SVR General Discussion

I completely agree and, though Boogie Lights is my vision of hell, I wish it well. My observation, from the comfort of an armchair, was merely that protecting that golden egg undermined the success of the branch line event.

 

I would have to disagree I’m afraid. Branchlines was succesful, infact very succesful. It transformed what would have been a very average weekend of revenue, in to something extraordinary. It’s given us a platform to boost the event from next year, and actually with some tinkering it’s given us a base timetable that could work for all
Enthusiast events except the big galas. We all accept trains were busy, but Boogie Lights itself didn’t cause that.

 

And given the number of families I saw it did a good job at that, mine included at 3 generations.
The Auto Train BTW was a source of much fascination from my daughter (age 13) to my mum (whose 68th birthday we celebrated on the railway). I also overheard a lot of comments about the quality of restoration of the coaching stock. As time goes on, the time capsule that is the carriages becomes evermore fascinating to non-enthusiasts and that is something the SVR is blessed with.

 

I hope the Branchline timetable isn't used as the basis for future events as for me, starting from Bridgnorth as I do, it didn't work at all as there were far too many short-journey trains and not enough whole-line trains, which mean that regardless of the train I took from Bridgnorth there was much too long a wait at Kidderminster for a return train, so I gave the event a miss. Time will tell, I suppose, to see whether the "tinkering" will make much difference.

 

But as base it works. The whole idea of a base is that it’s flexible. The short paths can be brought together to make full line paths, etc. Its all about operational flexibility to prevent countless re-writes of new timetables

 

Quite right! But dreams change and we old codgers who yearn to relive the swansong of steam in the 50s and 60s are a diminishing number.

 

Much of the 'froth' appears to be from people who didn't actually attend!!

 

Why was the Auto Train reduced to one carriage on Sunday? It was wedged all day on Saturday with two!

 

It's clear to me that the SVR shouldn't have promoted the weekend. The whole idea of branch line trains is there's only a couple of people on them .

That way the non-visiting public would be happy to know that the SVR faithfully recreated the branch line experience and also made the whopping loss associated with running branch line trains.

Jon

 

A variety of reasons….

1) Storage of the 2nd coach. It needed to end up down CS1, and get the Boogie Lights set in on top. So couldn’t get it back out on Sunday.

2) Variety. Very much wanted to have variety of the event.

3) Passengers numbers. That Sunday normally would have been unbelievably low on numbers. We couldn’t have predicted the increase in numbers on the scale there was.

As I keep saying, we have learnt. We can now put on a more Budgeted and informed event next year.

 

To be followed by a ''Beeching Closure Weekend"?

 

Watch out some on here will think you're serious!!!!

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You could follow up with a "derelict railways" weekend then an early preservation weekend and culminate in a "festival of complaining" where apparent enthusiast arrive to complain about the fact there are too many people/wrong colour of engines etc etc...

 

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