North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

It is indeed. The costs of putting on the event haven't been disclosed. My guess is somwhere between £1/4 & £1/2m. Even at the latter it is still a good earner.

 

NYMR representatives were saying £750,000 profit for their Scotsman event; at the recent HRA Conference.

 

Sounds a bit high but even if not that high it's clearly good news.

I think some credit too that effort was made to have a second steam loco at the back whenever possible. Too often the Moors have seemed to opt for diesels for operational convenience but not the case this time.

Jon

 

This year I think they have tried every wild card going with SNG, Tornado and finally Flying Scotsman (not to mention the numerous other visitors this year). I think they certainly managed to prove without a doubt that there isn't another single visitor/event that can bring in the amount of people and money that the FS can.

The future must surely be more spread out with lots of smaller events. Creativity is certainly required. I really hope that the FS cash injection helps get them back to proper forward planning with less throwing stuff in while trying not to panic.

For that creativity here's a thought, why not ask the staff and volunteers? That's where a lot of the old creativity came from.

 

Good suggestions, but it should be remembered that several of the past successful events such as wartime weekend and the 60s weekend were initiated and run by the volunteers, till the paid staff took them over and ruined them. What is needed is to let the volunteers come up with ideas and support them, but leave them to it.

 

Does the Railway have sufficent volunteers able to run and plan such events a lot of Railways are struggling to cover duties with volunteers the railway i volunteer at have had to cancel services due to a lack of footplate crew which traditionally was one of the easier one to cover

 

My fishmonger was this morning singing the praises of the Polar Express at Wensleydale which he had just taken his grandchildren to, driving up from Grimsby to Leeming Bar as a day trip. The railway apparently starts its PEs quite early. I think the train was around 4.00pm which helps with the atmosphere. I don't know whether the Wensleydale Railway running the PE precluded the NYMR going this route, as some territorial exclusivity does not sound unreasonable, or maybe the NYMR does well enough with its Santas (which according to the website start at the end of November). I was interested that the catchment area extended so far (within two hours driving).

 

I stopped at Leeming Bar services as the PE crowds were gathering two years ago. The draw seemed very strong and people driving from well around

 

The PE season is also underway at the Churnet. I think it’s fair to say that the profit from this has transformed the railway over recent years. Long may it last, though like all such things it will have a finite life span before the bubble bursts. Spotting the next one is key to keeping the ball rolling.

 

Then the answer is for both paid staff and volunteers to work together, rather than have one side as the dominant force. It should be "Simples!" but sadly doesn't seem to be. Personally, I loathe the PE premise/concept (American cultural influence overtaking everything), but I can't see why something along similar lines can't be developed that is royalty-free, and I'd try to enlist the help of local schools and AmDram groups to help work it up, which might actually bring more local involvement, interest, and perhaps even some volunteers on board. Like so much else on the NYMR, the Santas seem to be being run by the paid staff now, and they seem to be strangling the life out of them.

 

Roger, I share your antipathy of the "Americanization" {sic} of our way of life. I fear it has a stranglehold now,the grandkids regularly drinking Coke,,eating McDonald's and asking "can I get".

I have been dragged, reluctantly, to two Polar Express events at Wensleydale and Embsay and, have to say, they were very professionally run in order to extract every last penny from people's grasp.

The whole experience was ok, actually I rather enjoyed them, aided greatly in the knowledge that our cash was helping the respective railways financially.

If amateurs do try to emulate the Polar Express, they have a hard act to follow.

 

When the kids were the right age, I took them to a Santa event (not NYMR). Protecting the guilty, it’s wasn’t great.

Reading accounts of PE events (and the film was on constant replay when they were small), the event is much more sophisticated, using professional cast members and organising the event as a show. That gives higher cost but also higher return.

 

Does it though? A higher return for the organisation behind the franchise undoubtedly but how much of the cash stays with the railway?

 

That’s a fair question, but I suspect the answer is that the higher price point allows both to do well. Long term sustainability may be a different question - as we’ve seen with Thomas.

However, I think the question is partially misplaced. I wouldn’t do a Santa event. I’d consider a PE.

 

In the absence of knowledge of the contract, I'm not sure you can definitively say that.

There is also another key point beyond the "happy path" profit if things go well, which is how is the risk shared? The primary risks for these types of events - indeed, probably almost any event a railway hosts - is what happens if it can't proceed for any reason, and what happens if it does proceed but ticket sales are poor? The example of how the franchise holders of Thomas the Tank Engine put in place Ts&Cs that loaded all the risk of low ticket sales on the host railway is well known I think. Polar Express may well have a different model, but in the absence of seeing the contract, I don't think you can just boil it down got "higher cost but higher returns".

(As a small example: in my role as a Trustee for a small charity here in Salisbury, one of our fundraising events is to put on a summer garden show with a visiting theatre company. The terms of the contract are basically that the gross ticket sales are split in an agreed proportion; we take 100% of the sales of refreshments and they take 100% of the sales of programmes. That is almost risk-free for us, but I suspect has considerable risk for the theatre company. By contrast, if they set the terms as, for example, a fixed fee with us taking 100% of the takings once the fee was paid, that would probably be a higher profit, but considerably higher risk, for us).

Tom

 

A rhetorical question, surely? One must presume that the NYMR has already enquired about the contractual terms, otherwise people like me would be questioning the competence of a management that does not explore an option that is said to be very successful elsewhere!

 

At the Wensleydale agm, it was stated that the Railway makes a decent return on the PE, the exact figure I cannot recall, but they were more than satisfied.
Also, many of the line's volunteers were part of the performance, it wasn't just a case of a load of outsiders turning up.

 

Well having watched the P.E. set up at Swanage the last couple of years I could not see the railway having sufficient volunteers, or volunteers plus paid staff to undertake it. Not of course that they would have been able to as it is tightly controlled by the licensee. Not sure unless you are only talking about a few trains maybe at weekends at the NYMR where you are going to get sufficient number of Am Dram folks day after day for the season. You need repeatability in an offering like this, achievable on the original Santa offerings due to low numbers of "performers" and achievable with lights trains as long as there is not a power cut. A P.E. competitor or even a "lite version" of something similar I suggest is way more difficult to achieve.
I have no idea of the P.E. contracts but it seems from what has been said that any railway knows what it is getting in advance. It really is a form of outsourcing, but like Fox & Edwards trains it takes the risk away from the railway.