Monday 7th June 2021 It’s not just First Bus in the South West who’ve introduced new open-top and leisure bus routes this summer. Their colleagues in neighbouring First Hampshire and Dorset have also joined in the fun with some much welcome developments on the well established Jurassic Coaster service. When first introduced a good few... Continue Reading →
Saturday 5th June 2021 There was only one development of note introduced in last month's timetable change on Great British Railways (I know I'm premature but just seeing how it'll sound) and that was on the Midland Main Line where East Midlands Railways (EMR) introduced an improved service between Corby and St Pancras International using... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 2nd June 2021 This is the one I’ve been waiting for. Of all First Bus in the South West’s exciting new initiatives for the summer season under the "Adventures By Bus" brand, it's been the new Exmoor Coaster open-top service between Minehead and Lynmouth I’ve been looking forward to the most. It began at... Continue Reading →
Monday 31st May 2021 It was 45 years ago this month when I first made the journey from Leeds to Hawes by bus. I remember it was a Saturday on a West Yorkshire Road Car Bristol RE and with a conductor too. As a Londoner with bus and train rides until then largely confined to... Continue Reading →
Saturday 29th May 2021 I was back on the DRT (Demand Responsive Transport) trail again yesterday. There’s no let up in the current fad for national and local government to fund tech based ‘shared mobility’ schemes especially where they’re seen as the possible magic solution to the ‘rural transport problem’. Here’s another one hoping to... Continue Reading →
Friday 28th May 2021 This weekend sees the withdrawal from service of Britain’s last Pacer trains. Northern Rail did the decent thing to their Pacer fleet last November while Great Western Railway followed in December. The DfT’s derogation to use these trains with their outdated non-accessible features runs out on 31st May (having been extended... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 26th May 2021 Following my hugely enjoyable ride across Dartmoor on the Dartmoor Explorer last Tuesday I made a return visit to the South West over the last couple of days to take a look at the many new bus routes aimed at the leisure market First Kernow are now running in Cornwall. There... Continue Reading →
Monday 24th May 2021 Avanti West Coast’s latest wheeze to squeeze a bit more money from passengers is their new “Standard Premium” Class pitched between Standard Class and First Class. I'm guessing it ticked the box marked ‘innovations to be introduced if successful’ in the franchise bid; and from last week it became a reality.... Continue Reading →
Saturday 22nd May 2021 If you want a good example of how local authorities and bus operators can work together to breathe new life into tendered bus routes look no further than Lancashire’s Ribble Valley where Transdev Blazefield have refreshed a small network of bus routes after winning a tender from the County Council. I... Continue Reading →
Thursday 20th May 2021 It's definitely not a return to British Railways, Grant Shapps was at pains to point out on this morning's media circuit. This is going to be very different. It's "simplification" not "re-nationalisation". Because it's called Great British Railways. Not British Railways. But it'll bring back control of tracks and operations together.... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 18th May 2021 First Bus in the South West are launching a number of exciting bus route initiatives this summer with the aim of tapping into the tourist and leisure market. They're all featured on a new website adventuresbybus.co.uk which takes you through to a colourful page on the First Bus website showing all... Continue Reading →
Saturday 15th May 2021 Night Riviera and Caledonian Sleeper both conjure up romantic images of wonderful train travel through the night whisking you from one end of the country to another. Britain's sleeper trains certainly do that, taking you from London's Paddington just before midnight and waking up in Penzance for breakfast at 8am or... Continue Reading →
Thursday 13th May 2021 No sooner had I posted yesterday morning's blog about Aberdeen's hydrogen buses came news TfL and its contractor Metroline had chalked up a ‘world second’ by introducing one of their similar fleet of Wrightbus built hydrogen double deck buses into service in London for the first time yesterday. TfL have long... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 12th May 2021 After visiting Kintore Station on Monday I stopped off in Aberdeen to catch up on the latest development in the city’s high profile commitment to hydrogen powered vehicles. In 2015 First Bus and Stagecoach introduced ten Van Hool A330H hydrogen powered single deck buses between them as phase one of an... Continue Reading →
