Part 7: Lengthy Bits of Figures

 

This is Part 7 of the Order of the Bed's plans for reopening the Wye Valley Railway.

 

Once all the details of how to re-open the line have been worked out, costs start to come into play. A railway like the WVR comes with plenty, even with only 15 miles to play with.

Let's start with the income, since it's fairly easy to be positive with it. The general hope is to link Cardiff with Monmouth, which serves the Cardiff-Newport traffic and the commuter traffic from Chepstow and Caldicot to the bright lights of the cities. This can then be used to subsidise the extension to Monmouth.

It also provides a handy local population of 470,000 people. 6% of all journeys in the UK are made by train, so if 6% of these people were good enough to travel on the WVR once a year it would provide our services with some 28200 return journeys per year, or 77 people per day. Which isn't a lot, but it's also a bit of an underestimate. A larger figure comes from the following bit of maths:

If we average 2058600 and 28200 then we get 1043400 passengers per year - 2858 per day or 158 per train. This isn't too unreasonable if passengers get on and off along the way and the train is well-loaded beyond Severn Tunnel Junction.

Alternatively we take the view that the town of Falmouth produced 238027 passengers in 2007/08 for its three stations. A line between Monmouth and Chepstow would serve about half as many people again as live in Falmouth and so maths states that it will attract 357040.5 passengers per annum - 978 per day, or 54 per train (plus any more attracted between Chepstow and Cardiff - maybe another 60 or so, which would make 755550 passengers per annum).

If we take the options of 357040.5 or 722700, add them to 28200 and 2058600 and divide by four we get an average of wrong answers, which is also wrong but may accidentally be somewhere near right and so will use 791635 as our number of passengers per annum - 2168 passengers per day or 120 per train.

A return ticket from Cardiff to Gloucester, which is a similar journey time (with fewer stops but a longer distance), is £15.50. If we imposed the same fare on the Wye Valley line then these passengers would bring in £11,874,525 per annum - if they came, which for that price they wouldn't. If we were nice and charged something around £8 then they would bring in £6,333,080. If we were really nice and charged around £5 then they would bring in £3,958,175 - but that's all assuming that passenger numbers remain constant through fare rises. If they went up as the fares went down and down as they went up there would be a distinct possibility that the £5 deal would make more money than the £15 one. After all, who's going to give up their car so they can pay more to go from Monmouth to Cardiff more slowly? The petrol for Monmouth to Cardiff in a 35 mile per gallon car would cost somewhere in the region of £8, so the train needs to compete with that figure and therefore £5 would offer a distinct saving. Of course there's also parking in Cardiff to consider (currently £6 per day) but not including that in the basic fare would allow us to charge £3 per car for parking all day at Monmouth without screwing up the economics and allow for the fact that the road journey is about one hour and the rail journey is about 75 minutes if the old schedule is maintained. A new one might slice it to 65 minutes but there are too many stops to make a sizeable dent in it. Possibly also worth noting is that the rail fare is per head and the car fare is per car, so for three or more people the figures will favour sticking to the road.

Also worth noting is that most passengers won't go all the way. However, we don't have access to the supercomputer required to work out how many passengers will go where.

So that's the locals sorted. Then we have the tourists. Currently some 2,000,000 people come to the Wye Valley every year. If we assume that half of these head to Symonds Yat and Ross-on-Wye, which we aren't planning to serve, that gives us 1,000,000 potential passengers to play with. 6% of these would be 60,000 people. If each paid £5 for a return ticket or Wye Day Rover or something similar they would bring in another £300,000.

Of course, tourists (being on holiday in an unfamiliar area) may be happier to catch the train rather than drive as ongoing economic collapse causes them to holiday in this country rather than going abroad. This could offer an opportunity for a third of their journeys to be made by rail rather than only 6% - that would be 333,333 people per year, bringing in £1,666,665. This is about a quarter of the total income if the figures for local travel are correct, but would be a very handy boost. If the railway could push up tourist figures by around half the tourist income would also go up by about half - to £2,500,000 (plus or minus £2.50). That would give a grand total income of £6,458,175.

