Glastonbury gets its Rail Link bus

Saturday 8th August 2026

Readers may recall a blog last November featuring a grassroots campaign in Glastonbury calling for a dedicated direct bus route linking the Somerset town to and from Castle Cary railway station to alleviate the need for the convoluted alternative of changing buses in Street or an expensive taxi.

Well, the campaigners wish was granted from the beginning of this month after Somerset Council agreed to fund a six month trial as well as directly operate such a service itself, almost identical to the draft timetable that had been suggested. It’s been given route number 567.

The seven days a week timetable includes nine return journeys on Mondays to Fridays, with an impressively long operational day extending from 06:25 to 23:32 with five return journeys on Saturdays and four on Sundays as can be seen in the above timetable (which also includes South West Coaches route 667 between Street and Castle Cary).

It’s a one bus operation although bizarrely two buses are needed for half an hour around 19:35 while some long gaps are included in the daytime especially on Saturdays when there’s no service 567 between 12.13 and 18:27.

As you can see, the published timetable for new route 567 commendably shows all the connections between bus arrivals and departures at the station (shown in blue print) with trains to and from London, Exeter/Plymouth/Paignton, Salisbury, Weymouth and Gloucester although not every departure serves all these destinations as we’re not dealing with a Mini Switzerland here (no £6 million funding slushing around).

However, it looks like an exemplar of bus-rail integration and I had high hopes when trying it out on Wednesday, 10 days into the new service.

Readers may also recall from last November’s blog how I attempted to try out a connection available at that time from an arriving train and one of the two long standing bus routes serving Castle Cary railway station (South West Coaches routes 1 Yeovil-Shepton Mallet and 667 Wincanton-Street) only to miss the connection due to GWR’s late running train from London Paddington to Exeter due to arrive at 12:14. Which on further investigation turned out to regularly run late, sometimes extensively.

The timetable for route 567 doesn’t provide for a connection from that 12:14 arrival, and in any event after last year’s experience I wouldn’t trust it anyway, so instead I got up nice and early and travelled over to Castle Cary on South Western Railway’s 10:36 arrival from London Waterloo and Clapham Junction (depart 07:57).

It was an odd sight to see a two coach Class 158 arriving in a busy peak hour Clapham Junction – that’s all the “everything’s-going-to-be-alright-now-it’s-Nationalised” SWR could muster for the service – but after Salisbury the numbers on board thinned out to the extent, by Frome, there were only half a dozen of us left on board.

We arrived into Castle Cary six minutes late at 10:42 thanks to a late running GWR train (09:03 Paddington to Penzance) ahead of us but I wasn’t worried as the 567 wasn’t scheduled to depart until 10:51 giving a comfortable connection between the two modes.

Route 567 begins and ends its journey in Castle Cary itself which is just over a mile to the south of the station but the bus is given a generous eight minutes from there to reach the station, so not surprisingly it turned up a little early at 10:48.

As highlighted in November, Castle Cary’s station forecourt has a conveniently sited bus stop…

… with GWR style branding promoting bus links as well as full timetables on display and it was good to see the 567 had been added…

… as well as a promotion for the new route to Glastonbury and the town being added to the list of places served. Well done to GWR; it’s great to see such attention to detail.

The dedicated Mercedes Sprinter also has names of the main destinations served on the route along its sides as well as GWR’s smart Rail Link branding.

We set off – just the driver and I – on time at 10:51 towards Street and Glastonbury, the former also served by route 667 albeit by a slightly longer route (via Barton St David and Baltonsborough as shown on the map below) taking 45 minutes whereas the 567 bypasses both villages and takes 28 minutes.

Except it doesn’t. There’s a problem with the new timetable which became obvious as we headed over to Glastonbury and all the more so on the way back.

The distribution of running time is wrong. Only eight minutes is given between the village of Butleigh and Street (in both directions) whereas even with foot down driving it took 13 minutes and a more comfortable ride, as well as allowing for passengers boarding and alighting, would be 15 minutes.

