Five volunteers SUSPENDED from NYMR

[russ p]

6 minutes ago, Boris said:

I wouldn't be surprised at all, they were within 9 feet of the surface under the running line at one point at the north end of the station

 

I knew they were shallow but didn't realise that shallow 

[papagolfjuliet]

49 minutes ago, Boris said:

 

 

The whole ticket thing has been bouncing around for ages, the prebooking thing was massively unpopular and most of the booking clerks walked out because of customer abuse.  It was replaced with the same scheme but slightly different, I mean the logic is guaranteed weather proof income, but it absolutely screws people who for example want a single to walk back.

 

One of my favourite things to do if I had a couple of hours to kill used to be to buy a Grosmont-Goathland single and then walk back along the 1836 route with a pint at the Birch Hall midway. Can't do that now. Nobody can.

 

Not that I would give the NYMR a penny piece now anyway.

[papagolfjuliet]

12 minutes ago, russ p said:

 

I knew they were shallow but didn't realise that shallow 

 

That 'adit' you can see in the bank of the Murk Esk under the old school isn't an adit. It's one end of a horizontal drift.

Edited March 14 by papagolfjuliet

[fulton]

16 minutes ago, papagolfjuliet said:

 (just as they don't mention the network of Napoleonic and WW2 tunnels which undermine most of the Medway Towns,

Interested where this has come from, yes some are known or rumored, living there and working on construction projects there for thirty years never encounted any tunnels, sink holes not uncommon around the Frindsbury Hill area.

[Boris]

5 minutes ago, papagolfjuliet said:

 

That 'adit' you can see in the bank of the Murk Esk under the old school isn't an adit. It's one end of a horizontal drift.

There are 5 or 6 within 100 yards of that on in that bank alone, plus some on the other side.

[Legend]

1 hour ago, Steamport Southport said:

 

Correct. £13.50 return is cheap as chips even for a short journey.

 

Have those complaining about prices been on a real train recently? Maybe worth trying to buy a ticket for the same distance on a train that isn't part of a local network in a major city (subsidised by the taxpayer) and seeing how much it costs.

 

It's something like £20 for me just to go to Manchester without any steam trains in sight and the chances of getting a seat or access to a toilet is virtually nil. That's if the train even turns up.

 

 

Jason

Glasgow Central- Bishopton  about 14.5 miles £4.70 return 

[papagolfjuliet]

Just now, fulton said:

Interested where this has come from, yes some are known or rumored, living there and working on construction projects there for thirty years never encounted any tunnels, sink holes not uncommon around the Frindsbury Hill area.

 

One runs parallel to Rochester Avenue just below the surface linking an underground barracks on Delce Road (now a garage) and Fort Clarence, and another links the garage to Fort Pitt. There are tunnel entrances behind the billboards at the bottom of Chatham Hill leading goodness knows where. A large area of the cliff on the Rochester bank of the Medway inland of the bridges was hollowed out during WW2 to create an underground Short Sunderland factory - basically everything under St. Margaret's Street. And so on.

[papagolfjuliet]

Incidentally I know about the Rochester Avenue one because I nearly fell into it when replacing some decking! It is barely a foot below the surface right behind the back doors of the houses.

[fulton]

3 minutes ago, papagolfjuliet said:

 

One runs parallel to Rochester Avenue just below the surface linking an underground barracks on Delce Road (now a garage) and Fort Clarence, and another links the garage to Fort Pitt. There are tunnel entrances behind the billboards at the bottom of Chatham Hill leading goodness knows where. A large area of the cliff on the Rochester bank of the Medway inland of the bridges was hollowed out during WW2 to create an underground Short Sunderland factory - basically everything under St. Margaret's Street. And so on.

Thank you, my Dad worked at Shorts and related sheltering in the underground bit during an air raid.

[russ p]

9 minutes ago, Boris said:

There are 5 or 6 within 100 yards of that on in that bank alone, plus some on the other side.

 

Can you get in any of them or are they too high up on cliff side

[Boris]

1 minute ago, russ p said:

 

Can you get in any of them or are they too high up on cliff side

You can get into 2 that I know of but they involve wading through the river and there is one that can be accessed just off the ford with a small ladder.

 

The easier ones to access are between Grosmont and Sleights

 

[russ p]

1 minute ago, Boris said:

You can get into 2 that I know of but they involve wading through the river and there is one that can be accessed just off the ford with a small ladder.

