York Durham Heritage Railway makes plea for support after coronavirus losses

“The way we run the railway is like a movie theatre,” Perks explains. “We keep costs as low as possible for events and then most of our profit is made in the gift shop. With the coronavirus we had to cancel all events for the month, which is a loss of about $80,000 plus any revenue we would have made from the gift shop.”

The organization was gearing up for a busy month of popular events including a Sesame Street train, Marvel Superheroes Train and Nickelodeon trains featuring characters from Paw Patrol and Dora the Explorer, a Roaring 20s train and more. In addition, they had just opened a 5,000-square-foot gift store at Pickering Town Centre that was scheduled to celebrate its grand opening next week.

“We spent a lot of advertising dollars promoting these events, we were expecting 30,000 people to come Easter weekend,” he explained. “With all the marketing, buying costumes, hiring teams of actors and actresses, that’s a lot of money invested in events, and now we’re not having those events.”

While a “rainy day” reserve fund of more than $50,000 was thought to be sufficient, Perks didn’t anticipate the extent of the restrictions and public anxiety surrounding coronavirus.

“We had a rainy-day fund, not a hurricane fund,” Perks said.

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• Dec 31, 1969

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• Dec 31, 1969

As a registered charity, Perks is hoping community members and customers will show support for the railway either through donations or by purchasing tickets for future events such as Thomas the Train in August or holiday trains including Polar Express.

“We’re confident if we can weather the next two months we could continue to maintain and grow the railway sustainably,” Perks said, noting the situation is especially hard since they were expecting a very different outcome to 2020.

“We were poised for tremendous growth, we had an almost 40 per cent increase in ridership in 2019 and we thought we were going to surpass that. It certainly won’t be the 2020 we were expecting.”

Perks stressed the railway always tries to support the community, whether through their hiring, with 25 part-time and eight full-time positions held by residents, by donating to causes such as Canada Day, which they supported to the tune of $10,000 in 2019, or from the general economic impact, which Perks estimates at $10 million annually.

“It’s not just supporting a railway, it’s a historic monument of the past, an experience for families and a huge tourist draw for Uxbridge,” said Perks. “We always looked for ways to give back to our community, and now we’re relying on the community more than we ever thought we would.”

For a full schedule of events, to purchase tickets or to donate visit www.ydhr.ca.