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I think they’ll open as soon as the other Welsh TCs do,
I'd love to agree but I think you'll be disappointed.
Most trail centres aren't really a business, they're an additional revenue stream for the forestry business, the car parking etc is there already so no real cost, trails are built and maintained largely by volunteers so minimal cost.
The cafés and shops are separate entities and again, they're an additional revenue stream for NRW, they don't need to make a profit to keep the forest viable.
BPW though is a distinct business, with a single premises and that poses very different issues. They need to make money so the uplift has to pick up any slack in closing the cafe, the trails are built and maintained by the staff at a cost, you can't just open the cafe for takeaway - and take away isn't takeaway if you're sat 100m away on BPW's furniture on their grounds, it's just sitting outside, where as sitting on a NRW bench on forestry property 2 yards from the door of the cafe at afan is.
Running coed brenin as a trail centre for £100 a day in parking charges with no café, loos, bike hire etc is a very different proposition to running BPW for £100 a day in pedal up fees.
One amounts to letting people park, the other is trying to run a business based on a model that was viable 4 months ago and now isn't.
Yes but Gethin was free to ride back then, well it was unless you count the chance of having your wallet stolen by the druggies that hung about in the car park in the evenings!
well yes but there wasnt a bikeparks worth of other trails there either... (there obviously was other stuff buit not as now)
i was trying (vary badly and in a not very pertinent way) to point out that we rode/pushed up/dodged druggies on hills before uplift was a thing.
i like being lazy though so obviously i'd prefer an uplift but, if needs must (and it probably will) then i'll push/ride up as i like to ride stuff. the best stuff in FOD is out of the bike park and no uplift. no shortage of bikers there!
the problem i think is that BPW make money out of loafers/non serious riders who book teh uplift, have breakfast, lunch, do 4 runs and post ride beers and buy stuff from teh bike shop to look cool. not the actual people there to ride who have a few clif bars on the uplit and max out laps.
I’d love to agree but I think you’ll be disappointed.
Most trail centres aren’t really a business, they’re an additional revenue stream for the forestry business, the car parking etc is there already so no real cost, trails are built and maintained largely by volunteers so minimal cost.
The cafés and shops are separate entities and again, they’re an additional revenue stream for NRW, they don’t need to make a profit to keep the forest viable.BPW though is a distinct business, with a single premises and that poses very different issues. They need to make money so the uplift has to pick up any slack in closing the cafe, the trails are built and maintained by the staff at a cost, you can’t just open the cafe for takeaway – and take away isn’t takeaway if you’re sat 100m away on BPW’s furniture on their grounds, it’s just sitting outside, where as sitting on a NRW bench on forestry property 2 yards from the door of the cafe at afan is.
Running coed brenin as a trail centre for £100 a day in parking charges with no café, loos, bike hire etc is a very different proposition to running BPW for £100 a day in pedal up fees.
One amounts to letting people park, the other is trying to run a business based on a model that was viable 4 months ago and now isn’t.
You might be right, who knows.
I know they've got their Trail Crew back working full time in preparation for reopening so they're
paying them at the moment with zero revenue.
No, it won't be viable to run it forever as a pay to ride TC without an uplift, but it shouldn't be hard to make it viable for them to return a few staff back to work to take money for day tickets. For example I was at Cannop at the weekend for their first weekend post-lock down. The car park was full by 10:30am which each car paying £5-£7 to park, and as you can't car share at the moment you'd guess many will be single occupants. £7 to ride FOD all day, £8 to ride BPW all day. With all the bus drivers on furlough with or without the cafe, it's going to be a better position than zero revenue at the moment.
it’s going to be a better position than zero revenue at the moment
Depends if the outgoings for opening are greater than the receipts. Some revenue isn't necessarily better [or worse] than none.
FoD has several areas you can park free around the place and it's a lot easier to go riding or using the push up path to get several runs in.
I just can't see BPW being financially viable to reopen any time soon, as others say, they make their money from groups coming over paying 43 quid a head, having a breakfast butty and coffee for a tenner, then having a plate of macaroni or burger for restaurant prices. Can't see many of those groups wanting to tackle the beast of burden once, let alone multiple times in their full armour kit, 170mm travel bikes and so on.
