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North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

Discussion in 'Heritage Railways & Centres in the UK' started by The Black Hat, Feb 13, 2011.

  1. 5944

    5944 Resident of Nat Pres

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    Roughly 40% of the railway's income is spent on staff costs. It's all well and good receiving £10m in grants over the last few years, but the wage bill has been double that in the same period. How is that sustainable?

    For a railway that wants to generate more income, where are all the other attractions? Bluebell, MHR, GCR, they all have some sort of event happening most weekends. Not massive multi loco galas - kids TV characters visiting, vintage vehicles, back to the 60s, etc. Stuff that costs very little to put on but attracts more visitors on what would be quiet days. They also keep customers on the railway spending money, rather than going elsewhere for their lunch. I realise that Whitby is a massive attraction, but where was the incentive to get passengers use their annual ticket and spend time and money on the NYMR? £99 is good value for a family visiting for a week or two locally, but extortionate for a couple visiting for the day.

    The only events listed on the website at present are the Autocar specials at half term. There's not even an indication of when the main season starts, which seems to be a common occurrence every year - the timetable usually appears a few days before the start of the season. No other railway seems to suffer from this.

    As @torgormaig said, the assets of the railway seem to be suffering. Each of the last 3 years has seen a steam loco prematurely withdrawn from traffic with a serious fault (63395, 825 and 76079). Three locos (80136, 926 and 45428) are due to come out of traffic in the next couple of years, assuming they last that long, and replacements seem thin on the ground. At the moment only two steam locos are passed for Whitby, and one of them (926) spent a considerable amount of time out of traffic. Winter maintenance often lasts until just before the start of the gold timetable as well for some reason. Overhauls appear go on indefinitely - 34101, 75029, 80135 and 3672 have, by my reckoning, been undergoing overhaul for a combined 40 years!

    The coaching stock isn't much better. Even without the collision at Pickering knocking out half of the fleet for several weeks, availablity has been tight without the teak set. I'm guessing a substantial amount of the £2.1m generated by catering in 2023 came from the Moorlander. How much income would be lost if the kitchen car ended up out of service for a lengthy period? It nearly happened a few years ago with the fire, but luckily it was the end of the season.
     
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  2. Steve

    Steve Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    In very simplistic terms, if the NYMR needs a turnover of £8m/year and it carries 100,000 passengers, that requires a revenue/passenger of £80. If that number of passengers is 300,000, it only requires a revenue/passenger of £26.67, a huge difference. Whilst the reality is not as simple as that, not long ago it was claiming 300,000 passengers/year. At £49.50, that tends to indicate only some 161,600 passengers. That's a huge fall off in the numbers, more so as such as secondary spend and premium trains are being ignored in my simple calculation.
    Again, such information as passenger numbers appears to be a closely guarded secret.
     
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  3. Platform 3

    Platform 3 Member

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    Does anyone have rough staffing costs at other 'premier league' railways?

    Sent from my SM-S926B using Tapatalk
     
  4. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    Indeed - but let's not complicate life on the big railway with adding volunteers to the mix. It might get noisy...
     
  5. huochemi

    huochemi Part of the furniture

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    You are suggesting the NYMR has become a compensation machine for the staff? :eek:;)
     
  6. 30567

    30567 Part of the furniture Friend

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    But what is the mean number of day trips per year per £49.50 ticket? I'll stick my finger in the air and predict it might be close to 2. That would be 300k passengers with half of them paying.
     
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  7. garth manor

    garth manor Well-Known Member

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    The gamble is that families exercising the "free" repeat trip will spend on food, souvenirs etc, rather like the National Trust with its low cost annual pass.
     
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  8. 60044

    60044 Member

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    Allow me to reply on behalf of Lineisclear (and the rest of the Trust Boand PLC Boards): "blah blah blah - I can hear you but I'm not listening!"
     
  9. 60044

    60044 Member

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    It is a big gamble, though - and, jf the rumours of the scale of this year's annual loss are true, hasn't worked at all.
     
