North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

As usual, the silence from official sources is deafening, so anyone wanting positive news has to rely on gossip from the local shop.

 

Is it finished?
Has the track been relaid?

What were you expecting rom the railway a blow by blow account?

 

If it were GlobalMegaCorp PLC doing the work, probably not. But for an organisation that is making an appeal for every penny it can get to fund the works, I’d expect every opportunity possible to push the message (1) look how much we’ve done already (2) look how much more remains to do and (3) here’s how you can help us get from 1 to 2.

Tom

 

Last update was 21st April about the crane turning up. Since then, nothing. They've almost got the railway back from the contractors to allow them to prepare for services. They're meant to be reopening next weekend for through services, two months late. They should be spamming their social media to say there's been substantial progress; instead they're trying to flog key rings and sell the last half a dozen seats on a dining service. Even the Thomas event publicity seems half-arsed considering the lack of advance ticket sales.

 

Believe you me the ladies in Grosmont Co-Op are far more knowledgable about the railway than the Park Street Polit Bureau.

 

https://bridgestobroadway.blogspot.com/2026/05/gotherington-slip-repairs-week-4.html Just saying....

Sent from my PGT-N19 using Tapatalk

 

Total GWSR employees - 22.
Number of admin and marketing employees at NYMR - 17.

I think I'm right in saying Spa Valley has around 7 employees, and yet they managed to put out a daily blog about the bridge replacement as well.

 

Yet, they are still after donations!

 

I'm fairly certain The Spa Valley Railway has no permanent paid staff, only contractors for specific engineering tasks or ad hoc help such as behind the Bar in big events like Real Ale Festival and Polar Express.

The Broom Lane Bridge blog was run by a volunteer and I was thinking of posting about it already from the above comments (rather than lurking as I have done on Nat Pres for a bit) as it was a railway that bit the bullet and did expensive bridge work that cut the line for a few weeks (about 6) before it was forced into an emergency closure

 

Unless I’m being told porkies by a volunteer there, the Spa Valley has no paid employees.

 

@Jonnie

 

I think you're correct, but it's one of those various shades of grey rather than black and white situations with a mix of volunteers, employees and contractors at most railways

 

The NYMR CEO apparently does not read posts on Nat Pres - if she did she would certainly have discerned what the tealeaves were saying by now - but just in case she is struggling with the fact that all the messages on this forum are anything but mixed, all the evidence suggests that the NYMR Publicity Dept. can't get anything right - and responsibility for that must rest with the CEO who, if doing their job properly, ought to approve all press releases. It's a basic part of the job, and the buck should stop here.

 

If that is the case. Why don't you contact the CEO directly with your views and Ideas how you think the NYMR should be run, Instead of keep blathering away on this forum.
To be honest it is all getting rather boring.

 

Which states that the "propping has been completed and [the] crane has been removed". I notice in looking at that image that the cross-river support girders shown on the original drawing (once posted here, but now gone - the caption is still there, but not the drawings) seem to have been omitted? There are some members which form the lower member of the cross-river truss, but they give them impression of just being part of the trusswork, not substantial load-bearing elements (like the blue-painted up-down-river girders). I wish the original posted drawings had not been removed - and that I had thought to make local copies of them.

That's interesting, because I have heard that the propping won’t actually take any of the weight of the bridge, which confuses me. It is certainly possible to build a support structure which simply conforms to the existing structure, but exerts no (upwards) force on it. To be supportive, there would need to be some element in there to vary the force (if any) which the support structure exerts on the existing structure; wedges, or a way to make small adjustments to the height of the propping structure, or something. But if there is nothing like that there, just a 'support' structure which conforms to the existing structure, that should be obvious to the more intelligent people working on it: if that report is correct, I'm astonished that none of them have talked about it.

Maybe someone with some engineering/construction expertise who is on the ground there could examine the propping closely in person, and let us know if has an element designed to vary the force exerted upward on the arch?

Noel

 

From the picture, all the angled members appear to have a threaded portion reaching up to the bridge (I can’t see the top of the central vertical members).
These same members appear to be located on top of a trans-river girder?

 

It looks very similar to the “Mabey System” that was used on some of the timber bridges I worked on the safety team in Wales- those systems were a mixture of load bearing and stabilisation depending on the application.

 

The point of the structure is not to take the weight of the bridge (if that were necessary they probably wouldn’t have been running trains on it), but to support the weight of the trains on the bridge?

 

I wonder if a speed restriction will be in place over the bridge? Is it 10mph for station limits there anyway?

 

General Station limits restriction of 10mph with 5 mph-over the crossover.