North Yorkshire Moors Railway General Discussion

There is a lot going on at Pickering. P/way have been renewing point timbers at the station this week.
The major job is the upgrade to the signalling system involving large amounts of new cable which all requires testing. The electrical supply back up is being changed from batteries to a generator.
All this was not helped by flooding the other week which damaged tools and equipment.

 

Thanks.

 

There are a lot of questions that spring to mind from that list - an obvious one is that a lot of the roles seem to be duplicates of one another. A seond one, is that if this is a list of managers, how many people does each actually manage? With a total payroll of around 420, on average the nswer would seem to be about 3-4 each. I'm rather surprised there isn't a designated "Lord High Manager of everything else not otherwise listed". I think one has to feel sympathy, though, for the individual among all the managers who is merely designated as "S & T Technician"! I also wonder how many of those listed are only part-time or volunteers- I can't imagine that the support care coordinator is a full time post, any more than the Community & Engagement Manager. No wonder the NYMR is now settled on a course of making enormous, and crippling, aannual losses. It is suffering from a surfeit of job titles!

 

I seem somewhat surprised that you feel a manager should always have staff working for them, (how 1950's). I had the word manager in my title for around 15 years but in that time I only had people reporting to me for about 5. I actually spent more time with (and with more staff reporting to me) when I did not have manager in the title.
It shows a level of position and responsibility in the company in my view, not necessarily that they actually manage staff.
Still as you seem to want to recreate times past at the NYMR I guess it fits with your view.

 

Not quite sure where you get the payroll of 420 from? The annual accounts give the headcount; for the most recent year (2024 accounts, i.e. for 2023) the number was 150, with the caveat that the breakdown between full time and part time is not given.

Tom

 

I think there are two questions that spring to mind.

The first is how many of those roles are paid and how many volunteer? For example, we have a "Locomotive Superintendent" (our head of department for Loco Operations) and a "Yard Foreman" (in charge of the day to day running of the loco yard) but they are both volunteer positions. They might map somewhat closely to your "MPD Team Manager" I guess. The Society has a Membership Secretary (akin to your Membership Administrator) but again, it is a volunteer post.

The other more insidious issue is to what extent you have roles that are created because you win a grant. I say insidious because it is all too easy to appoint someone to deliver a project that is funded by a grant, but then find any number of reasons why they remain essential when the grant funding dries up. In that way, head counts grow. (Not restricted to heritage railways of course; all organisations tend to find it easy to grow and hard to shrink).

Chasing grants strikes me as a bit of a double edged sword, since the grant-awarding bodies aren't giving money away for nothing. If you are a railway with an annual £50k budget deficit and you win a £50k grant to appoint an "Upland Sheep Outreach Officer", you don't become a railway that is breaking even: you are a railway that still has a £50k budget deficit but now has a nice contented sheep in the neighbouring fields. In other words, while there may be some value in winning grants, that value rarely seems to be a route to balancing the books.

Tom

 

A build on this, having been involved in grant chasing, the ability to get those grants to contribute to core costs rather than just the project was a real challenge - grant givers were generally very keen to see grants go to specific activities, and reluctant to acknowledge how much those projects relied on core costs.

 

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Clearly you are not in agreement with my view, but I'm not sure that you really understand what my view is! Ignoring your personal experience, mine has always been that the term "manager" denotes a head of a department, and that a department usually consists of more than one person; it did where I worked, back in the 1980s fo example, although they were called "groups" and had "group leaders". I don't think that's a particularly 1950s-ism, and I'm not looking for the NYMR to be an all-round recreation of the 1950s. It needs to give that impression as a facade, no more, otherwise the MPD staff would still be shaping parts for locos from a big lump of steel with hammers and cold chisels, and the office staff would be writing letters to customers on typewriters.

 

I have manager in my job title, but do not have managerial responsibilities for people. I certainly do not have responsibility for a department - though I do consider myself part of a management team within the area I work in. The term denotes status and authority, and does not define what I do.

Looking at that list, in isolation, I see "directors", "head ofs", "managers", and "team leaders", but get no sense of the actual hierarchy, and therefore no sense of the relationship between actual management and on the ground activity.

I strongly suspect from that list that there is a mixture of clear on the ground understanding of hierarchy, and lack of organisation understanding of it. That's before you get into the questions of which roles are paid, and which voluntary.

 

I have Chief in my job title. I don’t carry a bow and arrow though

 

To answer your questions as best I can, AFAIK, all the positions mentioned on that list are paid staff. I can't think of any that aren't but am open to correction on that. Probably the nearest we have to Locomotive Superintendent is the Head of Mechanical Engineering. The MPD Team manager is I/C of the shed staff and the work they undertake. Once upon a time the position of membership secretary was held by volunteers but this is now administered by paid staff. You are correct that some roles are as a result of successful grant funding. I can't tell you which ones other than the Lineside Environmental Sustainability Manager and I do think that this has been one of the more successful appointments. There has been a huge improvement in the state of the lineside in recent years with (I think) a good team of volunteers working under her management.
It may be a modern thing to give people important sounding job titles with the word 'Manager' or 'Head of' but it just gives the impression of a top heavy organisation. When I was last working, it was for a £30M business with a staff of about 400. The business was run by four full time directors, an MD, an Operations Director, a Finance Director and an Engineering Director. Below them were an Operations Manager, Accounts Manager, HR Manager, IT Manager, a Transport Manager and a H&S Manager with a Plant Manager at each of our 10 sites. I certainly didn't have a job title even though I managed all but the smallest projects and provided technical support for all the plants which were countrywide.

 

I would expect people with a job title 'Manager' to do just that but it needn't involve managing people. In another life I was managing and responsible for £1M+ projects but I didn't have any staff working for me, only contractors. There are many jobs that are one-man-bands but require them to do a lot of managing with responsibility for significant expenditure.

 

Sorry, I had a dodgy keyboard (just replaced in the last few minute!) - the number should have been 120, not 420!

 

I agree with all of this, but I still don't think that calling everyone a manager really reflects their jobs and status. If there is a manager's meeting, do they all get invited? If they do, then by John Bailey's rules, that's far too many for a sensible orderly meeting! If they don't, then the ones that don't should be distiguished by a different title - "project leaders" perhaps?

 

Really all that matters is that the organisation gets value for money from its staff and the management has accurately projected the cashflow impact of each role.

 

The organisation that I worked for for most of my career had what I characterised as Chiefs, Big Chiefs and Heap Big Chiefs, but hardly any Indians. (All terms that are out of favour nowadays of course.)

 

I'd qualify that by modifying the final sentence: most grants are intend to not be there to help with core costs, although it seems as though that is exactly what the NYMR's SMT want! Having written quite a few successful grant applications for the LNERCA, their lack of appreciation of this point is not lost on me! I think it is worth pointing out that most of the successful large grant applications by the NYMR seem to have been largely written by volunteers, so perhaps the point has eluded the SMT? To my mind it is a glaring hole in their strategy for increasing the level of grant income (together with the fact that we seem to be moving into a world where belt strings at grant-awarding bodies due to a shortage of funds, meaning that grants are going to get thinner on the ground, and smaller) seems to be increasingly risky. I'd rather they focused on getting the business into a fundamentally healthier shape and saw grants as a potential bonus.

 

Isn’t the thesis of the board and SMT that it isn’t possible to get the business into a healthier state through trading as a heritage railway?

 

It appears to be. The problem is that they then appear to be relying on community and environmental grants that are not necessarily either (a) available or (b) appropriate.

 

I see that the NYMR has a PW Team leader but where are the PW Supervisor and PW Manager?