Saturday 29th February 2020 A long overdue overnight visit to some friends living in the delightful market town of Stamford was a great opportunity to sample a couple of Lincolnshire’s bus routes on Thursday and yesterday. The foul weather put paid to more extensive travelling; pouring rain and misted up windows are a lethal combination... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 25th February 2020 After Friday's Tees teaser I spotted the new 'Tees flex' app became available to download over the weekend so armed with that and the zonal maps which blog readers kindly pointed out were on Stagecoach's 'Tees flex' webpage as click throughs from the zonal names, I was able to plan today's... Continue Reading →
Monday 24th February 2020 The rail line between Reedham and Great Yarmouth, on what's known as the Wherry Lines, closed back in October 2018 to allow for upgrade work on track, level crossings and signalling. Sixteen months later it's good to see the line has reopened today and trains are once again calling at the... Continue Reading →
Sunday 23rd February 2020 If was 100 years ago it would be called Norton Junction Station but as it's 2020 today's brand new addition to the National Rail network is christened Worcestershire Parkway. The £22 million GWR run station is located where the North Cotswold Line (from Paddington and Oxford to Worcester) crosses the main... Continue Reading →
Friday 21st February 2020 (updaated Saturday 22nd February) The latest Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) scheme gets going on Monday so I thought I’d prepare travel plans and be ready to try it out. Except it’s proving a bit trickier than I thought. It’s in the Tees Valley Combined Authority area and comprises three separate geographic... Continue Reading →
Thursday 20th February 2020 My travels today once again involved sampling more impressive shiny new buses from First Bus but this time with a few unexpected experiences along the way. Read on for a mixed bag report. First Essex introduced seven new double decks to their X30 Southend to Stansted Airport route yesterday together with... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 19th February 2020 I took a ride on the Cambridge Busway earlier today to look at Stagecoach's latest vehicles purchased specifically to increase capacity to meet growing demand on the popular link from St Ives to the city as well as other destinations as far away as Peterborough and Royston. Eighteen vehicles costing £5... Continue Reading →
Monday 17th February 2020 It's 'take a ride on another high profile brand new fleet of buses' time again. Another £5.3 million spend. Another whole route conversion. This time nineteen buses for First Eastern Counties' excel branded Norwich to Peterborough 84 mile route. And all this before Johnson's promise last week of "4,000 beautiful, bouncing,... Continue Reading →
Friday 14th February 2020 Three different bus routes link Aylesbury, the county town of Buckinghamshire, with the county's former largest town, Milton Keynes (once in Bucks but elevated to its own Unitary status in April 1997). Taking the train between the two towns isn't really a viable option as you have to go via London,... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 11th February 2020 New route 459 linking the small community of Iver in Buckinghamshire (just over the Greater London border) with Heathrow Airport's Terminal 5 entered its third and final phase of introduction at the beginning of this month so I thought I'd follow up my previous visit in November with another ride around... Continue Reading →
Sunday 9th Febraury 2020 It seems not a week goes by at the moment without new 'state-of-the-art' vehicles being introduced to bus fleets around the Country; usually promoted with understandable emphasis on their green credentials at a time of increasing climate change concerns. None more so than in Basingstoke where Stagecoach South introduced a fleet... Continue Reading →
Friday 7th February 2020 Public transport provision in Epsom is somewhat anomalous. Along with neighbouring Ewell it was keen to stay on the Surrey side of the new Greater London boundary back in 1965 and TfL’s Zone 6 boundary is tantalisingly close to the town running between the previous stations to the north at Ewell... Continue Reading →
Thursday 6th February 2020 One of the benefits of being a member of the Chartered Institute of Transport is being able to attend its extensive programme of fascinating meetings and organised visits. One of these took place this afternoon to London Underground's relatively new control centre in Hammersmith overseeing the four 'sub-surface' lines (Metropolitan, District,... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 5th February 2020 I’ve yet to see a bus in what is officially dubbed the “people-powered new look” actually out on the road so these initial comments come with a health warning it might all look much better when seen in the flesh and I reserve the right to change my opinion. In the... Continue Reading →
Monday 3rd February 2020 - updated Wednesday 5th February 2020 First the good news. Rail passengers using Gatwick Airport will be pleased to see work finally get underway from May 2020 on the project to increase the station's capacity. Although an extra platform (7) was added in 2014 to reduce track congestion, particularly Gatwick Express... Continue Reading →
Monday 3rd February 2020 I gave my mate Roger Davies' book Ribble a plug when it was published last summer by my mate Ray Stenning and now it's time to extol the virtues of another book about 'the mighty' Ribble, by another colleague from years back, Paul Kirkham. Except this book takes a completely different... Continue Reading →
BusAndTrainUser 