I'll stick to FoD for the foreseeable, take a pack lunch, choose from just doing XC runs, trail or DH runs, if it's busy at sallow vallets then i'll head over to Y2K, EM, etc for my £35 annual membership for FoD.
£7 to ride FOD all day, £8 to ride BPW all day.
BPW is £12 per day now, plus you're limited to 9.30-5pm. Compared to FOD at £7 (or free if you know where to go) where you can ride sunrise to sunset if you wanted and it changes the sums a bit. Plus:
I just can’t see BPW being financially viable to reopen any time soon, as others say, they make their money from groups coming over paying 43 quid a head, having a breakfast butty and coffee for a tenner, then having a plate of macaroni or burger for restaurant prices.
BPW rely on the average punter spending £70 or more each visit: uplift, bearkfast, lunch, a fresh tyre or a bit of merch from the shop. They have got used to near-full uplifts every day all year.
Pubs and Restaurant opening is under review in Wales with an announcement due on the 18th of June (changes to take place on the 21st).
Also Masks to become compulsory on Public transport or wherever Social Distancing is impossible.
Might be a life-line for BPW.
I noticed 417 are opening soon as push up only, they have raised the price to try and compensate for the loss of earnings from not having an uplift.
Got to be better than nothing?
with an announcement due on the 18th of June
Restaurants and bars may open so long as they serve only steaks cut directly from the cattle of Geryon or deserts made from the golden apples of Hesperides
I know a price of £1m+ was mentioned just for installation.
I was on the Aston Hill committee between 2009 and 2013, and we got an estimation for putting in a chairlift – £1.5-2m.
There is an element of comparing apples to pears, but it does give you an idea of how prohibitively costly it is.
Worth also noting in the discussion they had to cancel a month or two of bookings who are "owed" a ticket which is going to mop up a chunk of socially distant capacity with no new money coming in
Worth also noting in the discussion they had to cancel a month or two of bookings who are “owed” a ticket
Hopefully that pans out. They owed me a ticket a while back but simply didn't acknowledge any emails I sent trying to rearrange it. Gave up in the end.
I noticed 417 are opening soon as push up only, they have raised the price to try and compensate for the loss of earnings from not having an uplift.
Indeed no extra charge for eebs either. I'm off there next week with 2 fully charged batteries. 15 quid I think it was.
But the BPW hill is bloody big if you want to do repeated laps and the trails descend fast, you’d never design the trails like this for a non-uplift centre.
It's not bad TBF, the "Winch effort vs Gnarr reward" ratio is much better pedalling up BPW than Afan IMO.
You just need to manage/plan your effort for the day a little better.
You get your eye in doing the blue and red runs to the fire road, halfway down the hill it's just a short winch back to the top each time. You can spend half the morning just on the top half of the hill without tearing your legs off. Then do a full run top to bottom for elevenses, pedal back up, a couple more "half runs" and then all the way down for lunch. You can spend the afternoon doing pretty much the same, maybe choose to session something if you want to work on a particular thing? of maybe give it the beans an go full Bottom->Top->Bottom->Top->Bottom and you'll probably be about done, feeling a bit smug that you bothered to "earn your turns".
Part of me wonders if they should maybe close the Black runs off too just to reduce the likelihood of an ambulance being needed, there's enough between all the other trails coupled with the fact that riders will be operating under their own steam to keep customers occupied.
We're only talking about a relatively short term arrangement, say four-six months of pedal up only service so they have at least some cash coming in and keep the place going, so the summer isn't a total loss, otherwise they are probably done for...
Sounds like a great time to visit BPW! Quick spin up, no semi-skilled fat lads getting in the way on the subsequent downhill. Might take my gravel bike - where do I book my day pass?
Social distancing model change - bikes *in* the bus, riders on the trailer?
We went to yosemite last year and you could do a valley floor trip on a low laoder Arctic trailer with about 50 seats attached to it.
I'm sure someone could knock something similar up, bike seat, bike seat etc, everyone wearing masks out in the open.
I think it was a hybrid truck as well so win win.
