OK; let's see. Some basic maths here.
There are roughly 9,000 members on this forum. Of these, approximately 1-in-5 has been active in the last month, and 1-in-15 in the last 24 hours. Allowing for those who post only rarely, or even never, or have only come along briefly for fares help, I feel it would be reasonable to assume that have of those active today are at least semi-regular, and then the same number again have been in the last month but not today. That would work out at roughly 600 "senior" and/or "regular" members. Now, if we allocated a budget equivalent to that invested by Grand Central for their two routes, using the data provided by the same company, we end up requiring £40m. Were 600 people to work together to make £40m, each would have to put forward approximately £65,000. If we were to then overlook salaries, because everyone would be working out of their love of trains and travel and only at times that suit them (if we had four crews of five per day each person in that 600 would need to work on the front line for just one day a month and then probably a second day for administration purposes), that figure would drop lower still (probably by as much as £5,000). By overlooking salaries we would also be looking at greater profits, because obviously our outgoings would be lower. And lastly, before I get on to the more serious stuff, consider this: It's free mileage!
So anyway, of each of those 600 people (remember it is an estimate) provided anything reasonable the can, ideally the full lot but not necessarily that much, and then tried to source help from others who they know might be interested (so in my case I could ask my brother [who still has just seven posts
] and my father), it wouldn't be all that hard. Then we would have to plan the best route possible from three different perspectives, which are (a) demand, (b) profit and (c) competition, and get to planning things such as stock and timetables.
To give an example, I will now discuss the Liverpool to Bristol via Shrewsbury idea. I personally would prefer to use 170s because of their faster loading capabilities (and DDA compliance), but ultimately they cost roughly 1.2p more per mile for access costs at 7.29p per mile [taken from 09-10 statistics].
- Liverpool Lime Street
- Liverpool South Parkway
- Runcorn
- Crewe
- Shrewsbury
- Ludlow
- Hereford
- Cwmbran
- Severn Tunnel Junction
- Bristol Temple Meads
Now obviously ATW wouldn't be best pleased about this route, but who cares? (LM wouldn't be overly impressed either.) I believe that this route would take about 3h20, so four units would suffice on a two-hourly frequency.
The route is 191mi long, which at 6.07p per mile for a 158 motor vehicle (i.e. 12.14p per unit) works out at approximately £23 access charges per journey. Assume each unit makes two runs each way, and this becomes £368 access charge per day. Then we come to fuel, which assuming 2mpg works out at 95 gallons of fuel (ouch!), which [using the costs discussed
here] would cost about £305 worth of fuel per journey; a total of 16 journeys results in a daily fuel cost of just under £5,000, which in practice sounds a lot but also makes the access charges sound irrelevant. On an annual basis, these two core outgoings would total somewhere in the region of £1.8m, which I think we can safely say would be covered by revenue (at an average of £30 per passenger journey, this would require 60,000 passengers per year, 165 per day, or just ten or eleven per journey).
Someone else can do the administrative costs; I'm not so clued up on those.
But essentially I honestly think that this scheme could well work. If enough of us could scrape funds together, and then allocate different roles to different people (to give a very vague example using just five people, I could prepare timetables, mumrar could be a conductor, TDK could drive, Mojo could be in the office, and Greenback could set up a ticket office at Bristol), we could then take this forward to the ORR.
OK, fantasy over; I want some *
serious* feedback. On this analysis, it really does look viable. And given there are far more of us than there are at the likes of Renaissance Trains, it would be easier to manage and finance. And if someone got bored or fell out with the others, it wouldn't be a huge loss!
Note the edit above. I have had to make one change, which is quite problematic. I shan't say what, but it's there. Also, to get a good pathon the Marches Line would require ~90 minute layovers at both ends, which would entail hiring a further unit.