  10. Steve

    Steve Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    For the avoidance of doubt, whenever trains are running, there is a duty fitter at Grosmont from 05.00 until the last loco returns to shed at the earliest. However, he has allotted tasks, such as filling the coaling stage, carrying out FTR's, carrying out minor repairs that can be done and other things, such as lighting up replacement locos if that is found necessary. so he is generally occupied. The argument against volunteers at weekends is that additional staff would be required to supervise them, not the duty fitter.
     
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  11. Jamessquared

    Jamessquared Nat Pres stalwart

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    I'd dispute that the National Trust has a "low cost" annual pass.

    For an individual, it is currently £91.20 per year. If you compare that with the solo entrance for, say, Stourhead - one of the Crown Jewels in the NT estate - you would have to visit about 4 times per year to justify that annual pass. If you took a smaller attraction - say Mompesson House - you need to visit 9 times.

    I happen to think the NT represents value for money (my kids may disagree ...) but essentially the annual membership is many multiples of a typical admission: relative to a single admission to one property, it is definitively not low cost.

    I mentioned the SVR up thread as having quite completive prices for a single traveller. They also offer an unlimited annual pass, which is £155 - about 6 times the cost of a single day rover. (The family equivalent - £310 - works out to be just over 4 times the equivalent advance purchase family day rover - £75). That multiple seems roughly in line with what the National Trust are charging.

    My feeling about the NYMR fares is that they are simultaneously too expensive for an individual who plans only on making a single visit - you are looking at £50 for a day out, which is off putting; but too cheap for anyone intending to make frequent use of their ticket as an annual pass, in the same way I, and many others, use National Trust membership.

    (Edit to add: because the NT is a genuinely national organisation, I am also much more likely to use a true annual pass, since I have a huge range of places where I can use it, both at home and on holiday. By contrast, I'd be very unlikely to visit any individual heritage railway more than once in a year, except unless it was very local. So were I on holiday in North Yorkshire for a week, the fact that the £49.50 fare allowed return visits is not actually a massive draw, since at the end of my holiday, I'd be very unlikely to go back to somewhere 300 miles away).

    Tom
     
    Last edited: Jan 6, 2025
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  12. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    I often hear the "secondary spend" argument advanced. Where a railway has a relatively captive audience (so not NYMR!), this may be true - but that secondary spend has to be earned. That means spending money on stock and possibly staff to sell it. It can be viable (my bank manager will say just how much I've spent at Belton over the years!), but if I spend £10 on a couple of coffees and accompanying buns, the vast majority of that cash has already been spent by the railway on selling me that, so can't be used to contribute to the bottom line.

    Unfortunately, as customers, we tend to think that our £10 of secondary spend is all to the railway, and forget that what we've bought has cost it money, meaning that our extra contribution on the £50 ticket is not £10, but maybe £1 or £2.
     
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  13. Steve

    Steve Resident of Nat Pres Friend

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    Secondary spend on the NYMR is not an easy task for the casual visitor. For those travelling from Pickering there is a small buffet from which you can buy drinks and the odd snack. What there is is good but there is little of it. There's a shop but, if you are starting your day you are unlikely to buy souvenirs/whatever to cart around all day. If you are travelling just to Goathland or Grosmont there is a reasonable buffet and a reasonable shop but, whilst there's not much in Grosmont outside the station, Goathland has a lot of competition. If you are going to Whitby, there's absolutely nothing to spend your pennies on that will benefit the railway. In the other direction, the most popular train gets back to Pickering after everything except the toilets has been locked up and people have gone home.
     
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  14. ChuffChuff

    ChuffChuff Member

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    I’m not sure the NYMR is really on a different path to many of our larger railways – maybe just further down the path.

    Costs are up, less people are volunteering, and regulation is only going one way.

