LOTTERY BOOSTS GWILI’S VINTAGE TRAIN E TRAIN
Beamish is another beneficiary of grant aid with £425,000 from Arts Council England.
THEY MAY BE NEEDED AS SOCIALLY DISTANCED STOCK FOR NEXT YEAR
DEWI JONES
Two vintage four-wheeled carriages at the Gwili Railway will be overhauled as ‘socially distanced stock’, thanks to lottery funding.
The West Wales line is the latest steam railway to benefit from the National Lottery Heritage Fund’s £50 million Heritage Emergency Fund, designed to help preservation bodies through the Covid-19 crisis (see SR505 and SR508).
The Gwili has received £22,000, of which £8,000 will help to cover the company’s running costs, while £14,000 is to complete the overhauls of Taff Vale Railway Brake Third No. 220 and GWR five-compartment Third No. 216, both part of the line’s ‘Welsh Train Project’ (SR503).
Dewi Jones, head of the railway’s Carriage & Wagon department, explained: “As they are noncorridor, it’s felt that they may be needed as socially distanced stock for next year – so the C&W works schedule has been changed a bit.
“The estimated repairs were going to take two years, but the money now available will allow us to maybe pay someone to make parts, or we can buy bits to allow us to speed up the repair. Also, we’ve picked up two tradesmen as volunteers, so hopefully their assistance will see progress speed up.
“We’re planning to extend our workshop by 50ft to allow more than one vehicle to be worked on at a time, so that probably would mean that one vintage carriage at least will be worked on continuously.
“The possibility of these two vintage carriages returning to traffic in 2021 has refocused the railway’s sights on the ‘Dan Do’ carriage shed. We don’t want to spend this time repairing them just to park them back out in the West Wales weather!”
The Middleton Railway is another beneficiary of the NLHF grants, receiving £39,500; along with the North Norfolk Railway, which received £46,500 to assist it through to its resumption of services on July 8; while in addition to its £29,800 grant, the Colne Valley Railway received a further £4,400 towards the costs of its reopening on July 26. Also receiving top-ups to previous grants were Bressingham (£8,300) and the Nene Valley Railway (£9,500).
The closing date for applications to the emergency fund was July 31, but the NLHF also launched a new £92m ‘Culture Recovery Fund for Heritage’, in partnership with Historic England and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. Applications closed on August 17 for these grants of between £10,000 and £3m.
In addition to its £115,500 NLHF grant (SR508), the
Caledonian Railway at Brechin received £96,000 from the Third Sector Resilience Fund (provided by the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations) and £10,000 from Angus Council as part of Government support grants.
Beamish has received a grant of £425,000 from Arts Council England, which Paul Jarman, Assistant Director (Design, Transport & Industry) explained, is
“to enable us to sustain ourselves to the end of September”.
With over 430 of the museum’s 450-plus staff furloughed, he said: “Obviously we’ve drawn heavily on our reserves and are now operating at minimal levels to reduce the cost base as much as possible. This means no transport operations at present, and with a ‘third’ winter looming, I think we will continue in this minimised manner for some time to come.
“We have used the £425k to remain functioning and also to invest in some of the measures that would enable reopening, on a reduced basis (about 20% of staff, restricted operations due to cost and making the most of the furlough scheme as long as possible). We are open and trading now, and the idea is for this to enable us to recover something of the season. That will not be enough to take us through to 2021, and of course opening ‘normally’ next year is based on there being a vaccine…
“So we have to open to survive, but must do so in a manner that covers our costs; we must make the most of the Government’s job retention scheme and finally we have to seek additional funding wherever this is available to cover
our bottom line. Even when closed, it was costing £100k a month (insurance, contribution to the job retention scheme and utilities plus covering the wages of a small number of staff retained to manage the closed site, animal stocks and plan for reopening) – the museum’s turnover usually being £12m. Salaries are by far our biggest cost, with upwards of 450 staff on the payroll, and make up threequarters of our annual expenditure.
“We are, in essence, a cash business, 95% of our income coming from admission receipts and on-site trading (food and retail) – this is a happy position, in ‘normal’ times, but makes us very vulnerable during the present pandemic and broadening economic crisis. The analogy of ‘three winters’ is absolutely true, and we face the challenge of providing value for money to our visitors, and meeting their expectations as far as we can.”
●● The Aln Valley Railway is taking part in a different kind of lottery – organised by Northumberland County Council for tourist sites, which agree to sell a certain number of tickets and receive a share of the overall profits. In early August, the AVR said that it was expecting this to raise around £3,000.