ELSECAR HERITAGE RAILWAY
OLIVER EDWARDS, manager of the Elsecar Heritage Railway’s ‘Home From The Front’ project, explains how mutually beneficial tie-ups can open up opportunities for railways of all sizes.
Why partnerships are the way forward
Chances are you’ve heard little of the Elsecar Heritage Railway before this article, but we’re rapidly becoming stiff competition in certain markets where there is increasing demand for steam nostalgia.
Elsecar is a heritage line, established for just over 20 years, and which, in the last five years, has pushed on to become one of the UK’s biggest providers of footplate experience courses. Last year we sold over 575 courses to customers from as far afield as Devon, Scotland and Australia. In infrastructure terms, Elsecar is pushing ahead with an extension to a popular retail park at Cortonwood, thus making the line over two miles long. Meanwhile, the commercial team is testing the market with new special events. The line is home to six ex-industrial locomotives, of which Peckett 0-6-0ST ‘Mardy Monster’ is a rightful flagship.
The railway is still grappling with the growing pains shared by many preserved railways which have ambitions to expand. For us, this includes a shortage of skilled volunteers with expert knowledge, and regulatory barriers to opening an extension, which forms a part of Barnsley’s Visitor Economy Strategy until 2020.
POWER OF TWO
So what is the key to overcoming these difficulties and keeping volunteers motivated to meet future challenges? Well, we see partnerships as a real, lasting way of unlocking great rewards.
For so long, the preserved railway industry has seen partnerships merely as a way of raising funds for projects which primarily excite the railway enthusiast, such as the restoration of a locomotive without economical or historical reasoning, or as a wasted pursuit of larger organisations that simply “couldn’t deliver for us”. But a healthy partnership is neither of these things. Firstly, as organisations such as the National Lottery see their funds increasingly restricted and focused on other areas, funding locomotive overhauls or other revenue costs for commercially run steam railways are no longer high in the list of priorities. To access funding, organisations must think outside the station, so to speak.
This is where Elsecar has enjoyed significant success in recent months. Partnered with a local university centre, and with local authorities through the Heritage Lottery’s ‘Great Place Scheme’, the EHR aims to bring to life a fascinating piece of forgotten railway history in October and November 2018.
Thanks to Stephen Middleton and the Severn Valley – a railway 20 times our size – Elsecar will commemorate the demobilisation after the First World War, namely the process of bringing back men and women, between 1918 and 1920, who served on the front lines of France, Belgium and beyond. Port Talbot No. 813 and coaches of the Stately Trains collection will spend two weeks at Elsecar to help educate over 2,000 people about this aspect of history at ‘Home From The Front’, while simultaneously forming the largest event Elsecar has ever run. Now, what if I told you that this partnership had generated over £16,000 of funding for this project in just four months, between December 2017 and March 2018? Remember your history, trawl the books a little and every preserved railway has important stories of social change to tell.
For those who think that partnerships are little more than
FOR THOSE WHO THINK THAT PARTNERSHIPS ARE LITTLE MORE THAN A MANAGEMENT JUNKET, NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH
a management junket, nothing could be further from the truth. When Elsecar realised it couldn’t maintain a core steam fleet, which operates three days a week in peak season, and diesels that run just as regularly, it became clear that forming a partnership was our only option.
RAISING STANDARDS
Thus, Advanced Engineering Services became our engineering partner and infrastructure standards are now rising considerably. They have the capacity to carry out work, such as the rebuilding of ‘Mardy Monster’, in a third of the time that it would otherwise take. Without partnerships, our ‘Coalfield Line’ would likely have been without its NCB star for much longer. Consider the substantial level of rail renewal, lineside maintenance and running repairs, and we now have a volunteer team much relieved by this partnership. Partnerships often have a commercial impact, even if we don’t realise it. Third party suppliers like BuyaGift help us fill our footplate experiences, and such tie-ups make great business sense for us both. Stories in the press generate a real motivational buzz for volunteers, and coverage of Elsecar’s progress in the specialist press is as good as it’s ever been. And imagine how much faith we instil in our audiences by keeping them in the loop.
The partners most frequently dismissed are those in the arts, heritage or museums sectors. In many ways, preserved railways are an art form, a stage with props such as steam locomotives, nice stations and dirty workshops that portray our heritage to the public through the medium of living museums. Arts organisations have ready access to funding, and they can offer innovative ways of capturing the public’s attention, such as The Railway Children productions, which engage people who otherwise wouldn’t dream of spending time at a steam railway. Not only are they a way of connecting thousands, as Thomas the Tank Engine has been for many years, they can also be great commercial ventures.
And partnerships can help keep that stage changing. When Elsecar ran short of steam in May, one of my biggest arguments for a visiting locomotive was that we could bring a great piece of Yorkshire heritage to a new audience; remember, we are an educational charity. A partnership-style approach led to help from the Middleton Railway, in Leeds, which sent Manning Wardle 0-6-0ST Works No. 1601 Matthew Murray, and furthered its goal of teaching the public about Leeds-built steam locomotives.
PUSH THE ENVELOPE
Where next for all these partnerships? It’s important to build momentum and, with this in mind, we must keep the ideas coming. We find our partnerships need leaders and contributors. We contribute when others lead, such as the Heritage Action Zone, established by English Heritage to preserve our local history. We’re currently very focused on organising ‘Home From The Front’, and that will push us to our operational limits, but by December 2018 the experience will have extended our thinking and opened our minds to running more events of a similar nature. Personally, for our next project, I’d like us to focus on the 225th anniversary (2020) of the historic Newcomen Beam Engine, and create a lasting reminder of the industrial revolution in coal mining villages like Elsecar. Imagine a week of early Victorian train rides, plays, firework displays and driving experiences. It’s more of a possibility than you might think…