KENT & EAST SUSSEX
SIMON MARSH, chairman of the trustees and an active volunteer at the Kent & East Sussex Railway, considers how preserved railways can continue to attract new recruits.
The importance of getting the right people in the right roles, and how to retain them
We are approaching departure time at Tenterden Town station, just off the high street of a picturesque town in the Weald of Kent. The engine is alongside the small station building, and around it stands a cluster of people – the locomotive crew, the guard, the stationmaster and several members of the public. All are chatting, probably sharing a joke.
Further down the platform, the catering staff are loading supplies for the trip. The signalman comes up with the single line tablet and, on a nod from the stationmaster, he goes to work the level crossing and clear the signals. A final check down the train and the guard shows the green flag.
The train sets off over the crossing, past a group of waving staff and visitors, and down the steep bank at the start of its tenmile trip to Bodiam and its National Trust castle. During the journey it will pass over five more level crossings, probably cross another train (more waving) and there will be the opportunity for passengers to purchase refreshments and to watch the engine being watered at Northiam. If they are part of a pre-booked group – for example from a cruise ship moored at nearby Dover – they may be served a light meal.
On arrival at Bodiam, friendly staff will welcome them and direct them to the castle. For we pride ourselves on being a line with a family atmosphere, and we try to make our visitors feel part of that family.
CHALLENGES
Like all preserved railways, we face significant challenges in ensuring that this experience will be available in years to come. Much of it comes down to our people; not only to run the trains and talk to our visitors, but for all the other tasks that are required to ensure that we can continue to be a successful tourism business in a crowded and changing market, while at the same time preserving and operating historic and fragile equipment. As well as the obvious jobs, we need people to overhaul and maintain infrastructure and equipment, to weed the gardens, to prepare and serve food, to go out and get business, to design publicity material, to raise funds, to work with suppliers and, dare I say it, to direct and manage the organisation. The list is endless.
The lifeblood of our railway is the volunteer. Although we employ over 30 permanent staff, many on part-time contracts, and around 20 casual staff during the main season, it is the volunteers who keep the show on the road. We have around 400 who give of their services to a greater or lesser degree, and some have been with us since well before we opened to passengers in 1974.
They preserve the pioneering spirit of the early days and they remain very valuable. But they are not getting any younger. In fact, the age profile as a whole is worrying; we seem to be able to attract people of retirement age looking for something to do but, with a number of shining exceptions, the younger people either don’t seem to be interested or don’t have the time.
There is to my mind no such thing as a ‘typical volunteer’. Perhaps the term itself is a misnomer and we should consider the KESR simply as having ‘staff’, most of whom are unpaid. Thinking in this way might bring other benefits too, by promoting the concept of ‘One Railway’ which belongs to all of us. Certainly, it is often difficult to distinguish who is paid and who is not, even at management level. Many of our volunteers are highly trained, either by us or in their day jobs, and many spend much of their spare time on the railway – sometimes to the detriment of other areas of their lives!
DIVERSE SKILLS
But to return to the point, we need to recognise that as people we are all individuals and each one of us has different needs, and can bring different attributes and skills. We have always been aware that without a steady trickle of new volunteers we have no future.
Over the years we have, from time to time, examined our volunteer base and considered what more we should do to ensure that we can recruit and retain sufficient people – I’d like to say ‘enough’ people but we shall never achieve that.
As a result, we have a dedicated volunteer liaison officer – himself a volunteer – whose role is to ensure that potential recruits are invited to one of our regular induction days, following which they will be put in contact with their potential department manager, from which the process for making them part of the family and arranging necessary training can begin. He will also be around to pick up and hopefully deal with potential teething problems.
Does this work? Yes, it does, or we wouldn’t have as many people as we do now.
But we need to raise the game still further. One of our trustees is leading a piece of work to build on what has gone before, to understand where the pinch points are and develop a set of recommendations for dealing with them. He has consulted existing volunteers across the organisation and we now have a recognition of what we do well and less well, and a list of ideas for improvement.
The next task will be for a committee with trustee, volunteer and management representation to take these ideas, convert them into action points and get on with doing them. The actions are likely to include proposals for ensuring that the organisation as a whole is seen to value our non-paid people more highly, gets better at nurturing the social side, and understands more than we do at present that volunteering is a two-way transaction – we can help people as much as they can help us.
The older generation has to realise that the world has moved on. Speaking personally, I was always a railway enthusiast and was recruited by a form-mate at school in the early 1970s. We were all young, and most of us did a bit of everything. We spent nearly every weekend on site and slept in unhygienic mess coaches. Nostalgic, yes; fit for today’s preserved railway business? No. Today’s potential volunteer may well have no background railway knowledge and be baffled by the strange language that we all speak. He or she may even have no interest in railways as such, but want to deploy his or her skills (or learn new ones) in a sociable environment which gives a sense of belonging. We need to be better at knowing where he or she might be found, and how to
WITH A NUMBER OF SHINING EXCEPTIONS, THE YOUNGER PEOPLE DON’T SEEM TO BE INTERESTED
reach out to them.
AMBASSADORS
One final point, for all of us actively involved in preserved railways: each one of us is a potential volunteer recruiter. There is no substitute for the personal touch. We all have friends in the outside world, and many of us engage with our railway’s visitors. If each of us, by our attitude and enthusiasm, introduced just one person to our railway and kept an eye on them as they settled in, we could double the size of the movement.
None of what I have said above should be rocket science. We at the Kent & East Sussex would be pleased to share our approach with others, and hear about what others are doing.
And if any reader wants to be part of the picture I painted in the first paragraph, please get in touch! ●● Kent & East Sussex Railway is a charitable company, limited by guarantee and not having share capital. It is a company registered in England(No. 1007871), and a
registered charity (No. 262481).