when you do combine roles into a paid member of staff, if that staff member leaves, it is difficult to find perhaps 5 - 7 volunteers to cover the micro roles, so it becomes easier to just recruit a new paid member of staff. Rostering is a good example. On a railway the scale of the NYMR, I can imagine that rostering across all operating departments probably is a full time job if done by one person. If that person leaves, it is likely very difficult at short notice to find and train a volunteer in each department (loco, guards, signalmen, platform staff etc) to cover the immediate requirement; easier to just get a new full time member of staff. So there is a very strong risk that while it is easy to convert volunteer roles into paid staff, it goes in the "too hard" pile to go the other way and split paid roles back into being done by several volunteers.

Tom