Monday 10th May 2021 It's just over six months since the new station at Kintore reopened for business on 15th October 2020. I caught up with a visit today to check it out. I was interested to see how the new station, located 12 miles north west of Aberdeen and costing £15 million, compared to... Continue Reading →
Thursday 6th May 2021 I was struck by Baroness Vere's forthright endorsement of Cornwall Council's "vision for a high-quality, integrated and customer-focused public transport network" (quote from the Transport for Cornwall website) at the recent Transport Select Committee enquiring into the 'Bus Back Better' Strategy. “You should be very excited about Cornwall" she told Committee... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 4th May 2021 We all know it's going to be a big challenge to get passengers using public transport after the past year's pandemic hiatus. And it's good to see some exciting developments with new bus brands in Lancashire for tendered routes (Ribble Country and Little Hot Line), ambitious new services for the leisure... Continue Reading →
Sunday 2nd May 2021 I last took a ride on Go North East’s X-lines branded inter-urban bus routes back in November 2020, trying out some of the many new double decks delivered to the Company last year raising the profile of this useful route network. At that time the coaches made spare after Oxford Bus... Continue Reading →
Friday 30th April 2021 Thandi’s 11:30 Birmingham bound coach departs Victoria Coach Station yesterday FLiXBUS restarted British domestic express coach services last week with an extended range of destinations served from London so I thought it was worth giving the ambitious German company another road test. My first trip with FLiXBUS was immediately after ‘Lockdown... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 28th April 2021 It's all happening in Barking. And it's looking pretty good for the potential 26,000 public transport using residents the development known as Barking Riverside is hoping to attract as the promised 10,800 new homes planned for the next few years come on stream. Rail operator c2c has just started work on... Continue Reading →
Saturday 24th April 2021 It’s uncertain times for buses in Greater Manchester. Assuming Stagecoach and Rotala’s legal challenge against the Mayor and Combined Authorities’ decision to introduce franchising fails, the next few years are set to bring many changes, not least the current variety of liveries replaced by one unified brand. If TfGM’s promotional media... Continue Reading →
Thursday 22nd April 2021 Readers may recall my attempt to try out North Lincolnshire Council’s JustGo branded Demand Responsive Transport service when it launched last September. The £9 million (over three years) scheme is operated by Go-Ahead owned East Yorkshire using software provided by tech company Liftango and Mercedes minibuses redundant after the TfL funded... Continue Reading →
Monday 19th April 2021 As the deregulated era of free market bus operation draws towards a close it’s not surprising head-to-head bus competition is pretty rare nowadays. Not least currently because Covid has reduced passenger numbers to (at best) less than two-thirds of normal times, and no one is making a profit in the current... Continue Reading →
Friday 16th April 2021 It used to cost just £14 to land on Monopoly's Bow Street but in 2021 the latest new station of the same name (added to Britain's rail network on 14th February) has come in at a tad higher cost than that - an eyebrow raising £8 million - to build. And... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 14th April 2021 Not by one of my favourite London bus routes, the W3 (famous for its breathtaking top deck views across London as buses pass in front of Ally Pally), but on foot along what's now called the Parkland Walk following the abandoned rail line that became known as the Northern Heights. It's... Continue Reading →
Sunday 11th April 2021 A big thank you to the London Bus Museum team for organising today’s ‘Running Day’ on route 65 between Ealing, Leatherhead and Dorking. It was great fun and made up for missing the usual Spring event held at the Weybridge based museum. In many ways it was even better to see... Continue Reading →
Friday 9th April 2021 The Isle of Sheppey has been on my ‘to visit again’ list for some time, so news Arriva are retrenching from the island by closing their garage with its rather basic facilities sited alongside Sheerness station seemed a good reason to arrange a trip yesterday. I'd also been browsing Arriva's infamously... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 6th April 2021 It's not often TfL's bus stop contractors manage to install new bus stops in time for the start of extensions to bus routes. (Readers will recall my recent ride along new route 456 featuring 'dolly stops' and temporary flags despite plenty of notice before the service started.) But in Wandsworth, they've... Continue Reading →