 

The easier ones to access are between Grosmont and Sleights

 

 

Surprised nothing on YouTube about them, mind there are ironstone mines they don't tell you the location but they look more modern than the eskdale mines 

[john new]

44 minutes ago, Boris said:

I wouldn't be surprised at all, they were within 9 feet of the surface under the running line at one point at the north end of the station

I can’t recall which book, or booklet, it is in but I have in one of them a copy of the mining map showing the gallery layout for the level mined under the station. Over it is the overlay of the surface level station. Best guess as to which source is one of the small A5 booklets on the Cleveland mines. 

[Steamport Southport]

26 minutes ago, Legend said:

Glasgow Central- Bishopton  about 14.5 miles £4.70 return 

 

Subsidised by the taxpayer as are all of Scotland's railways as part of Devolution. Same applies to TFW.

 

It's a bit like all those £2 bus fares they are banging on about whilst putting the other fares up to pay for them as well as getting money from the taxpayer. All a con.

 

 

Jason

 

[pete_mcfarlane]

1 hour ago, Boris said:

Your can't just blame John Bailey for all this, Andrew Scott carries just as much, if not more blame.  Bearing in mind that not that long ago an interesting amount of money was devoted to a series of ideas that included redoubling Goathland to Levisham, which whilst would have been amazing to a handful of enthusiasts but of dubious advantage to the core business..

Would that give them extra capacity to run more trains and provide more seats? Every time I've been on it recently the trains were full to bursting, so adding more capacity would help. 

[papagolfjuliet]

5 minutes ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

Would that give them extra capacity to run more trains and provide more seats? Every time I've been on it recently the trains were full to bursting, so adding more capacity would help. 

 

Not really, or nothing that a passing loop wouldn't cure. The big capacity problem is on the Levisham - Pickering stretch (singled during WW1) which could theoretically be ameliorated by having one train leave Pickering just after another arrives, but that in turn would necessitate an extra carriage set and also create the problem of people turning straight round without any secondary spend on the station or in the town. Doubling the whole lot between Goathland and Levisham would entail moving Newtondale Halt, redoubling a lot of bridges which have been singled since preservation, realigning the track in places where curves have been eased meaning that you'd be back to a curvature so tight in  that during BR days the stretch was subject to a 35mph speed restriction and which would not be kind to LNER pacifics or 9Fs, losing the up loop at Goathland, and losing the sections of trackbed currently used by firefighting vehicles.

 

And apparently it to took quite a lot of money for Mr Scott et al to find that out for themselves.

[adb968008]

For free here

 

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6pk843p49yo#

[adb968008]

1 hour ago, Legend said:

Glasgow Central- Bishopton  about 14.5 miles £4.70 return 

taxpayers are adding around £2.39 to that fare.

Average revenue on the Inverclyde line is around £257 against a per train cost of £496 to operate each journey.. thats excluding track maintenance.

 

Without taxpayer support only Glasgow to Edinburgh would exist, and thats only because the volumes of passengers allow the per mile fare cost to be lower than other regions.. rather than as elsewhere raising the price to subsidise other routes.

 

Many Preserved railways are financially more sound than Scotrail

Edited March 14 by adb968008

[john new]

54 minutes ago, papagolfjuliet said:

 

Not really, or nothing that a passing loop wouldn't cure. The big capacity problem is on the Levisham - Pickering stretch (singled during WW1) which could theoretically be ameliorated by having one train leave Pickering just after another arrives, but that in turn would necessitate an extra carriage set and also create the problem of people turning straight round without any secondary spend on the station or in the town. Doubling the whole lot between Goathland and Levisham would entail moving Newtondale Halt, redoubling a lot of bridges which have been singled since preservation, realigning the track in places where curves have been eased meaning that you'd be back to a curvature so tight in  that during BR days the stretch was subject to a 35mph speed restriction and which would not be kind to LNER pacifics or 9Fs, losing the up loop at Goathland, and losing the sections of trackbed currently used by firefighting vehicles.

 

And apparently it to took quite a lot of money for Mr Scott et al to find that out for themselves.

When I was an active volunteer a few decades back Newtondale loop was on the cards and, at the time, the partial remains of the former signal box were still extant. It was subsequently demolished.

[009 micro modeller]

3 hours ago, Steamport Southport said:

Have those complaining about prices been on a real train recently? Maybe worth trying to buy a ticket for the same distance on a train that isn't part of a local network in a major city (subsidised by the taxpayer) and seeing how much it costs.

That was one of my first thoughts - OK so maybe the ‘price per mile’ is sometimes slightly less on National Rail, but that’s not really the point. If you visit a heritage railway you’re also paying for the experience, it’s a discretionary spend, and part of me thinks that it probably should cost a bit more to visit a heritage railway than to have basic access to public transport (as National Rail is). On the other hand, I see how it could seem a bit much if you aren’t able to make a repeat visit, and I do also think there’s a bit of an issue with using up capacity on people on repeat visits riding for free when it could be sold to new visitors.

