Thursday 9th May 2024 Rail companies which bought into the Vivarail idea of refurbished London Underground D78 stock becoming diesel/battery Class 230 and electric Class 484 trains in their new guise haven’t had a lot of luck with their purchases. The idea sounded good when first mooted by the late Adrian Shooter who founded Vivarail... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 7th May 2024 There are some great examples of community organised bus routes around the country. Perhaps most famous are DalesBus and MoorsBus where volunteers oversee bus networks serving the two National Parks (Yorkshire Dales and North York Moors) with financial contributions and sponsorship from local businesses as well as support from local authorities.... Continue Reading →
Saturday 4th May 2024 A brand new 850 space Park and Ride site in Oxfordshire has recently been constructed at a cost of £51 million but it won’t be used for "a number of years" because, according to media reports, there’s no funding for its access road and roundabout on the adjacent A40. Sounds bizarre?... Continue Reading →
Thursday 2nd May 2024 A few weeks ago a partnership between Arriva and Stagecoach was announced. It's part of the Leicestershire Enhanced Bus Partnership and has seen the two bus companies amend timetables of their respective hourly routes (X3 and X7) between Market Harborough and Leicester so there’s a more even half hourly frequency from... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 30th April 2024 Another month end. Another motley collection of miscellaneous matters and some good news to begin with ….. £920,000 fence reopens Cambridge busway The northbound Cambridge busway between Addenbrooke’s Spur Road and Cambridge railway station finally reopened on 30th March having closed in February 2022 due to safety concerns arising from two... Continue Reading →
Saturday 27th April 2024 We're now a third of the way through this fortnightly series featuring all of Britain's bus routes numbered 100 and having been to Stevenage, Crawley, Lincoln, Glasgow, Campbeltown, Guildford and Manchester I thought it was time to head to London and take a ride on TfL’s route 100. It’s odd to... Continue Reading →
Thursday 25th April 2024 Mid Cornwall Metro is a £56.8 million project providing a new hourly Coast to Coast link with direct trains running between Newquay, Par, St Austell, Truro, Penryn (for the Exeter University campus) and Falmouth. The aim is to upgrade the Newquay to Par branch line first, facilitating a doubling of the... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 23rd April 2024 Welcome to another investigation into a sensational public transport headline from the mainstream media. Way back on 11th October last year BBC News carried a story stating "more than 500 people have signed a petition to save a bus stop in Cornwall set to be removed due to safety concerns". It... Continue Reading →
Saturday 20th April 2024 The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) are at pains to point out on its website how its statistics on rail station usage can only be estimates: "as Great Britain does not have a fully gated rail network, a complete recording of passenger flows through stations is not possible, so some... Continue Reading →
Thursday 18th April 2024 This month has seen four developments in the burgeoning world of DRT operations. Firstly, Nottinghamshire County Council expanded its Nottsbus On Demand offering last week adding a fifth area south of Newark. To kick start the new arrangements it withdrew “your friendly local link through the Rushcliffe Villages” represented by Marshalls... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 16th April 2024 What do the three bus routes linking Maidstone with Ashford; Ashford with Canterbury; and Canterbury with Maidstone have in common? And I don't mean they're all operated by Stagecoach South East. And I don't mean they’re all (usually) operated by Enviro 400 double deck buses. And I don't mean they'e all... Continue Reading →
Saturday 13th April 2024 The eighth route 100 to be featured in this fortnightly series must rank as one of the quirkiest. It’s Arriva's second of that Company’s two routes numbered 100 but unlike its busy Stevenage to Luton route already featured, and certainly unlike the lengthy Manchester to Warrington featured last time, this 100... Continue Reading →
Thursday 11th April 2024 I attended a fascinating and timely visit organised by the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport to Metrobus’s Crawley bus garage on Tuesday. It was to hear more about the challenges the Company is facing with its pioneering introduction of liquid "green" hydrogen including commissioning what is destined to be “the... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 9th April 2024 I paid a visit to the Didcot Railway Centre over the Easter weekend. Never having been before, it had been on a list of interesting looking places to visit for a long time having always given it a good stare out of the window when travelling on trains between Reading and... Continue Reading →
Saturday 6th April 2024 No, sorry train fans, this blog isn't about the much hyped Greater Anglia super duper two return journeys a day express linking Norwich with London Liverpool Street in an impressive 90 minutes launched with much hype and self congratulations in May 2019 only to succumb to the Covid retrenchment 10 months... Continue Reading →
