Friday 29th October 2021 This week’s DRT bus service launch is Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority’s trial in that rural part of ‘West Huntingdonshire’ lying west of Huntingdon and St Neots. It’s got the same features and challenges I’ve covered in other blogs about rural DRT operations so I won’t repeat the same old stuff... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 27th October 2021 If you've been wanting your train company to "conceptualise its commitment to its customers individual well being combining all elements of physical, spiritual, corporal, emotional and social being to ensure that any journey leaves you positively ready" .... then Lumo’s the train company for you. When you travel with Lumo, as... Continue Reading →
Monday 25th October 2021 Following my recent outing to Sheppey and Grain on the north Kent coast, it's time to replicate similar island exploring on the north side of the Thames Estuary along the Essex coastline - said surprisingly to be the English county with the longest coastline, mainly because of all its inlets and... Continue Reading →
Saturday 23rd October 2021 It’s been a long time since you could catch a bus from the Debden and Loughton area of Essex, on the fringe of Greater London, and travel to the county town of Chelmsford. A locally based correspondent Chris reckons it was pre war when an early Green Line lettered route provided... Continue Reading →
Thursday 21st October 2021 Eighty-five enthusiastic and energised young managers from across the bus industry gathered in the Royal Beach Hotel on Southsea’s sunny seafront for around 24 hours last week and among a packed programme of speakers and site visits found time to draw up a comprehensive Bus Service Improvement Plan (BSIP) which local... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 19th October 2021 As regular readers will know I’m very partial to a lovely rural bus ride. The more infrequent and quirky the better. I always feel a sense of achievement by visiting picturesque isolated villages by bus so I thoroughly enjoyed an outing on Tuesday last week when I managed a trio of... Continue Reading →
Sunday 17th October 2021 A surprise ending And so to the fourth and final quadrant of our London encirclement commemorating last year's fiftieth anniversary of the much missed London Country Bus Services. We'd journeyed from Gravesend to Dorking; Dorking to Amersham and Amersham to Bishops Stortford and Friday saw the circle completed by travelling from... Continue Reading →
Friday 15th October 2021 Rail. Replacement. Bus. October 2021: warning for February 2022 already As you can see down here in Sussex Rail Replacement Buses are front page news again as GTR and Network Rail's media machine begins the warm up warning to give rail passengers plenty of advance notice of next February’s nine day... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 13th October 2021 As promised last month, a further quick update on my recent experiences with customer service teams in the public transport sector. In my Sunday 19th September blogpost I explained how I’d encountered a problem at Tottenham Hale Underground Station on Friday 17th when the ticket gate ate my rail ticket and... Continue Reading →
Monday 11th October 2021 Following the success of the Route 65 Running Day in April, the London Bus Museum held a similar nostalgia fest on Saturday recreating London bus route 93 between Putney Heath and it's original most southerly terminus of Dorking (reached on Summer Sundays between 1939 and 1960) . RT 1431 was one... Continue Reading →
Saturday 9th October 2021 A couple of exciting zero emission developments were added to the Leeds bus scene in September. I caught up with both during a visit on Thursday. First up is another DRT operation using electric Fiat minibuses with Mellor bodies. I know, I know, you must be tiring of reading write ups... Continue Reading →
Thursday 7th October 2021 While down in Cornwall last weekend I took the opportunity to take a ride on First Kernow’s new-for-the-2021-summer-season Falmouth Coaster branded open top bus tour of the town. It’s part of FK’s Adventures By Bus over arching brand of initiatives introduced this summer to attract the leisure travel market. Regular readers... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 5th October 2021 First the good news. Go-Ahead’s Go Cornwall Bus website which acts on behalf of Transport for Cornwall (TfC) now includes a comprehensive map of the combined county bus network showing both First Kernow’s commercial and TfC’s tendered networks. Fantastic. An integrated bus map. At last. And as I found when I... Continue Reading →
Sunday 3rd October 2021 I wrote about TfL's new route 497 on its first day of operation back on 25th January 2020. Here's a quick recap: the 497 links Harold Wood station with new housing in Kings Park (the former Harold Wood Hospital site) passing a Polyclinic and London South Bank University's Havering Campus as... Continue Reading →
Friday 1st October 2021 The DRT craze reached Aberdeenshire on 16th August when the snazzily named Ready2Go five vehicle operation hit the road. Six weeks on it was time for a ‘BusAndTrainUser’ visit to give it the once over which I managed to do on Tuesday morning to add to my collection of DRT travel... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 29th September 2021 I explored the Isle of Sheppey back in April as my very own ‘Farewell to Arriva on the Island’ Tribute Tour. The Arriva bus garage alongside Sheerness station closed as planned in July with Sittingbourne based independent owned bus and coach company Chalkwell taking over operation of the bus routes on... Continue Reading →
Monday 27th September 2021 Temporary reduced frequencies in Harrogate with fewer journeys than on display in the timetable case. It was inevitable. As soon as Ministers appeared in the media on Thursday afternoon telling us “there’s no need to panic buy petrol as there’s no shortage” you just knew Friday would see motorists queuing at... Continue Reading →