I was chatting with a BPW driver last year comparing chairlifts to the big military truck. As slow as the truck is, it can take 28 riders on one journey. A chairlift at max capacity could transport 200 riders per hour. Even if a chairlift was pennies, the capacity is simply too low to justify.
Not sure of your working there? At peak times BPW probably sends a full or nearly full minibus up the hill every 10 minutes or less, that's 90-ish per hour. But that's when fully booked- the actual maximum number of customers would be higher, BPW fills up ages in advance.
Not that this makes a chairlift suddenly make sense, mind, it's just that one argument doesn't seem right
Pretty sure BPW were looking into old ex army trucks at one point, the kind t hat were in use at Bike Park Ireland. Those can carry loads of people and be run uncovered, might be a viable option instead of enclosed Transits
.
They've got one ex-army truck and it's unbelievably annoying when it's running. It takes longer to load, is slower up the hill, costs a lot to run and holds up the other buses. It's also unbearably hot in the sun. I've been there when it's running and the other buses have to run to a slower schedule to account for it plodding up the hill, you can load 2 transits in the same time and one day it broke down blocking the fireroad so nothing could run for nearly an hour.
Horrible thing.
Hi @northwind this wasn't my working out, merely regaling a conversation I had with one of the drivers last year.
I guess a chairlifts capacity is fixed, whereas they can run vans depending on visitor numbers.
A chairlift at max capacity could transport 200 riders per hour.
That sounds low. A decent chairlift will do 500 people per seat per hour for skiiers. If you slowed the on/off ramps down to half speed to allow for loading and unloading a bike, thats still 250 per seat. Even if you buy the budget version I can't see it dropping to a max 200. And then even if it was only 200 you have the added rider experience/efficiency too. By constantly loading and unloading rather than building up a backlog you reduce bottlenecks and improve the uplift efficiency so what capacity you do have works better all the time. You only get the efficiency at the moment by making your punters wait for you. So while you can do x riders per hour, that necessitates some of those riders waiting for buses. The chairlift provides the same or better capacity without the rider waiting to create that capacity.
Not saying it makes economic sense, but I think it would greatly increase uplift capacity. What BPW needs to do if it wants more efficient uplifting (which will allow for more total capacity) is the smaller vans not bigger, with a circular route to the top. That of course isnt the cheapest option, but would allow more people to be moved in a manner that makes the punters happier.
I get why they don't have one, but if they did have a chairlift I'd probably be there every weekend. Waiting for a van, loading in tons of people and crawling up the hill just gets annoying after a while honestly. If I could just get to the bottom of the hill, then hop straight on another chairlift again it would be so much nicer.
I had a quick look at their accounts, they owe a lot of money to AIB Bank (nearly £5million as of last accounts) who I guess won't wait about for money and a chunk to the Welsh govt
If Aston Hill was £1-2 million for a chairlift I'd guess one for BPW would be at the very least double
I'd take a chairlift over a sweaty, smelly 10 minute van ride every day of the week. In summer you sweat more sitting in the van than you do riding!!
They do season passes for entry (not uplift) but I reckon they'd have a few takers for a season chairlift + entry pass, at several hundred quid.
I know that things change very quickly, but Mark Drakeford talking yesterday doesn't bode well...
Wales will remain largely shut over the summer with visitors likely to be restricted to staying in cottages and self-catering flats, the Welsh first minister has warned holidaymakers.....
.....he indicated that the ban on travelling more than five miles in Wales would remain in place well into July, and said he did not expect mass gatherings such as sports events and concerts to resume until next year
Not sure whether BPW would be picked up there or not.
Also seems like Merthyr currently has the third highest infection rate in the UK.
They'll be screwed by the 5 mile travel restriction. Until that is lifted they won't be able to get anywhere near the numbers to make opening financially feasible.
“Part of me wonders if they should maybe close the Black runs off too just to reduce the likelihood of an ambulance being needed”
I think it’s the blue runs that actually suffer the most ambulance-worthy accidents!
reluctantjumper
Subscriber
They’ve got one ex-army truck and it’s unbelievably annoying when it’s running. It takes longer to load, is slower up the hill, costs a lot to run and holds up the other buses. It’s also unbearably hot in the sun. I’ve been there when it’s running and the other buses have to run to a slower schedule to account for it plodding up the hill, you can load 2 transits in the same time and one day it broke down blocking the fireroad so nothing could run for nearly an hour.Horrible thing.
