Swanage Railway General Discussion

I don't think the catering situation is that black and white as "must be lucrative".

An oft unappreciated issue is how do you scale your (fixed) catering outlet. Make it big enough to cater for a substantial proportion of 200+ people getting off a train and that is a lot of footprint, which has a high capital cost; you also need a lot of staff to service that many people quickly. (On the assumption that if you make them wait in a town centre location like Swanage, most will choose to just leave and go into town unless you can be quick on service - you get one shot at it before they walk away when they see the queue.). But if you make the facility small, it sets a limit on how many people you can serve, so automatically your turnover (and therefore potential profit) is reduced. However great the margin, there's not much bottom line injection of cash if you only serve 10 people a cup of coffee and a sandwich on each arrival.

There's also the capital investment: a kitchen doesn't come cheap, even before you staff it.

It comes back to the space problem - where do you propose to site a catering facility? Being a complete blue skys heretic - at Swanage, given a clean sheet of paper, the best location might be the Goods Shed. It's quite large, it would be quite a quirky venue (so generate word of mouth etc); access could be arranged such that it was accessible from the town even when the station wasn't open (evenings etc - maybe with a non railway clientele). But (I believe) it is where carriage restoration happens, so you'd first need to find a different location for that - and then fund the capital investment.

Most railways are short of space, but it seems particularly acute at Swanage. It would be interesting to know if there was any kind of spatial strategy - i.e. working out how you squeeze the proverbial quart (passenger facilities, catering, shop, rolling stock storage and maintenance, p/w facility, offices etc) into a pint pot. I think if you could massively recapitalise the railway, you'd want to break out beyond Norden and concentrate all engineering and storage beyond there, so that the serving heritage buildings could then have passenger-facing roles (including museum, catering etc; or their historic roles such as booking office / waiting room). But it is hard to see how it would happen in a cash-constrained situation.

Tom

 

At one time (2016?) one of the then COM members was working on just such a plan: an over arching master plan and then individual station plans. In 2019 a separate plan was drawn up to give Swanage new toilet facilities (including an accessible toilet) and crucially access to the space on the opposite side of the booking hall to the ticket counters (ie the side where the former Hants and Dorset ticket office was). This space could have been used as a small cafe or a waiting room with small refreshment counter or for the shop and then repurpose the current shop space. Sadly the plan was not enacted as the then COM and Board were not minded to adopt it for reasons which arent clear.

The issues you outline re the size of the catering facility and its impact on revenue is exactly the problem which beset the Birds Nest Buffet carriage.

 

The problem is that Swanage already has several places close by to eat, so hardly a captive market, so any plan has to be carefully worked out, First priority has to be to ensure the railway can still trade into 2024, hopefully the polor express will contribute much needed funds , but, how to ensure survival prehaps winter warmers, in January if the line can operate, with soup and a roll, to entice some trade at a time when there won't be much else, something like just a Sunday service, and if it does well extend it into February, open corfe, especially if the station has a nice warm open fire and somewhere you can get a hot drink and cake etc,

 

A weekend only service in January was tried a few years back with IIRC low fares but it didnt attract sufficient patronage and so the exercise wasnt repeated. Another factor in being able to operate such services was that PWay normally use the post Christmas period for works which require the closure of sections of the line.

 

That all depends on what metric you use to judge sufficient patronage. While Winter DMU services have generally had a below average take-up, the last time a Winter weekend service was run with steam average passenger numbers were significantly over 200 per day, comfortably covering the direct operating costs plus making a contribution to the fixed costs that would be incurred whether a train was run or not.

What needs to be remembered, in my opinion, is that one of the effects of cutting operating days is that you need to generate a greater contribution on each of those days towards those fixed costs. While there is clearly a balance in ensuring these costs aren't artificially raised by the number of operating days and therefore needing more staff (for example), the answer isn't always cutting days and having to 'sweat' the remainder more.

 

Absolutely. My view has always been that while keeping a beady eye on costs is essential, in a business such as a railway in which the fixed costs are high, you can't cut your way to profitability. You just end up spreading similar costs over a decreasing number of passengers.

Tom

 

As you have no idea of the contract, with respect, could you keep your thoughts to yourself.
People will start doing simple maths like £54 a seat, 12 million seats equals very rich railway.
Why are they putting out an appeal?
PE is keeping the wolf from the door.

 

Don't know where you came up with the 12 million seats from! 12,000 perhaps? Whatever the number is, I agree with you - The SR is probably getting the fare and is probably giving a discount to the PE promotors, so if that are lucky they might be getting £20/seat, but against that they are hopefully just providing the trains and not having to splash out on presents etc. Fingers crossed for them that all the seats are sold.