    I don’t think you can run a heritage railway with paid staff that is financially viable through ticket sales alone. (In some parts of the country I think you can run a viable tourist business that just happens to use steam trains – looking at you Dartmouth – but that’s different.) Legacies, donations, lottery funding, and appeals have historically done a lot to close the gap, but I think those days are passing.

    So … you need (probably both of) volunteer labour to supplement paid staff, and other income streams to supplement ticket sales. (For an example income stream, something like the SVR setting itself up as a conveniently located rail test and training facility.)

    If you need volunteers, then you need to keep them happy. Paid staff do it primarily for the money. (If they don’t, simply stop paying them and they will do the same job for free!) Volunteers do it because they want to, so they have to be happy and feel engaged. Running an organisation of paid staff is very different to a paid / volunteer mix. My inclination is that transparency is everything. You can’t keep all the people happy all the time, but you will be amazed what people will do if they understand the situation. And if most people are happy, the ones that don’t fit will quietly go elsewhere to find a place they do fit.

    Final thought … If the railway is a charity, with legally defined charitable aims, and the only way for the railway to exist is to use volunteers, then trustees keeping volunteers happy is absolutely a priority, as without the volunteers the charity fails and the charitable aims are not met.
     
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  15. Archivist

    Archivist New Member

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    OK, this is getting childish now. As an ordinary life member of both the NYMR and the LNERCA I’m bemusedly watching this set of increasingly unproductive exchanges. All parties seem to think that their opinions should carry weight, but… who the hell are you? Some of you obviously know each other, as you occasionally address each other using what I assume are your real forenames but generally you’re all sniping from behind anonymous forum usernames.

    You all talk about an informed membership able to take decisions. Why should anyone in the membership pay attention to the views of anonymous correspondents? Either tell us who you are and why we should give any weight to your views, or take these cliquey discussions offline into private meetings.

    Full disclosure
    Richard Taylor. Life member of NYMR and LNERCA. Now retired, volunteer, but not in the heritage sector. Formerly, at various times, Archivist for London Transport, Railtrack plc, the NRM and the City of York.
     
  16. MattA

    MattA Member

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    It's easy to mistake this for the infamous WSR thread at this point...
     
  17. 35B

    35B Nat Pres stalwart

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    You make a fair point, but I suggest that @Jamessquared's post #3618 captures a key dimension in this - that the arguments do keep moving. For those of us with an emotional commitment to NYMR (and despite being an ex-member, I do have one), this quality frustrates when there are genuinely interesting and challenging questions worthy of discussion. @Lineisclear deserves credit for defending his perspective to a sometimes hostile audience, and I have no doubt about his commitment to NYMR.

    Respecting your commitment, my name is Paul Davie. I am an ex-member of NYMR, work full time as a commercial manager, and also volunteer (including as a trustee) outside the heritage railway sector. I am also a lifelong railway enthusiast.
     
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  18. Lineisclear

    Lineisclear Member

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    Sensible suggestion!
    I think a lot of people on here know but personally I’ve nothing to hide……… John Bailey, Life member, former NYMR Trust Chairman, current Trustee and volunteer signalman on the NYMR and GWSR. Company Secretary of the HRA, chairman of its legal and parliamentary affairs committee. Volunteer adviser on corporate governance and structures when requested by a number of other heritage railways.
     
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  19. oldmrheath

    oldmrheath Well-Known Member

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    All the talk on here about the £49 fare suggests to me one of the problems NYMR has. For many it is simply too expensive.

    And yet there are much cheaper travel options available- Whitby Goathland return for £22 (?) isn't bad , and yet all the promotion seems to be about the all-line ticket. I can understand why the railway would want to sell as many full price tickets as possible, but many people must only see the £49 option and decide it is too much.

    Jon
     
  20. Sidmouth

    Sidmouth Resident of Nat Pres Staff Member Moderator

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    Mods hat on

    A few posts are unnecessarily personal towards contributors to the forum . you may not like the message but as we all have the same passion for our heritage movement , we can treat each other cordially and with respect

    Mods hat off
     
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