Thursday 14th September 2023
Leisure travel is booming, so it’s good to see enterprising entrepreneurs promoting bus and train travel on the internet to encouraging people to forgo their cars and use public transport to enjoy some amazing journeys as well as reach visitor attractions without the hassle of parking by going car-free. Here are three websites doing just that.
1 Good Journey
This website is a great resource to encourage people to visit attractions around the country by bus and train many of which offer attractive discounts for car free visitors which the site owners have negotiated.
It’s a well produced site with easy to navigate links taking you to information about each attraction. There are currently around 400 attractions listed with more being added all the time. Discounts for car free arrivals are typically 20-25% off admission.
The site is the brainchild of Nat Taplin who’s been involved in providing publicity for public transport initiatives over the years. I know how hard he and his team have worked to raise funding for the website, especially in its early days, as well as approach and persuade all the attractions to get involved and, crucially, get the information about public transport access up to date.
What I particularly like about travel information is the step by step guides that have been compiled for each attraction as well as providing links to current bus and train times, albeit the latter links to the trainline website. Even better, where applicable, included in the step-by-step guide are references to arriving by steam train and even by boat and where to moor it (check out those in the Norfolk Broads).
There’s another section of the website showing car-free adventures visiting a large number of towns and cities with ideas of what to do and where to visit along with how to reach them by public transport.
There are more sections devoted to bus and train travel including information about travelling around including using buses and trains combined with walks, days out and even bus travel centred holidays in such delightful places as Fife, Northumberland Coast, Yorkshire Dales, Lake District, The Gower, Isle of Wight and Cornwall.
The website encourages you to sign up for its bi-monthly newsletter (well worth a read) as well as receiving a free Scenic rail and bus journeys of Britain e-book. This wonderful publication with its amazing photography really does tempt you to give the 12 suggested itineraries a try.
The list includes Pimlico to Hampstead Heath (TfL’s route 24), the famous bus route 555 from Windermere to Keswick, the Settle Carlisle rail line as well as the Cotswolds line between Oxford and Worcester.
I’d urge any bus company managers reading this to check out this fantastic website and see how you can help Nat expand it and make it even more useful and successful. It costs you nothing.
2 Scenic Buses
This website has been put together by Andi North who runs Southampton based Mangopear – “a small but talented full service creative agency. Passionate about digital, design, photography and public transport.”
Good Journey provides links to the Scenic Buses website and indeed the two are in a sense complimentary with the latter also including ideas of places to visit and enjoy travels on scenic bus routes. Ideas for adventures by bus, featured bus routes and places to visit are all easy to find by using the simple search function on the home page or using the tabs linking to bus routes, places to visit as well as filters by genre including cities and urban, heritage, attractions, lakes and lochs, seaside, rolling hills and forests.
Like Good Journey, it’s impressive to see Andi keeps the site bang up to date, for example featuring the recently introduced Peak Sightseer, which like all routes featured, links to amazing photography of the scenery and attractions served together with a description of the route and what it offers as well as links to timetables and brochures where available.
Andi doesn’t make a charge to bus companies for their inclusion on the website, currently providing the service as a labour of love, and complimentary to his main design business so I would encourage bus company managers to support Andi in his endeavours to promote bus travel around the country and showcase Britain’s best bus routes and the wonderful scenery that can be enjoyed by taking a ride.
3 Great Scenic Journeys
Completing the trio of websites promoting bus travel is the recent addition from the ever enterprising Alex Warner who has created Great Scenic Journeys. It currently features just bus but as its name implies there are plans to expand it to include rail at a later date.
The website explains “participant transport operators and their routes are only able to join the ‘Great Scenic Journeys’ collection if they have reached a high level of customer service, as validated and accredited by our customer experience assessors.” Reviews cover a range of criteria including ease of finding out information, and its availability, value for money and any fun factor, innovative facilities and the friendliness of staff and commitment to customer service.
Those featured have therefore stumped up fees to cover these assessments and if applicable, in return, can feature as a “premium journey” although this aspect hasn’t yet been enacted on the website.
Like Good Journey you can subscribe to a newsletter for latest news and “interesting offers”.
The website currently features 31 English counties along with Wales and Scotland with bus routes listed under each, again with some fantastic photography to tempt visitors. Unlike Scenic Buses, the information for each route featured only gives details of journey duration and frequency rather than a link to the timetable. It also has a link to Google’s Journey Planner to “plan your route to this Great Scenic Journey”.
There’s a category marked Excursions but so far only Newbury & District has signed up to this and when you click on the link that takes you to that company’s website you’re greeted with a “No trips currently” message.
The website linked up to its complimentary social media feed during the summer to run the “UK Open-Top Bus Cup” sponsored by Ticketer. This saw 32 open-top bus routes around the country whittled down to the winner being Newcastle’s Toon Tour – which interesting though it is, I wouldn’t have said beats some of the other participants in the scenery stakes (Eastbourne Sightseeing, Atlantic Coaster, Lakeside 599 for example) but then that’s the fun of these World Cup style social media inspired japes.
The team have also teamed up with Go Jauntly – “an award-winning walking and wellness app” so that customers can be inspired to combine their bus or rail trip with a great walk. The website promises “over the coming months, together Go Jauntly and Great Scenic Journeys will be unlocking opportunities for walking and scenic travel fun across the Great Scenic Journeys collection in a number of different and innovative ways, whilst working with various transport operators.”
If you enter “scenic bus journeys” into everyone’s favourite search engine ‘scenic buses’ comes out top followed by a number of websites produced by national newspapers offering their own list of readers’ favourite bus rides including The Guardian, The Times and The Mirror as well as Visit England. But the three websites featured in this blog, being looked after by people who know a lot about the industry, are probably the most authoritative references available and I hope continue to expand and succeed.
Roger French
Blogging timetable: TThS
BusAndTrainUser 
Very many thanks for this unusual – but very welcome – blog. I can see myself having a lot of un exploring these sites – and also some bus routes I hadn’t come across …
So much more information available now than fifty years ago!
Rick Townend
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One problem I’ve noticed more frequently is that scenic routes are often spoiled by really dirty bus or train windows. Some obviously haven’t been cleaned for days. Not so much in London though.
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