Saturday 31st December 2022 Today was going to be the last day of operation for the Hythe Ferry. The hourly service links the town, on the west side of Southampton Water, with Southampton. Blue Funnel Ferries have been running the service since taking it over from previous owners White Horse Ferries in April 2017. Rising... Continue Reading →
Thursday 29th December 2022 I wrote about my journey on Britain's shortest bus route back in August. That was Vectare's route 30 introduced in January 2022 between St Margaret's Hospital, Epping and Coopersale with a four minute end-to-end journey time. At that time a number of blog readers kindly suggested more contenders for a top... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 27th December 2022 Another month; another potpourri of miscellany. Another great Ensignbus running day A big shout out to the Newman family (Peter, Steve and Ross) for organising another great running day based on Lakeside at the beginning of the month. It's proving to be one of the most popular events of its kind... Continue Reading →
Saturday 24th December 2022 Dear Santa I know it's your busiest day and night of the year, but please can you deliver something from my list (I’ve not been naughty this year) …. A network bus map produced by TfL to the style adopted up until 2016 for buses in London in both online and... Continue Reading →
Thursday 22nd December 2022 Four new unusual bus routes started running in north London this week. That’s the introductory paragraph I optimistically wrote as I left home yesterday morning to try them out. Spoiler alert: one never ran; one had such a long gap in service I gave up waiting; one was extensively disrupted by... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 20th December 2022 It's one of those weeks for end of year reviews and news round ups so I thought a few updates on how Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) is going would be in order particularly as the DfT and so many local authorities have such high hopes for it. 2022 has seen nine... Continue Reading →
Sunday 18th December 2022 A blog link to a vlog. 100 Bus and Train Events in 2022. 100 clips in 10 minutes. See how many you recognise. A listing of all 100 events is in the comments. Click here for the video. Roger French Blogging timetable: 06:00 TThS
Saturday 17th December 2022 Photo of the Year: Nicely encapsulating the state of politics and transport in the country in 2022: the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak, promotes a 5p per litre fuel duty cut introduced in one of the many Budgets/Fiscal Events this year (the one in March) notwithstanding the need to cut car use... Continue Reading →
Thursday 15th December 2022 I spent a couple of days earlier this week in Inverness checking out some recent bus and train developments. 1. Request to Stop This innovation is being rolled out by ScotRail on the Far North Line from Inverness to Thurso and Wick. The idea is when passengers require a train to... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 13th December 2022 Among the bus service cuts made by Stagecoach East at the end of October were changes to the company’s bus routes between Peterborough and the market towns of March, Spalding and Ramsey. Route 33 provides a long established link to March and used to run hourly but cut back to two-hourly... Continue Reading →
Saturday 10th December 2022 Welcome to my final A to Z fortnightly exploration of public transport provision in Britain's mid sized towns which brings me to Somerset. Yeovil is the county’s second largest town after Taunton, having a population of around 48,000 making it just a bit larger than Bridgewater and Frome. Its in the... Continue Reading →
Thursday 8th December 2022 Yesterday saw the final outing for Chiltern Railways' quirky anomalous once-a week journey between West Ealing and West Ruislip. It’s been what's called a ‘Parliamentary Train’ to retain driver route knowledge on the former Great Western line out of Paddington that parallels London Underground’s Central line between Hanger Lane, Greenford and... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 6th December 2022 Safeguard Coaches managing director, Andrew Halliday contacted me last week suggesting I might like to sample the company's two recently delivered new Volvo B8R/MCV Evoras (spelt eVoRas - just to be different I guess). It sounded a good idea and one not to miss out on so yesterday morning found me... Continue Reading →
Saturday 3rd December 2022 And so to the third and final of my palindromic anagram London bus route riding trilogy. Having enjoyed the 123/321 and 132/231 it can only be the turn of routes 213 and 312 thus completing the only six route palindromic anagram possible on TfL's bus network. So far I’ve not had... Continue Reading →
Thursday 1st December 2022 There aren’t many instances of head to head competition between bus companies these days, particularly not on inter urban corridors. So I was a bit surprised to see Arriva and D&G Bus are battling it out between Crewe and Macclesfield with each company running an hourly service numbered 38. The route... Continue Reading →
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