From A to B (Amersham to Bishop's Stortford) Saturday 25th September 2021 Friday of last week saw the LCBS Tour Gang reconvene for our wander through the third quadrant of the company’s Polo mint operating area as our mission continues to mark last year’s fiftieth anniversary of London Country by recreating that much missed bus... Continue Reading →
YorBus and HertsLynx Thursday 23rd September 2021 I’ve been back out and about on the DRT trail again. It’s almost becoming a full time occupation as the DfT’s Rural Mobility Pot Of Gold funding kicks in with nineteen schemes starting up as the money begins to flow. First up last Saturday I took a ride... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 21st September 2021 The last time a new station opened on the London Underground was 2008; the year the Piccadilly Line reached Heathrow's Terminal 5 and Wood Lane opened on the Hammersmith & City Line. Yesterday saw much celebration and excitement as the Northern Line's Charing Cross branch trains got to run beyond Kennington... Continue Reading →
Sunday 19th September 2021 I thought I should provide a few updates after my post a month ago about unsatisfactory experiences at the hands of various rail companies and their hard to reach customer service departments, or often, their sub-contracted outsourced companies. I explained how South Western Railway had twice declined my delay repay claim... Continue Reading →
Friday 17th September 2021 The Snowdon Sherpa network of bus routes provides a great way to explore the Snowdonia National Park. It links the six walking paths which give access to the mountains and removes the tediousness for walkers needing to retrace their outward route if parking in one of the designated parking areas across... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 15th September 2021 Transport for Wales have only gone and done it again. They've further expanded the TrawsCymru network of bus routes with a brand new route - the T10 - running through the Snowdonia National Park linking Wrexham via a connection in Corwen with Betws-y-Coed and Bangor. The T10 timetable provides a two-hourly... Continue Reading →
Monday 13th September 2021 I've been meaning to pay a visit to take a look at Chester's relatively new "Bus Interchange", opened in March 2017, for some time and a delay on the West Coast main line (axle counter failure near Rugby delaying and diverting all trains through Northampton) recently meant my extensive plans for... Continue Reading →
Saturday 11th September It’s sad when a bus garage closes. There’s so much transport history within the fabric of the building and it always seems such a shame to lose the heritage they represent and a living reminder of how bus garages looked and worked eighty to a hundred or more years ago. They’re also... Continue Reading →
Thursday 9th September 2021 Buckinghamshire’s expansionist bus company Redline has upped the stakes in its competitive battle with Arriva by introducing of a new hourly route X20 between Aylesbury and Oxford. It challenges Arriva’s long standing three-bus-an hour Sapphire branded route 280 on the same route. Redline are differentiating their interloper by offering a quicker... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 7th September 2021 Thanks for the guesses following Sunday’s post. Some of you were spot on identifying Britain’s most westerly bus stop. Bearing in mind we’re talking ‘Britain’ (therefore ruling out Northern Ireland) and not just thinking about England, the Outer Hebrides trumps Lands End by a considerable longitude; and in particular, the mission... Continue Reading →
Sunday 5th September 2021 I visited Britain's northernmost bus stop in July 2018. It's on Unst, the furthest north island in the Shetland archipelago, in the small hamlet of Valsgarth. It was a great trip. I turned my attention southwards in 2019 and visited Lizard Point in August that year to check out Britain's most... Continue Reading →
How that campaign should have looked Friday 3rd September 2021 Instead of this.... This.... This week’s controversy over Channel 4's national advertising campaign for Naked Attraction using T shape bus sides in major cities around the country reflects more on the attitude of media giant Global who signed off the campaign and those bus companies... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 1st September 2021 Apologies for the London and South East centric blogposts of late. That’ll change in the next few posts, but here’s just one more featuring a quick tour I did on Monday to check out three recent transport developments in the Capital. Aldwych goes two-way On Saturday 21st August Aldwych became a... Continue Reading →
Monday 30th August 2021 ‘Back in the day’ (I’m thinking the fifties and sixties) when the UK had a sizeable manufacturing industry and car ownership was much lower bus companies ran networks of routes to serve factories on industrial estates often sited on the edge of towns with journeys timed specifically to cater for workers’... Continue Reading →
Saturday 28th August 2021 Sooner or later the bubble had to burst. For years London's buses have been hailed as an exemplar for how bus networks should be across the country. It's a favourite bleat of MPs used to flotillas of red buses passing up and down Whitehall as they attend their Westminster offices that... Continue Reading →
From Compass to Carousel Thursday 26th August 2021 The LCBS Anniversary Tour Gang of Four (now joined by Mike Best and David Cole to make Six of the Best) reconvened on Tuesday to continue our wander around that much missed company’s Polo mint operating area taking us from Dorking Station (where we left off last... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 24th August 2021 One of London's most unusual bus routes makes its final journey this week. I write 'London’s bus route', but it's not a TfL route and only reaches as far east as Romford. But it does operate along a road once used by former London Transport Central Area red bus route 250... Continue Reading →