They must have bought the crap one, then, never seen one break down at BPI - and when it's hot, the canvas can be rolled up or removed altogether so that it's open top. They can go plenty fast, transits will obviously be quicker up a paved road though.
I think it’s the blue runs that actually suffer the most ambulance-worthy accidents!
I don't doubt it for a second.
Close them, and the reds just to be safe.
Black runs only.
😀
The crisis might cause the current enterprise to fold because they can't service the debt or runs out of cash. This would be a tragedy for the current operation, creditors (including people owed a booking) and can be bad for the current employees but it is likely that something very similar will emerge from the ashes because of the infrastructure and the investment already made.
@elvino sadly this is the situation facing many thousands of businesses at the moment, with people struggling to survive, having built businesses up over a long time. Many will fold I fear, and then be bought up and restarted on the other side. The only upside for the current owners is they might be able to salvage something if they buy the assets etc out of the administration.
@honourablegeorge - if they'd got a standard one I'd agree but they got this:
It even broke down on the M50 on the way to them!
The truck has been nothing but major problems since it was first delivered and sure the first few teething problems were because they had the fuel gauge taken out of in during the build.😂😂
I really so hope BPW does survive but they are more concerned about building the cabins and accommodation than improving uplift facilities. They are moving into more of a family sector and have spent mega bucks on surveys and planning to get there.
The blue runs are the highest accident numbers but it’s these blue runs which bringing in the cash. BPW wants the all the gear no idea riders who will happily spend £100 a day and leave after 4 runs with a few t shirts and merchandise.
Just checked and it's either parked up as it has no MOT or they sold the number plate as it comes back as a MotorCraft Mid Coach. Thinking about it I haven't seen it running there for a while.
Didn't know it had it's fuel gauge missing, that's brilliant.
@reluctantjumper - jazus, that's fancy
BPI trucks had the original canvas sides/roof, and a bunch of old bus seats bolted in. Not fancy, but functional. That looks like they spent a fortune.
Just checked and it’s either parked up as it has no MOT
Do any of them have MOT? They never leave the site while working (unlike Antur, FOD). Given the abuse they get (heavy load, hill climb, potholes) I imagine the vans work there until they die so no resale to worry about.
Public use MOT is more stringent/frequent than private owner.
With a whole fleet it might make sense to have a local mechanic to come to site when any problems occur.
Doesn't look good if the 5 mile restriction stays all summer!
Warning - shocking website alert!
Given the insane prices people are asking for vans /van conversions at the moment, I reckon they could sell off their fleet and be halfway to funding a chair lift 😉
They never leave the site while working
To go to a garage to fuel up?
I recall a conversation with some folks who are heavily involved in the Tweed valley trails, around a chairlift. The feeling was that even the smallest of options required numbers that were unachievable even there in the gluepot that is TV, to cover costs.
Best of luck to BPW, I really hope they can keep going, as it looks awesome and it's my own fault I've not been there yet.
To go to a garage to fuel up?
Forgot about that.
Fuel bowser?
There's some sort of agricultural/farmer exemption rule they might manage to get away with.
I think it’s the blue runs that actually suffer the most ambulance-worthy accidents!
That was always what they said.
It's not a surprise really, some of the blue are insanely fast if you're even remotely skilled (I include myself in the remotely skilled cat) lots of 'just one more run' riders, lots of 'first day at a bike park' rides etc touching 40mph and drainage ditches on the outside of bends.
I haven't been in a few years, but there was 1 bend in particular on Bluebell that Strava seemed to suggest I was taking at about 40mph, half the time the rear would be drifting and as above, I'm not Brandon Fairclough by any means.
They have to drive it to the local petrol station for fuel and as all their vehicles are transporting paying customers they have to be roadworthy and have regular checks. They are also registered as buses, the giveaway being the operator's address written on the doors you see in the video. The tractors that Black Mountain use have a lower level of checks required as they're farm vehicles.
@roach - yep, Wales online is a mass of adverts, pop-ups and clickbait headlines buy does have useful info buried underneath it all!