Swanage Railway General Discussion

A bank in Swanage? Only a branch of Nationwide and the Post Office.

I think there are many factors in SRs decision but the time and costs of banking cash (collected by G4S or someone similar), the costs of obtaining change and the time involved making up floats and cashing up at the end of the day must be significant.

 

If you are dealing with cash exclusively on a day to day basis fine.

The problem is keeping an adequate stock for change particularly when you are only a part time organisation relying on volunteers. I know of cricket and bowls clubs locally that have gone solely onto card and one of the main reasons is it easier for members who have to deal with the money not to handle cash. Try dealing with a run of £20 notes with only a small float.

 

Many thanks for that.

Re sounding good up Tenterden Bank; do you have the dates for when 31806 is due to be at the K&ESR please?

 

1st and 2nd June as part of their 50th Anniversary Gala

 

Yes indeed. I wonder if volunteers prefer not to having to handle cash given the possibility of making a mistake with the change.

Whatever the pros and cons of this decision, hopefully it is a further step towards putting SRC on a sustainable footing.

 

My local chippy is the same as I believe is @Spamcan81

 

Last time I was at Swanage (for the event in early January) I saw a couple of books in the (unmanned) book stall at Norden, and only had a £20 - fortunately the booking clerk could break it for me so I had the right money, but you could see it being a problem as fewer people pay with cash. I could see in that situation that the vast majority of his regular ticket sales were probably card, so you could then end up awkwardly if too many people did as I did.

I read the announcement as the main SR will stop taking cash, not small collecting boxes - but it is bound to have an impact. Had I not been able to break that £20 note, the choice would have been buy a £5 book for £20 and write it off as a donation (feasible, but not one I think many would pursue); find three other books I didn’t especially want; or not buy it at all. I guess the SR have got a picture of how cash collecting boxes are doing before making their decision, but I’m sure there will be an impact in the short term.

Tom

 

Swanage Railway Trust and Swanage Railway Company are (subject to member and regulatory approval) to be merged into one charitable entity so that "Swanage Railway" can take full advantage of gift aid and reliefs available to charities. AIUI there will be a separate company for retail and catering as required by the rules which govern trading by charities. There may have to be a residual "Trust" to allow for legacies which have been left to the original Swanage Railway Trust. AIUI it will be SRC that becomes the main charitable body because of the original Light Railway Order (or whatever its precise name is) and various lease agreements which are all in the name of SRC and would be too costly, time consuming and possibly require the other parties consent to be put into the name of a new charity.

 

The interesting question, which I'm sure is bothering many, will be how the trade-off between means of donation work. Electronic donations are more expensive to take - equipment plus transaction fees - but can also increase individual donations. On the other hand, I know that I've been in similar positions and not donated.

 

That may all be true - but I was making a rather more prosaic point about the impact that an increasingly cashless society (and railway in particular) will have on the receipts of donation boxes hung on station walls and honesty boxes by unmanned book stalls - such as that at Norden.

Tom

 

I have read somewhere (not sure where) that cash usage is increasing but not sure by how much. Having said that, it's fairly easy to hav a sign with a QR code to enable you to donate if you so wish. The down side of not having a collecting box is that it is often loose change that gets put in them and having to make a conscious effort to raid your bank account using the QR code is less tempting than throwing a few coins in the box.

 

Yes I fully appreciate that - I was explaining that the relationship between what was SRT and SRC was changing and it may be that it influences decisions about the mechanism of the taking of donations going forward.

Every £1 donated can be found a good use and it would be sad not to receive those donations but I wonder at what point they will cease to be collected because of the work and costs involved.

I was concerned a few years ago when the SRT annual draw was abandoned because it was adjudged to be too resource consuming to be worthwhile.

Looking around the collecting of small amounts of cash by charities seems to have all but disappeared. Certainly there are much fewer tin and bucket rattlers of years gone by.

The reality is that many of the "big" charities want you to sign up to standing orders thus guaranteeing them an income flow which in fairness one can understand given the extent of the works some charities now carry out.

 

I think this is being driven by some deciding that they can better manage their finances by having only £xx in cash in their purse / wallet to spend rather than just swiping the card and at the end of the month being horrified by the amounts. Paying with cash only certainly enforces spending discipline.

 

The IOWSR have a donation point in the carriage workshop, where it encourages you to swipe your contactless card to make a donation of a certain amount. Perhaps that is the way forward.

Google ‘contactless charity collection terminals’, and you’ll find numerous suppliers of this kind of technology.

 

And they work well - churches use them a lot. But my experience is that they work alongside traditional cash donations.

None of which deals with the wider issue of honesty box sales stands

 

I expect most journeys are now booked online rather than the ticket office.
The MHR gives a discount on advance online booking compared to paying on the day, if you are a member you will also get a further 50% off promoting membership, but the SR online booking so far does seem to allow this?

 

There isn’t a roster on the website. If you’re able to, drop the Facebook or Instagram pages a message before your visit and they try their best to get you an answer as soon as possible.

 

Swanage Railway has (had) at least two of those. One was at the Swanage booking office on the platform where the coin donation chute used to be, the second was portable and went to various events including The Great Dorset Steam Fair. I think that when it was not out and about it was at Corfe Castle Station museum.

 

Yes the IOWSR one is alongside a cash collection box, so people have a choice about which way to donate. Seems to work well.

Surely honesty box sales would work in exactly the same way? Have a donation terminal set up, which takes say £1 each time you tap your card. Tap however many times you need to for the number of items you have taken. Or allow the user to enter the amount they need to pay before tapping the card.

 

They need setting up. Repeated taps could be problematic for the cardholder as it might trigger automated fraud alerts.