BUILDING ON A SUCCESSFUL YEAR
The A1 Steam Locomotive Trust (A1SLT), the registered charity behind famous new-build 100mph steam locomotive No. 60163 Tornado and what is set to be Britain’s most powerful steam locomotive, Gresley class P2 ‘Mikado’ No. 2007 Prince of Wales, has continued to progress its projects on a number of fronts – and is now looking forward to the coming year.
Asked whether 2019 has been a good year for the organisation, Mark Allatt, A1SLT trustee, replied: “Yes – we’re so much bigger than we were even four years ago. If you think about how we’ve rapidly transitioned from 1990 when we started through until 2008, we were building a locomotive – it was very much a singular focus.
“After that, we had a locomotive to operate, which was all new to us. We had to convert a support coach and we had around £1 million in debts from the construction phase to repay.
“Towards the end of 2013, we went public with the project to build the P2 – so we are now building a locomotive, we are operating a locomotive and we are also running our own railtours.
“That’s a massive difference in scale of operation.”
Tours
Earlier this year, the A1SLT took its tour bookings function in-house. Commenting on the performance of the operation, Mark said: “The majority of the trains we hauled during our early years of operation had other people as the promoters.
“We provided the locomotive for their tours. We always ran a couple of our own trains each year. We then decided to increase the number of those – and of course we needed a booking agent. Because we were only doing a couple of tours, we used different booking agents in the past, including UK Railtours.
“The number of our own trips grew to the point financially where it made sense to bring the booking office function in-house. It’s going well for us – and bringing the bookings in-house has saved us a reasonable amount of money.
“With anything like that, if you’re doing a small number, it doesn’t make sense to have your own staff as there are too many peaks and troughs. Once you get over a certain amount, it becomes more cost-effective to do it yourself rather than use an external supplier – and those peaks and troughs become flatter.
“In addition, we continue to work with a number of different promoters, including Pathfinder Railtours, Belmont British Bullman and Steam Dreams – and from next year we’ll start working with RTC. That’s all set to continue in 2020.”
Mark added: “In parallel to that, we’ve started running a series of repeat itineraries – the two
