Ecclesbourne Valley Railway

For the group's information, the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway ran the 'Thames-Ecclesbourne Express' service from Wirksworth to London yesterday.

The EVR ran an early-morning service from Wirksworth to Duffield (07:15 departure) which connected with a specially extended Derby-London service that started at Chesterfield and made a special stop at Duffield at 08:07.

The return service was the 18:25 from St. Pancras that stopped at Duffield at 20:18 with the connecting service departing to Wirksworth a few minutes later and arriving back at Wirksworth at 21:00.

The trip took a not inconsiderable degree of organisation both on the day and in the preceding few months. The timespan of the operation necessitated two sets of crews and some eleven people from the EVR alone on the day.

Nonetheless, this was an extremely pleasant day out and, hopefully, sets a template for similar events in the future.

Working with East Midlands Trains was an especial pleasure as there is no denying that they are both commercially-minded and have an eye of an opportunity.

A gallery containing images from the day can be found here: http://photobucket.com/thames-ecclesbourne2011.

Neil Ferguson-Lee
Ecclesbourne Valley Railway

 

Is this the way forward for other heritage lines to adopt?

 

How many people made use of the service? Was the number up to expectations?

 

We had a total of 37 fare-paying passengers and one baby. The figures exceeded our minimum level very comfortably and although I would have liked about half a dozen more, the levels were well within our target.

It will be interesting to see how we can grow these numbers in the future now that the initial template has been established.

Neil

 

Thanks for the information. I'm always keen to see "heritage railways" performing a public service too and think it is just brilliant that you were able to put this trip together. The Weardale Railway is a good example with its community service not to mention the freight flows. I'm also fascinated by the upcoming MCR developments and Swanage Railway reconnection to Wareham. I'm sure there are many other examples...

Nigel

 

The Weardale is an excellent example and we have close links with their senior management, while other connections such as MCR and Swanage offer real optimism for the future.

I would suggest that the key thing is for private lines to be outward-focused and make very best use of their connections. These offer new business opportunities and it would be daft for any railway not to see how best to exploit every possible opportunity. The only downside to actually operating one's own trains on the national network is that the cost and complexity rise exponentially.

At Wirksworth, we are in the situation where there has been more-or-less no through railway traffic to the town for 64 years (1980s Wirksworth Phoenix respectfully excluded) and we are now beginning to build-up that market. Saturday showed the way forward but it is now up to us to build on that modest success.

Incidentally, as I write this post, our Passenger Services Manager has posted an email regarding timetabling on our Yahoo! Group. I thought the following paragraph might be of interest to readers here in the context of this thread:

We are in many respects quite an unusual railway: our connections with the main line are our very life-blood and this is uncommon, indeed rare for a heritage railway in Britain. The vast majority of heritage lines have no connections to make, or are on occasion remote from the national network and can therefore create and change their timetables, sometimes right up to the very day they operate. We cannot do so, and in many respects we have more in common with some Swiss private railways than even with some of our near neighbours.

As they say in all good examination papers - Discuss!

Kind regards,

Neil