Thursday 4th April 2024 Something odd has been happening to rural bus routes in the Dacorum district of Hertfordshire these past few weeks. Readers may recall the County Council's Herts Lynx branded DRT scheme expanded into the Berkhamsted and Tring areas west of Hemel Hempstead in December 2023 without any reduction in conventional bus routes.... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 2nd April 2024 It’s not often a bus service has to succumb to a 10 mile diversion due to a road closure resulting in half its route and two villages left unserved for up to six months. That’s what happened when Scottish and Southern Electricity Networks embarked on its multi-million pound “Alton-Bordon Network Investment”... Continue Reading →
Sunday 31st March 2024 Welcome to March's month-end miscellany. Odds and sods that have caught my eye while travelling around over the last 31 days but not enough for a full blown blog. Latest Greater London Bus Map The excellent news to kick off this month's miscellany is Mike Harris has updated his Greater London... Continue Reading →
Saturday 30th March 2024 I took a ride on the busy inter-urban route 100 linking Manchester and Warrington on its very last day as a commercial operation by Go North West - last Saturday, 23rd March. The following day, Sunday, the route became part of Greater Manchester’s expanding franchised controlled Bee Network. Buses were already... Continue Reading →
Thursday 28th March 2024 Stockport's impressive new Interchange opened for business on Sunday last week (17th March). It’s cost a cool £140 million and forms part of a £1 billion regeneration makeover of the town centre. The so called ‘north/south divide’ and need for ‘levelling up’, both never far from a politician’s sound bite these... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 26th March 2024 The long standing popular ferry link across the River Thames linking Gravesend and Tilbury is being 'paused' from Saturday while a new operator is sought. Jetstream Tours has operated the service under contract to Kent and Thurrock Councils for the last seven years but Thurrock Council’s well documented financial difficulties led... Continue Reading →
Saturday 23rd March 2024 I still call it St Pancras even though it gained its International suffix back in 2007 and if you want to buy a ticket from a ticket machine to travel there you have to know to type in London St Pancras International. At 33,296,120 passenger journeys a year, it lies in... Continue Reading →
Thursday 21st March 2024 Bus passengers travelling along the coast road between Brighton and Eastbourne are enjoying superb comfort from the brand new buses now entering service with Brighton & Hove Bus Company as part of a substantial order of 44 ADL Enviro400 MMC buses. 38 of the new intake are destined for the hugely... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 19th March 2024 Two of Britain’s bus services numbered 100 are Park & Ride routes and in a happy numerical coincidence when I took a ride on Guildford's route 100 on Saturday afternoon, the first of the two to be featured in this fortnightly blog series, the car park was packed with people ...... Continue Reading →
Saturday 16th March 2024 This month sees three high profile public transport networks change hands. Firstly in Northampton, unō withdrew from its operations last weekend (9th March) after 11 and a half years in the town to be replaced by Stagecoach. Secondly next Thursday (21st March) Stagecoach ends its 27 year tenure operating the Sheffield... Continue Reading →
Thursday 14th March 2024 The sub title of this 'hot off the press' voluminous book, coming in at 420 pages, 'In shades of brown & cream' adds 'South Yorkshire PTE - the bus operating years' clarifying it's a comprehensive study of that renowned bus operator in what was dubbed at the time 'The People's Republic... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 12th March 2024 I paid a visit to Somerset last Wednesday to investigate an interesting development in that county’s bus scene. Both Somerset and North Somerset Councils have used some of their BSIP funds to reinstate route 126 between Weston-Super-Mare and Wells. Regular readers may recall I took a ride on the route just... Continue Reading →
Saturday 9th March 2024 Contextual Alert: The following blog was written prior to Lambeth Borough Council's dramatic decision on Thursday afternoon to suspend the Streatham Wells Low Traffic Neighbourhood with immediate effect. Teaser Alert: I paid a return visit to Streatham yesterday afteroon to see what impact this suspension was having. Read on for the... Continue Reading →
Thursday 7th March 2024 The £56 million project to greatly increase the capacity of the West Midlands railway station called simply University has been completed with the new station opening at the end of January. It’s an impressive transformation. There’s no comparison to the cramped conditions of the old station with two newly constructed massive... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 5th March 2024 I’ve recently caught up with the three latest additions to Britain’s burgeoning DRT landscape. They’re in West Berkshire, West Sussex and Derbyshire. West Berkshire’s scheme was launched on 15th January. There’s a rather cute home made video on YouTube explaining the background to it here featuring West Berkshire's Councillor Denis Gaines,... Continue Reading →
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