North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

I wonder if they also going to put the fares up this year as well. The SVR by contrast have frozen theirs.

 

Railways are expensive to run. The NYMR needs a turnover of £7m+ per year.

How many members are there?

1000 members * £100 per year is only £100,000. That's ~15% of 1 engine overhaul. There needs to be 6 loco's availble per year minimum.

£60 seems cheap.

How much was membership of the Tornado group? £10 per month, thats £120 per year and that's to support 1 locomotive, not a whole railway.

 

And also remember that working volunteers get free membership with no obligation to make a donation. That also applies to supporting groups such as NELPG, H&B stock fund and LNERCA for example. Those volunteers would probably want to support their own group rather than the NYMR so no funds for the railway.

 

It only requires that much a year because it operates with a higher number of paid staff than any other heritage railway of similar length and as noted loves to pay external advisors and contractors, for stuff such as the poorly produced house magazine. Recently the c&w has had a level of dust extraction fitted which would benefit a large joinery manufacturer operating numerous machines in tandem on a full time basis, not a small worship where machines are used intermittently usually one at a time. Yes extraction was needed but the amount of waste produced only justified a much smaller plant. The company next to the LNERCA workshop that specialises in manufacturing bespoke windows doesn't have a plant that size and all their waste is compressed into firewood briquettes suitable for log burners. Setting the membership subscription to this level shows the same lack of grasp on reality as the fare policy, with no understanding that increasing prices beyond a certain point will see a fall in income overall. It's funny for some things it seems money is no object, while assets that are essential to the core business go without and I definitely think the NYMR isn't at all good with distant elephant syndrome. £60 is not cheap and if membership subscriptions are not showing a small surplus then magazine production and distribution costs need to be cut, it doesn't need to be a large glossy ego massaging tool for the SMT.
Someone may be a director of civils but they are not listed as a director of either company on companies house.
https://find-and-update.company-inf...cers/M932KKs10iKkXqr76bxegaS5WiM/appointments
https://find-and-update.company-inf...cers/f0jXYgQM6keZhxDvtho-tHBajYU/appointments
Turn up when searching people on companies house.

Sawdust.

 

I assume free membership won't include voting rights?

Sawdust.

 

Membership was in the region of 10,000. Even averaging the price out at £30 per person to allow for children and couples, that's £300,000 per year. £60 isn't cheap when every single other railway in the UK offers far, far cheaper membership options. Highest fares, highest membership costs, highest wage bill, highest annual losses. They're doing brilliantly!

Also, there isn't any membership of the A1SLT - you simply give them money and they send you the occasional newsletter. It's not a fixed fee per person, and you have no voting rights or say in how the trust is run. It's simply a donation.

 

Mem

Members are not the big cash source. Millions come from running trains and providing supporting shops and catering.
Over the Xmas period the Bluebell ran trains, and by early January the public were informed of the results. Almost one million in revenue from trains, teashop, huts etc.

Nymr keeps all this stuff fairly secret.
What are they hiding?

 

That's news to me - and, I suspect, all other volunteers!

 

Is membership really expected to be a source o income? I suggest to, it's more a vehicle for keeping people interested and committed, in the hope that they will make rather more substantial by way of donations and, in particular, via legacies. It's those legacies, inn particular, that have provided the matched funding to allow big grant-aided projects (eg YMJ, which I think needed 4M of matched funding) to go ahead.

 

Not sure that means anything. You can have a Directors title without being on the board.

My old employer BA only lists 6 names on Companies House, yet has way more directors than that.

 

Talking of directors. @Lineisclear has not posted to National Preservation since 5th December 2025. I hope he is OK.

 

https://www.national-preservation.c...eneral-discussion.29732/page-468#post-2967914

Gagged by the sounds of it. @Sidmouth4me hasn't posted either for a while.

 

You can call yourself whatever you like, but from a legal point of view, there is a big difference between being a director in a companies act sense and not being. Not least that you have the automatic power to bind the company and be liable for its solvency when trading. The fun bit is that if you pretend to be a director too hard, you can be a "shadow director" (and thus liable as a director), even if you are not officially a director.

I'd guess most of the ones at BA will be operations directors, divisional directors etc.