 

To be honest I think that's a bit tough. There has been endless speculation on here about the costs of various things... And all @Alan Kebby said was that the SR must be getting a "decent cut", which is pretty obvious really. And heaven knows where you plucked 12 million from.....

 

Last week I worked the available seat number out to be 41360 across 110 trains. I would be surprised if they all sold out, and I do not know why the after dark ones seem more popular, but then I am not familiar with what P.E. is all about.

 

I agree with the views expressed by @Rumpole and @Jamessquared posted above. However the size of the "financial blackhole" is such that something has to be done with the core railway operation to bring it back to breakeven.

That is just under 4 X the capacity of the original Swanage Railway Santa Special. 224 seats per departure X 4 departures per day X 12 / 13 days of operation (it varied from year to year and depended upon what day of the week Christmas Day fell)

The events portrayed in Polar Express film, on which the experience is based, take place overnight on Christmas Eve with the young boy (one of the central characters) returning home on Christmas morning.

 

Thanks I guess that is why the after dark ones are more popular.

 

Interesting letter in Steam Railway from a holiday maker at Dorchester (albeit a railway enthusiast) about a trip from Dorchester to Swanage via Wareham. Comments included lack of promotion to non railway enthusiasts, Dorchester seemed to know what to do, at Wareham lack of visibility or promotion of the service, nothing on station boards, no indication of where it was leaving from, staff explaining the extra cost vs bus ! No Swange railway people until DMU turned up etc. In fact his observation was that the majority of passengers on DMU were enthusiasts who knew about it fron other sources.

 

(1) the space for the ticket caravan (2017) has been used for cycle racking and realistically no suitable alternative exists - it would have required permission from SWR. (2) SWR have had some staffing challenges at Wareham with new / relief staff being used (3) Signage /. promotional material displays at Wareham requires SWR approval and possibly purchase of space from J C Decaux (4) Golden rule of marketing - never rely on third parties to promote your product. (5) not sure that SR staff had permission to carry out any activities at Wareham other than dispatch.

I did ask SR about why the digital train displays at Wareham showed "Charter" and not "Swanage". The response received was that it was because the train was operating as a charter and not a scheduled service it had to show charter!

There was a statement that through tickets would be available on the SWR website / booking engine but I dont think this ever materialised

As regards marketing a number of other forum posters have commented on the lack of print media and print marketing for SR in 2023.

However you do have to wonder why most of these issues occurred on the Wareham service given the existence and raison detre of PCRP.

 

I used 12 million to highlight how the keyboard warriors view things, I could have put 120

Steve

 

I have no idea when he travelled but I photographed a few railtours and the nuclear waste trains at Wareham, risked travelling on SWR a couple of times and spent a day on the DMU passenger counting during the period it ran.
Every time I was there the train was shown on the departure board on the platform. I even had to wait one day whilst someone did a long transaction & then the booking office staff had to explain to a family it would be cheaper to buy on the train as the kids for a £1 could not be sold by them in the ticket office.
What was he comment about the extra cost compared to the bus, that the railway should be pointing this out, or SWR staff were telling people to take the bus?
Also say if you travel from Bournemouth on XC there are only SWR staff, why should two companies staff, the same station even if SWR allowed it to happen.
There were leaflets in the booking hall at one stage, and whilst the T.O.should be open all afternoon I have been there a few times when it closed at 14:00.
Turning it on its head what do the same people expect to happen when Wareham is unmanned, as it is a lot of the time and they want to say travel to Woking or Upwey?

 

I'm not party to the contract for the Polar Express but the vibes I get from elsewhere are that the income the railways get is a quite small percentage of the ticket price. It is the high gross income that makes the railway's return acceptable.

 

Maybe to out the Swanage appeal in perspective in the latest Bluebell Times the Bluebell chairman quotes overhead costs nearly £280k per month. I assume Swanages are significantly less based on staff employed and less facilities but it is not cheap these days to run a railway.

 

In the financial year ending 31/1/2023 SRC's turnover was £2.98M and made a loss £394K (before taxation).
The problem is in how items are defined and in some cases how locomotive "hire" cost agreements are structured e.g. by year, by steaming day.
One gets the impression that on Swanage Railway there are very few variable costs (coal, water and lubricants) and that virtually everything else is fixed whether SRC operates on one day only and carries 1 passenger OR operates 200 days a year and carries 200,000 passengers. Obviously it is not as simple as that but nevertheless the business has high fixed costs which have to paid month in month out.