West Somerset Railway General Discussion

This feels like it's heading into exactly the same conversation we had 2000 pages ago...

 

Of course Mr H owns a bubble car and that is not exactly something for his mainline brands. What is to say it is not something similar for JJP to uses for his clients/friends.
It is after all an earlier version of a bubble car really.

 

Somerset (County) Council had pledged any future thoughts concerning sale of the route of our railway's land lease would initially be raised within the WSR Partnership Development Group (PDG), a pan-railway forum of WSR constituent groups and major stakeholders, including county and both district councils.

PDG was created in the wake of the infamous debacle 10 years ago, in an honourable attempt to bind the various disparate groups and organisations together in some coherent manner. It provided a basis to work together formally within our less than optimum structure. PDG was chaired by a rotation of WSR plc, WSRA and WSRHT directors. The group was disbanded last year by WSR plc whilst they occupied the chair. This was confirmed by the WSR plc chairman in reply to a question from myself during the Q&A session following the most recent WSR plc AGM last September.

I was the WSRA rep for PDG at the time. There had been no relevant discussion nor debate within PDG in the lead up to that summary decision.

Final PDG meeting took place on 10th November 2022. Links to minutes of every PDG minutes, except that final meeting, can be found towards the bottom of this page:
https://www.wsr.org.uk/r-links.htm

Final meeting minutes, and others from 2018 onward, are available within members' area of WSRA's website.

The first PDG meeting minutes from 30th October 2014 clearly describe John Irven's (then WSR plc chairman) reasons for setting up PDG. See opening paragraphs.

Barrie

 

Thanks Barrie I will attempt to improve my knowledge by looking at all that.

 

The existing lease between Somerset Council and WSR plc runs until 2088.

 

9466 returned to traffic in April 2016, so around two years left

 

Rail Advent have said in their latest cut and paste webpage that there'll be an update about 4936 shortly. Considering it doesn't look like anything has been done to the loco in at least 5 years, even giving it a dusting would count as progress!

 

A shame that did not apply for 5542 in years gone past

 

But then, it's not unknown for leases relating to some part of the WSR to be terminated prematurely..... :-(

 

But according to our friend in South Wales 4936 should have been in traffic about 4 years ago…

 

What you've implied there is that it is unlikely to be completed/steamed soon, whereas it says "Jonathan Jones Pratt has, however, stressed that the priority is still on returning Kinlet Hall back to service, with more updates to be released soon." Seems like positive news is on it's way.

 

Until such time as the PW is capable of taking the axle loading of a hall, there is no point in returning the loco to steam, unless another railway is interested in hiring it, because it can't run on the WSR, until the axle loadings are increased.

 

But the axle loading of a hall is less than that of 9466….

 

I don't think I've ever seen a statement from the railway itself about what the precise limits and restrictions are. There has been plenty of talk in very monolithic terms about "axle loading", "red route vs blue route" etc, without much consideration that at least in the latter case, they are somewhat meaningless terms if you don't also take into account the speed you are going. Hammer blow from 19 tons at 50mph is very different from 19 tons at 25mph (or even 15, for example) - in other words, a BR-era route restriction has limited applicability today at reduced heritage line speeds.

From casually following the work of the p/way team on social media, it seems a lot of the work this winter has focused on repairs at specific points along the line that are prone to "wet beds", i.e. locations where wet mud is pushing up through the ballast. There are some pictures on http://cgibin.wsr.org.uk/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?h=Topical+pictures&t=pics#, and there was more on Facebook with a fuller explanation. I can't really judge the efficacy of what is being done or whether it is being down at a sufficient annual rate, but my impression from a trip on the line last summer was that a lot of the p/way had weeds growing through it (see for example here on the section immediately beyond the repair: http://cgibin.wsr.org.uk/cgi-bin/snap.cgi?h=Snapshot&p=2024/01/081) which suggests to me that tackling those areas probably is a priority.

Tom

 

9466 was certainly once stated as having too high an axle loading for the WSR, and that I believe was why it ended up at the Ecclesbourne Valley. Not sure what changed all of a sudden when it was decided to terminate the EVR hire early, and move it to the WSR.

And wasn’t the axle loading given as the reason 6960 was moved to the SVR, with Bradley Manor being sent to the WSR instead?

 

All of which was in a period when the WSR reduced it's route availability because of issues with heavier locomotives. The details weren't entirely clear, but seemed to be infrastructure rather than track related, and presented as temporary rather than permanent. It's unclear whether those issues have been fixed, although the announcement of a class 50 working at the diesel gala would tend to imply that they either have been fixed, or that special restrictions can be made to work for one off workings.

Edit - musings superseded by @Pete Thornhill's post immediately below

 

I think a few people are forgetting that 4953 was initially planned to run on the WSR last year during the spring gala

 

And 80064 has just arrived which apparently is high up in the overhaul queue priority...