Figures for the island’s steam railway have been thrown into doubt following a Freedom of Information request.

The Examiner asked for passenger figures from 2018 and 2019, divided into those who travelled as passengers on regular services and those who travelled on the dining car trains.

The 2018 figure, provided by the Department of Infrastructure, differed by more than 20,000 from the figure provided by DoI Minister Ray Harmer to Tynwald in April last year.

And the 2019 numbers which the government released on its website also show massively different figures to the ones provided in response to our FoI.

In Mr Harmer’s response to a question from Onchan MHK Rob Callister in April 2019, he said there was a total of 113,197 passenger journeys on scheduled services in 2018 and 9,000 passengers carried on the dining car service.

However, in the figures released under FoI, this had grown to 136,096 passengers: 127,096 timetabled service passengers, 5,698 dining car passengers, 1,599 Christmas dining car passengers and 1,703 Santa train passengers.

And in 2019, the FoI shows the railway had 143,867 passengers: 134,400 on timetabled services with 6,048 main season dining car passengers, 1,499 at Christmas and 1,920 on the Santa trains.

In figures released on the government’s website, which seem to have since been removed, the 2018 Tynwald answer is given for the total number of passengers for that year, but for 2019, the total is shown as 128,107 passengers.

In response to our FoI request, the DoI added: ’We have taken physical counts of passengers at Douglas, Castletown and Port Erin. To this we have added 10,000 passengers who will have boarded at Port St Mary, Colby and Ballasalla.

’This is based on the historic numbers counted when these stations had station masters.’

Port St Mary and Ballasalla railway stations have not been manned since 2015 (when 111,160 passengers were carried) and it is understood that Colby has not been manned since the railway was nationalised, in 1978.

In his Tynwald response, Mr Harmer said the DoI introduced a system called Ticketer to the Manx Electric Railway which ’allowed accurate recording of passengers boarding and alighting from all stations’.

However, Mr Harmer made no reference to whether this system is or was used on the steam railway.

We asked for clarification a week ago from the department but had received none as the Examiner went to press.