 

And in many cases, membership provides a continuing connection for sympathisers from the local community, who are quite possibly not interested in railways in general. That can ease relationships with the local council and with local businesses, and can also facilitate grants from public or charitable bodies.

 

Indeed, it can. But like most relationships, you get out of it what you put in. And if the relationship is giving less (e.g. Moors Line changes) but demanding more (e.g. price rise), then the outcome is likely to be predictable.

 

If the purpose of the membership club is to keep people informed in the hope they will donate more, does seem like it's an income generator. Though not expected to be the sole income generator by any means.

The A1SLT covenants were £10 per month (minimum).

£300,000 per year is a lot of money, but also not a lot in context of a full size railway.

Do they have the most paid staff by choice? Are there volunteers to fill the roles if they reduced the paid staff?

There is a double edged sword with regards a large attraction such as the NYMR. On the one side. A business with £7m turnover is a large business. It should be run properly, and a business mindset is definitely a requirement.

On the other hand steam engines don't make money. Im sure I dont need to tell anyone here that a steam locomotive owner is happy if they can break even. Hire fee's barely cover the overhauls, that's when you are lucky and a loco goes the full 10 years without needing more than routine servicing and replacement of consumables [firebars, the odd spring, tyre reprofiling, etc] . Wasn't there a loco, not on the NYMR, that recently required a boiler lift after just 2 years in ticket.

Most £7m pound businesses expect to make money. I know any profit at the end of the year would normally be put back in to the railway anyway, facilities upgrades, or overhauling a nice to have, or restoration of heritage buildings or something.

But at present it seems the NYMR is struggling to break even. And that can only happen a few times before work that gets put off (infrastructure) will bite back. Bridge 42 is an example of this.

If you have a loco go out of ticket every year, and a loco come back every year, that's 10 loco's. You need 6 steamable to guarantee enough cover for breakdowns and washouts / servicing. So that's a requirement of 15 steam loco's to run the line. what's an average overhaul? £400k for a small loco requiring minimal work, £750-900k for a 9f or merchant navy. £3 million if you cock it up and have to send it to Ian Rileys to be done properly. *cough* nrm *cough* flying scotsman.

£60 seems like a drop in the ocean comparatively. Minimum wage is 12.25 per hour. So volunteers earn their free membership in 5 hours and thats assuming a minimum wage position. A volunteer doing boiler work or welding, to give just 2 examples, would be even less.

Why is there a need for a glossy magazine? It's 2026 just make a pdf and email it out, maybe charge more for a printed version, save trees, encourage the much cheaper email version. The communication is the important bit, the words are the same.

Reading heritage railway magazine lately I saw an interview with the CEO. I notice they had a scrap drive to make some cash. I also notice the auction they did which came up short of target. In my opinion she thinks too small. The thinking seems to be how can we make a few thousand extra. Where the thinking needs to be how can they make a few million extra.

 

I'm not really at all sure that she thinks much outside her own immediate orbit, but maybe she was thinking in terms of her own pay rise? But, leaving joking aside, there is no doubt that virtually any railway one cares to mention is not sufficiently financial successful to continue to exist without a background of substantial fundraising, and really that is where the volunteers tend to excel. Paid staff tend to excel in finding ways to spend whatever the volunteers raise! That's why anything that tends to sideline the volunteers or diminish their input, or deride them as being a "cost" on the organisation is profoundly counterproductive. Some of us have long been trying to tell the erstwhile @Lineisclear that but he seems to be too deaf or foolish to listen. The people who will pay the price of this misguided reasoning will be those who earn their living at the railway, because it will stop being able to maintain them all before too long, and my real fear is that the people they have to let go will prove not to be the ones they ought to let go,.

 

Another piece of news that has just reached me is that the LNERCA has raised the full amount of its appeal to restore Gresley TK 23896, in a short space of time. This, of course, is another vehicle that the NYMR don't seem to back on the railway. Could it be, though, that the enthusiastic response to this appeal, which is in stark contrast the the 75029 appeal's success, is because the NYMR's supporters want to see more, not less, teak carriages? Perhaps the NYMR's supporters have a different vision of how the railway should evolve in terms of the way it embraces "heritage"? - but can the current management go along with them? Sadly, I think not.