Passenger numbers on board the island’s heritage railways were questioned in the House of Keys.

New Infrastructure Minister Tim Baker was quizzed by Lawrie Hooper (Lib Vannin, Ramsey) about why figures previously presented by the DoI to Tynwald differed from those released following an Isle of Man Newspapers Freedom of Information request in February 2020.

In response to a question from Onchan MHK Rob Callister in April 2019, former DoI minister Ray Harmer said there was a total of 113,197 passenger journeys on scheduled steam train 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.

Mr Baker acknowledged that there are ’known issues’ surrounding passenger figures including how group bookings are counted when they, for example, book an entire carriage rather than the number of people and journeys being ’multi-modal’ but only being counted once.

He said: ’It is clear there is a need for the methodology to be clarified and be followed consistently in the preparation and publication fall figures.’

He added: ’Given that these services are currently not operating, it would seem an ideal time to better understand how numbers are recorded and reported.

’The department will now look at ensuring there is a common methodology in applied in the collation of all figures and where assumptions have been applied, these will be clearly stated.’

It is unlikely it will be possible to apply this new methodology to figures from previous years but Mr Baker has committed to ensuring there will be ’robust’ figures going forward and will be in place when the services resume.