H is for Harrogate

Saturday 23rd April 2022

And so to H. I thought about Harlow, just fleetingly, but couldn’t face the negativity. Hemel Hempstead came to mind – I sort of lived there with my parents for a time in the early 1970s while at university in Reading and it’s always interesting to go back – but in the end I opted for a strong dose of public transport positivity.

Harrogate’s population is 75,000 with a further 15,000 living in nearby Knaresborough. It’s the epi-centre of Harrogate Borough Council within North Yorkshire County Council. It’s renowned for its excellent bus service but would it pass muster in my A to Z meander around mid-size towns? Would some random bus rides and observations live up to its reputation not least as like many places the local bus companies have been suffering from driver shortages

I began my visit a few weeks ago by arriving on the half hourly Northern Rail service from York which runs via Knaresborough and Harrogate to Leeds. This is supplemented between Harrogate and Leeds by LNER’s two-hourly direct service down the East Coast Main Line to London Kings Cross.

LNER journeys only stop at Horsforth thereby achieving a Harrogate to Leeds journey time of just half an hour with Northern’s stoppers taking 36 minutes.

The famous route 36 operated by Transdev Blazefield’s Harrogate Bus Company does the same journey in 49 minutes and is currently on a Covid reduced 15 minute frequency with every other journey continuing north of Harrogate to serve Ripon half hourly. Pre Covid the respective frequencies had been 10 minutely and every twenty minutes either side of Harrogate.

However on my visit I noticed the driver shortage was impacting even this reduced timetable such are the challenges even the industry’s best companies are facing at the moment.

Other inter-urban routes from Harrogate to nearby towns including Ilkley, Otley, Wetherby, York and Bradford are operated by locally owned independent bus company Harrogate Coach Travel trading as Connexions buses as well as Transdev Blazefield.

The former runs the hourly X52 to Otley and Ilkley and the half-hourly X70 to Wetherby while the latter runs the Flyer branded hourly A2 to Bradford via Leeds-Bradford Airport, the half-hourly 7 to Wetherby and Leeds and the hourly 24 to Pateley Bridge.

There are also a smattering of more rural routes tendered by North Yorkshire County Council.

The Harrogate to Knaresborough corridor is served by both Connexions buses and Harrogate Bus Company with competing services.

The latter runs more frequently, albeit recently reduced from every 7-8 minutes to every 10 minutes while the former runs every 15 minutes. In Knaresborough buses operated by both companies undertake various loop routings to serve the town’s residential areas each with a suffix letter denoting each route.

Residents are well served here including the competing services on a couple of the loops.

Harrogate’s town routes numbered 2A, 2B, 3 and 6 are famously operated by electric Volvo buses which top up the battery with overhead pantograph charging each time the bus stands in the town’s bus station. They’re marketed as Harrogate Electrics and are superb buses to travel in with impressive interior features as I described in a recent blog.

As said, my visit began at Knaresborough’s delightful station which sits in an elevated position above the town with a wonderful viaduct immediately west of the station taking the line high above the River Nidd.

It contrasts with the rather brutal station in Harrogate which is hidden on the ground floor of an unimpressive Travelodge building.

The adjacent bus station owned and maintained by Harrogate Bus Company is a functional ‘saw tooth’ 13 bay arrangement with a well stocked (with timetables) travel kiosk (as previously highlighted) that’s all kept nice and clean and attractive but at busy times it can get very cramped in the waiting area with long queues stretching back especially for those popular route 36 buses causing pedestrian congestion.

My first journey was on a Connexions double decker on route X1A from a random bus stop in Knaresborough to St James Retail Park.

We passed through Knaresborough’s bus station and dropped a couple of the five already on board off and picked up three more all of whom bar one got off as we passed through Aspin and she alighted with me at the Retail Park terminus as the bus returned to Knaresborough as an X1B via Eastfield.

Timetable displays are available for both companies’ routes in separate cases at all relevant bus stops including at the Retail Park which is the usual collection of familiar names in shed style buildings.

I headed back into Knaresborough and Harrogate on the four journey a day tendered route 8 from Wetherby which takes a different route into Harrogate (via Wedderburn and Crossways) than the main Knaresborough corridor buses take via Starbeck.

It was worth doing as we picked up half a dozen passengers who’d obviously made a special effort to wait for this infrequent service.

I sampled the electric buses on the town’s other routes 2A/2B to Bilton and 3 to Jennyfield (both every 15 minutes) as well as keeping an eye on the half-hourly route 6 to Pannal Ash and its peak hour variant X6 to the nearby Beckwith Knowle Business Park.

These carried decent numbers for a March afternoon and the bus station was constantly busy with comings and goings of both buses and passengers.

There was some hiatus around school closing time during the afternoon with some late arriving buses with traffic getting busier and some good loads on board, with a bus seemingly not wanting to be charged up despite passengers on board ready to go. A control supervisor who is on the spot in the bus station was obviously on top of the situation and swapped buses around to get passengers on their way. Passengers were obviously pleased to be looked after and to be advised which alternative departure stand to head to.

I didn’t have time to try out the more rural routes, nor route 7 which takes the longer-way-round route into Leeds via Wetherby. But it looked to be doing a good job, and uses bespoke branded buses.

However, I did squeeze in a ride on route 24 which runs two-hourly over to Pateley Bridge in the Dales. This really is a delightful route which commendably is operated on a commercial basis Mondays to Saturdays with the Sunday timetable provided as part of the Dales Bus funded network. We brought 15 passengers into Harrogate during mid morning.

It was interesting to see some of the bus stop flags in the Dales still sporting former company names ….

… and in some cases had seen better days.

But they very much were the exception with signs and information in abundance not only from Harrogate Bus Company ….

….. but Connexions doing their bit too.

It all makes for what comes across as a very vibrant town for bus use. Definitely beats Hemel Hempstead and, as for Harlow …. you know my views!

Roger French

Previous AtoZ blogs: Andover; Bracknell; Carlisle; Durham, Evesham, Folkestone, Grantham.

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