Sunday 22nd August 2021 Britain has three* bus networks using the prefix W. They’re a very diverse threesome. One comprises frequent routes in Wood Green and Walthamstow in north London (as well as Wanstead and Woodford). Another can be found running through the most remote spectacular scenery you’ll ever find in Britain, in the Outer... Continue Reading →
Friday 20th August 2021 A new name to the open-top bus scene this year is Reading based coach operator Aldermaston Coach Lines, the trading name of Southern Coach Lines Ltd. It’s reportedly been nine years since Southsea enjoyed an open-top bus service but now Aldermaston owner and managing director Nick Morton has introduced a service... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 18th August 2021 It's always impressive to read corporate vision documents. You know the kind of thing. Glossy photos of staff helping smiling customers and paragraphs full of glowing statements about the company's unbridled commitment to customers and how we're at the heart of everything the company does. Sadly they seldom match up to... Continue Reading →
Monday 16th August 2021 After my recent visit to Safeguard, I thought I'd feature another small bus operator exuding quality and that's Kings Lynn based Lynx operating a network of routes across north west Norfolk. Julian Paterson and colleagues began trading as recently as January 2015 and it’s no surprise to see how well it’s... Continue Reading →
Saturday 14th August 2021 After being relegated to online ‘virtual tours’ in March 2020 due to lockdown, the London Transport Museum’s programme of real life ‘Hidden London’ tours are finally back in business. The programme kicked off on Thursday with a brand new tour exploring the Kingsway Tramway Subway and I was lucky enough to... Continue Reading →
From Gravesend to Dorking Thursday 12th August 2021 OK, I realise I'm a year late, but just like the Tokyo Olympics, due to the uncertainty of Covid restrictions this project couldn't happen in 2020, but now, better late than never (just like a Green Line coach was for much of the time in the ‘old... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 10th August 2021 As well as bringing back open top bus routes all along Bournemouth’s seafront between Mudeford and Alum Chine this summer, Yellow Buses have also introduced a new route aimed at the leisure market linking Christchurch with Ringwood taking in the western side of the New Forest. It began operating at weekends... Continue Reading →
Sunday 8th August 2021 It's always a pleasure to visit one of Britain's quality smaller bus and coach companies. Safeguard Coaches has been trading for nigh on 100 years having been established in 1924. The company is still owned by the same Newman family (and that's not the famous Ensign Newmans), albeit now into their... Continue Reading →
Friday 6th August 2021 After I’d checked out Exeter’s new bus station on Monday last week it seemed a good opportunity to take a ride on First South West’s new open-top Discover Exeter tour introduced at the end of May for the summer season. It’s part of the company’s suite of initiatives under the overarching... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 4th August 2021 This week has seen Stagecoach South East revamp its bus routes between Canterbury, Faversham and Sittingbourne and introduce an exciting new extension onwards to Maidstone. Southeastern trains run regularly between Faversham and Sittingbourne but services to Maidstone are not so convenient with journeys taking well over an hour and involving a... Continue Reading →
Monday 2nd August 2021 It was a welcome makeover at the time. In September 2013 Arriva bought out its majority partner shareholders in Centrebus Holdings which had been running buses from bases in Huddersfield, Elland and Honley since 2008 under various brands. Some of the operations had originally been part of the old Yorkshire Traction... Continue Reading →
Saturday 31st July 2021 How many times have you heard local councillors or traders calling for reduced or even free car parking to encourage shoppers back to town centres? Many of us in the industry usually retort “how about making bus travel free instead?". That’s exactly what's happened in Swansea where councillors have funded completely... Continue Reading →
Friday 30th July 2021 I first met Ben Colson in 1977. He was working for Eastern Counties in Norwich and I'd been posted there for three weeks to undertake what was called 'comparative training' with the jointly managed West Riding and Yorkshire Woollen bus companies where I'd been working on the National Bus Company's two... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 27th July 2021 At a reported cost of £8 million Exeter’s brand new bus station, which opened for business on Sunday, sounded like excellent value for money so I popped down yesterday to take a look around and see what’s on offer. As readers will know I never trust the hyped up world of... Continue Reading →
Monday 26th July 2021 It’s not the longest bus route - extending only about five miles north and east of Llangollen at its furthest points - but it would be hard to find another route that packs in so many amazing scenic delights and heritage sites per mile. The brand new Dee Valley Picturesque Bus... Continue Reading →
Saturday 24th July 2021 “Worcestershire on Demand” is the trying-to-be snazzy overarching brand name for what Worcestershire County Council hope will be a network of DRT schemes across the county to provide "better value and a better service for essential travel". That's what their 'blurb' says with its rather strange grammar in the first sentence:... Continue Reading →
BusAndTrainUser 