Optimizing a Heritage Railway Provider’s Volunteer Workforce Allocation: The Case of Swanage Railways

Heritage railways are railway operations that are not mainstream and serve as a reminiscence of past railways to build a cultural and national identity. They are among the main forms of heritage tourism. The heritage railway industry differs fundamentally from other forms of tourism and travel because of the significantly large fraction of volunteers in its workforce; additionally, heritage railways are of an extremely smaller scale than mainstream railways, with lower annual revenues. Although the regular railway industry extensively uses mathematical decision-making technologies for its daily operations, there is little evidence and few case studies demonstrating such value for heritage railways. Among the first of such studies, we present our experiences in using mathematical optimization models that improved the workforce allocation at a premier UK-based heritage railway company: Swanage Railways. Our collaboratively developed optimization models show four hours of reduction in weekly overtime for some employees during emergencies. If volunteers are efficiently integrated into the workforce, we find a reduction in overall workload by 26.7% for some of the existing employees. Finally, our models present a potential to reduce staffing costs by up to 35% if an hourly wage system is used instead of a fixed salary system.