THE South Devon Railway’s ‘SOS’ emergency funding appeal has received a £9,000 in one week and now stands at £153,695.

Press officer Dick Wood days: ‘It has gone up by £20,000 this past month so far. Good news for sure!

‘We broke through the £150,000 barrier after the weekend with our very popular Thomas the Tank Engine video on FaceBook, which drew over 900 live viewers at one point on Sunday, May 24 and just under 2,000 views, with a reach of 6,000 people already which is excellent going!

‘We are hoping to do another, different Thomas broadcast in late June, and are now targeting £200,000 as the next milestone!

‘The SDR is aiming to try and reach £500,000 as the target figure it estimates will be the amount that it’s going to need to combat the loss of income during Covid 19, so it is doing well at 31 per cent of this target so far, but has to keep on going of course to get there.’

‘Our appeal figures as of May 18 show the following breakdown: donations from SDR Members starting on March 23, including Gift Aid, amounts to £70,414.25; Various SDR Groups donations of £23,000 and SDRA donation of £20,000amounts to £49,200; The Virgin Money Giving total (including Gift Aid) was £26,270.90,; The Facebook appeal, including Gift Aid, was £7,809.88, making a total so far received of £153,695.’

How the team is working

Like most tourist attractions, we have a ‘Lockdown Response Team’ handling all of the functions of the SDR in this shutdown period. One group is dealing with the financial planning and allocation of resources to ensure essential bills continue to be paid; another group is looking after HR issues and the furlough arrangements; there is also an operations group dealing with practical issues, and a commercial group dealing with advance booking changes, plus future marketing and PR.

Meetings are being held on a weekly basis using one of the online platforms, and the team are constantly sharing information via email and other electronic means to stay on top of the job.

Facebook Live

As mentioned above, we ran a very popular video with the Fat Controller reading some Thomas stories on our Facebook page, every Sunday now sees the SDR doing a Facebook Live presentation every week at 3pm. So far, we have had a tour around a locomotive footplate, a description of some of our wagons and their original uses and an explanation of how our push and pull Auto Trains work. The videos are all on our Facebook page and the next live presentation is on Sunday, May 31.