 

Although again, perhaps the underlying idea is basically to encourage local people to engage with heritage via the NYMR and its annual tickets, and to effectively subsidise their repeat visit travel from the fares paid by tourists who can more easily afford to pay that much for a one-off visit. Though while I understand (and to a large extent agree with) the principle of widening access and encouraging local visitors in that kind of way I’m not sure this is necessarily the best way to implement it.

 

3 hours ago, papagolfjuliet said:

As to the rebranding, I am referring to the new look Moors Line

Have they done any wider rebranding as an organisation or just for that? It would seem odd to do one without the other.

 

3 hours ago, Boris said:

The whole ticket thing has been bouncing around for ages, the prebooking thing was massively unpopular and most of the booking clerks walked out because of customer abuse. 

Did they attempt to make it prebooked only, or just recommend that people prebook? I don’t think the latter would be unreasonable if they think the capacity will sell out and advise pre-booking to guarantee a ticket. However, it sounds like it’s veering a bit too much towards the Snowdon Mountain Railway model of only coming back on the same train you went up on (which to be fair to Snowdon is more understandable on their line, even if it’s not ideal for some passengers).

 

On a different note, another variation that I’ve just thought of on my post above (about how/if museums with train rides charge for them) is the NRM, where they’re still paid for even though the museum itself is free to enter.

[papagolfjuliet]

1 hour ago, john new said:

When I was an active volunteer a few decades back Newtondale loop was on the cards and, at the time, the partial remains of the former signal box were still extant. It was subsequently demolished.

 

Newtondale Box was demolished, or rather dismantled as I think I'm right in saying that the bricks etc were saved and the base was stabilised (it's still there), in the late 90s when Roger Heath was Chairman.

[009 micro modeller]

2 hours ago, papagolfjuliet said:

which could theoretically be ameliorated by having one train leave Pickering just after another arrives, but that in turn would necessitate an extra carriage set and also create the problem of people turning straight round without any secondary spend on the station or in the town.

Could you avoid that issue by literally having it leave immediately after the other train arrives, so that it’s not possible to change from one train to the other?

 

2 hours ago, pete_mcfarlane said:

Would that give them extra capacity to run more trains and provide more seats? Every time I've been on it recently the trains were full to bursting, so adding more capacity would help. 

Doesn’t that also reinforce the argument that the annual tickets as described earlier are a slightly odd way to do the ticketing?

 

To clarify my earlier points, I don’t actually have a particularly big problem with the annual tickets from the point of view of a potential passenger (with the caveat that it seems to give less value for money if you are unable to make repeat visits - but if you live locally or regularly visit the area, and can get to the NYMR often, it seems like a good deal). From the railway’s point of view they’re basically an extension of the day rover hop-on hop-off tickets that other heritage lines use, only valid for a year rather than a day. But I think these kind of rover tickets tend to work best on lines where the available capacity that can reasonably be provided substantially exceeds the expected number of passengers, and where the train service from any given station is fairly frequent. Given the length and complexity of the NYMR and how full the trains can be I’m not sure either of those currently apply in this case, and if I was them I’d want to be making the best use of the capacity, which probably wouldn’t be using it at no extra cost for people who’ve already ridden. I note that the booking system still requires you to choose an outbound train and to book a time for repeat visits but I don’t quite understand how that helps.

 

Crich as mentioned above is an interesting counter-example - the operational trams are probably the main, but not the only, reason to visit for most people, but you ride up and down on them on a fairly short line with a frequent service, within the museum site, rather than on a very long, relatively infrequently served line to another attraction, as is more often the case with a typical heritage railway.

[jjb1970]

The more I read this thread the more I worry about the Tank Museum. 

[Cwmtwrch]

1 hour ago, 009 micro modeller said:

I don’t actually have a particularly big problem with the annual tickets from the point of view of a potential passenger (with the caveat that it seems to give less value for money if you are unable to make repeat visits - but if you live locally or regularly visit the area, and can get to the NYMR often, it seems like a good deal)

I live in the westcountry, so it seems quite extortionate to me, since I would be very unlikely to be back for several years, if at all, given my age. I would have thought that most locals would soon lose interest in regular trips on any steam railway unless they happen to be enthusiasts, who are steadily dying off and largely not being replaced by younger people.

[Blandford1969]

59 minutes ago, jjb1970 said:

The more I read this thread the more I worry about the Tank Museum. 

It's had quite a few bosses in recent years including a former SVR General Manager - saying more would be an ecumenical matter