The driver I travelled with said all three of the team who’ve been recruited for the new route tried practice runs before the route started last week and none could achieve less than 13 minutes even at 05:30 in the morning without any traffic about. Meet a tractor or other vehicles along the narrow roads, particularly in the village centre of Butleigh, and timekeeping will be a real problem.

Conversely nine minutes is allowed between Glastonbury and Street whereas on the way back it took us five, whereupon we had to pause for four minutes before continuing (to keep to time) only to then face the wrongly timed section of route to Butleigh and becoming six minutes late.

The upshot is it stresses out the driver and passengers heading back to Castle Cary aiming to make connections with trains. Granted most connection times are suitably generous but ironically the journey I travelled back on from Glastonbury is due to arrive into Castle Cary station at 12:10 whereas, despite the heroic efforts of the driver, we arrived at the station five minutes late at 12:15 – which shows in the timetable, among others, as a connection to the 12:15 GWR departure to Exeter (yes, that famous 10:36 from Paddington).

And as fate would have it that renowned train was once again running late – 23 minutes – due to “a fault on a train in front of this one”, so passengers would have made it but if all had been running correctly there’d have been no chance.

The 567 timetable needs urgently revising to ensure passengers trying it out to connect with trains in these first few weeks are not put off by the stress of a late running bus heading towards the station through no fault of the driver.

I appreciate it’s a challenge to work out a timetable to make connections with trains in both directions (from and to Glastonbury) using just one bus but to me, it’s just all too tight. I suggest the convoluted route followed by the bus in Street is simplified not least as route 667 also serves Street, eg taking the route showing in red below rather than the current route shown in blue.

This would save enough time to maintain the current unrealistic allowance between Street and Butleigh without altering timings. As an illustration it took us seven minutes to navigate that blue loop in Street itself on Wednesday whereas only eight minutes are given in total to reach Butleigh.

Quite how this situation has arisen when I assume the timetable was compiled following ‘on the road’ trials is a mystery. Maybe if someone from Somerset Council is reading this they could take note?

No other passengers made a connection at the station but its early days and one potential passenger passing by did enquire of the driver, while we paused in Street, about the Sunday service and asked for reassurance it ran as she was planning to catch a train.

And we did carry five other passengers, albeit all could have used other routes, including on the outward journey one from Lydford-on-Fosse to Street (667); one from Street to Glastonbury (373/374/375/376); and on the return journey, two from Butleigh and one from Keinton Mandeville to Castle Cary town centre (667).

The new 567 certainly gives a better frequency on the common section of route with the 667 as can be seen from the timetable shown earlier.

It was good to see copies of the new timetable had been posted at bus stops all along the route and a supply of an A4 printed sheet was available on board the bus…

… albeit just showing the 567 rather than the combined timetable with 667 journeys.

On both timetables there’s a note to say the “last departures from Castle Cary Station will wait an additional 5 minutes for late arriving trains” but when I asked the driver how he would know whether a train was running late or not, and if so how late it was, he didn’t know. It’s a shame with all the technology around these days the bus driver can’t be given access to an app that shows real time departures.

It’s also a pity, bearing in mind the overall cost of this trial route that a colourful and attractive leaflet hasn’t been produced and distributed to households along the route as key to its success is raising awareness. It’s also a shame, more effort can’t be made to tidy up the display at the bus stop in the centre of Glastonbury.

It’s a delightful town but the image of the bus to residents and the many visitors is not helped by such poor presentation.

Interestingly one notice (which was peeling off in the top left corner) explained arrangements for “bus routes when roads through Glastonbury are closed”.

Even more reason to get those running times sorted as I can imagine at busy times of the year (not least a certain long weekend in June) the roads throughout the area can get very congested.

I wish the route well, but it’s going to struggle to survive, especially as Somerset Council has only committed funding for six months. As has been said many times in these blogs and in the ‘Comments’, that’s simply not long enough to test out the full potential of a new bus route.

Roger French

Summer blogging timetable: 06:00 TThSSu