Cardiff. Served by lots of trains from all over South Wales, befitting its status as Wales's capital.

Chepstow. Not served quite as well - occasional trains between Maesteg and Cheltenham stop at this historic town.

St Briavels. Unlikely to be busy, being a mile from anywhere, but next to a road junction, so maybe a Parkway.

Monmouth Troy. Bit out of town but could be provided with suitable car park, footpath, bus/ light rail, etc. to Monmouth.

That looks healthy, if unrealistically high. It does mean that we should have a good chance of covering our costs though:

This provides a total annual cost of £6045000 and a profit of £413175 (about 6% of turnover). That would be quite an achievement, since the old WVR was in a position to have "profit" taken out of the company dictionary to save money on the basis that it was a word which they would never need.

It may be worth noting that these figures do not allow for the accountants, lawyers and consultants which would accidentally involve themselves in proceedings; the costs of useful things such as the General Manager and the refreshment trolley/ restaurant car are cheerily omitted (although a carefully handled restaurant car buying things off the lorry which serves Waitrose Monmouth (or, indeed, franchised out to Waitrose) might be persuaded to add to this profit).

Additional profits could also be obtained by assisting the local authority in the provision of increased road traffic calming measures and reduced speed limits around Tintern, Brockweir, Llandogo, Bigsweir Bridge and Redbrook following completion of the railway, in exchange for which the railway would expect 50% of revenue from speed cameras erected along the route.

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As important as potential profits are the costs of rebuilding the line, which are unlikely to be offset by immediately visible profits for the railway and will instead be shown by increased trade in local shops, increased accessibility of the valley to those without access to a car, increased quality of life through reductions in road noise, pollution and traffic-related injuries and the provision of a strip of undisturbed hedgerow and verge alongside the railway for wildlife.

One way of working out a hard cost is by pinching the figures from the Dean Forest Railway, which has a slightly easier job (and theirs was pretty hard, what with two level crossings and a collapsing bridge to deal with). Their light railway apparently cost £1 an inch. As we have about as many collapsing bridges per mile to deal with as them, we can use this as a bit of a basemark. The line is officially 13 miles 2 furlongs 9 chains 75 links long, which we will round up to 14 miles. There are 1,760 yards in a mile, three feet in a yard, and twelve inches in a foot. So 14x1760x3x12=887040 inches. This works out as £887,040, which is less than a million quid and therefore a bargain.

Incidentally, to be scientific, 13 miles 2 furlongs 9 chains 75 links is 847,242 inches (which results in a cost saving of just under £40,000 by being more precise). This equates roughly to 13.4 miles, or 21.4km (21,395 metres). If you can't quite picture how long this is, it's just over half of a days march by the Roman army or just under the distance from Chepstow to Monmouth.

As the Wye Valley line would only be commercially viable if rebuilt to heavy rail standards rather than light rail (trains capable of going to Cardiff and a maximum speed of more than 25mph - 40mph would be a good maximum overall speed) it would probably be fair to double this cost to something more in the order of £1,774,080 to allow for the better-quality job done for higher speeds. Providing good-quality track and equipment to begin with would have the benefit of keeping maintenance costs down over time.

A more accurate cost for rebuilding the line can be guessed by rounding up the figure above to the nearest £1,000,000, adding 10% (£2,200,000), adding 5% for all the extra charges which suppliers will decide to add (£2,310,000), adding 3% per year for inflation (£2,379,300), doubling it (£4,758,600), and rounding up to the next £1,000,000 again (£5,000,000). It may be worth adding another million for the costs of buying nice detached houses in Redbrook, acquiring fields around the railway and moving people's drives. Unfortunately the property market has not collapsed as far as it might and costs have therefore remained higher than we would like.

The 1985 Wye Valley Railway Company reckoned that it would cost about £37,000,000 and various price rises, inflation and so on mean that this figure (for the line from Chepstow to Hereford) would probably now be valid for the Chepstow to Monmouth route.

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Of course, the most accurate way of finding out what the costs, income and losses would be is to build it and see what happens.

 

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28/09/09