Friday 2nd April 2021 It’s good to see Bournemouth’s Yellow Buses running open-top bus services again after a Covid enforced absence last year. My friend Ray Stenning and I took a trip to the lovely south coast resort today to have a ride. There are two routes this year, numbered 11 and 12. The former... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 31st March 2021 It's all change for Milton Keynes Council's funded bus routes tomorrow as the local authority sweeps away the low frequency services which compliment Arriva's cross town commercial network replacing them with Demand Responsive Transport (DRT) commissioned from the tech company Via. Councillor Lauren Townsend, Cabinet member for Community Safety, hailed the... Continue Reading →
Monday 29th March 2021 TfL's newest bus route numbered 456 began a couple of weeks ago on Saturday 13th March. As I remarked in my 6th March blog, introducing a brand new route when TfL is running a huge deficit with no certainty about future funding as well as during a pandemic lockdown seemed like... Continue Reading →
Saturday 27th March This week's decision by Mayor Burnham to introduce bus franchising in Greater Manchester came as no surprise. After spending over £11 million in preparatory work over the last couple of years with two public consultations promising better buses alongside much "take back control" rhetoric it would have been a strange outcome if... Continue Reading →
Saturday 20th March 2021 'Better' is definitely the word of the week, and I’m not referring to the continued much welcome news of improving Covid infection, death and hospitalisation levels and vaccination roll out (although talk of a third wave in Europe is somewhat concerning just as our irreversible freedom beckons) no, I mean ‘better’... Continue Reading →
Saturday 13th March 2021 Did anyone notice any particular story dominating media headlines this week, or did I miss something? The world of buses and trains has also been a bit quieter on the news front this week although expanded bus services and some extra rail journeys to ensure school children could return to school... Continue Reading →
Saturday 6th March 2021 First up this week a shout out to long standing family owned Bourne based bus company Delaine Buses, who proudly put their new ADL E200MMC single decker into service on Monday (1st March). It was the first (and only) '21' plate bus I've seen this week (and virtually at that too).... Continue Reading →
Saturday 27th February 2021 The Government's new-look-cautious irreversible-one-way-road approach to unlocking means the 'stay-at-home' message will be eased, subject to data, "data not dates", in four weeks (at the earliest) on 29th March (which sounds like a date to me, as does 12th April, 17th May and 21st June, but I'm sure it's all splendidly... Continue Reading →
Saturday 20th February 2021 A few quick postscripts to last week's blogpost. Firstly, I got my Grand Centrals mixed up with my Grand Unions when reporting on the ORR's decision to turn down the application by Grand Union to run a new train route between Paddington and Carmarthen not Grand Central as I erroneously mentioned.... Continue Reading →
Saturday 13th February 2021 I was uncertain whether this week’s ‘word of the week’ is ‘Darcy’ or ‘uncertain’. I plumped for the former as there seems to be so much uncertainty about the latter, especially when it comes to whether Cabinet Ministers reckon we should all be booking our summer holidays. Turns out we shouldn't,... Continue Reading →
Saturday 6th February 2021 A truly amazing inoculation milestone was passed on Wednesday. What a remarkable achievement. Ten million people vaccinated within twelve months of news of a "new novel virus" originating in China is quite extraordinary. Last Saturday almost 600,000 received the jab. That's the equivalent of the whole population of Glasgow vaccinated in... Continue Reading →
Saturday 30th January 2021 Worcester or ... Lincoln or ... Wakefield or .... Preston .... completely wiped out. In ten months. Haywards Heath ...... just since Christmas. Five missed COBRA meetings ... Shaking hands with everyone ... Cheltenham Races ... PPE ... Testing ... a protective ring around care homes (not) ... send the virus... Continue Reading →
Saturday 23rd January 2021 Photo courtesy of The Guardian We've heard a lot about "at pace" over the last ten months. I'm old enough to remember when PPE was being sourced "at pace"; when PPE was being rolled out "at pace"; when testing was being ramped up "at pace"; when laptops were being distributed to... Continue Reading →
Saturday 16th January 2021 I should have guessed. Just as we were reassured on a Sunday morning primary schools were perfectly safe to open yet by Monday evening they'd become "vectors of transmission" necessitating their closure, so having welcomed this latest lockdown's absence of Downing Street's damaging "avoid public transport” messaging in last week's round... Continue Reading →
Saturday 9th January 2021 There's nothing like a pandemic taking a serious turn for the worse (numbers infected, numbers in hospital, numbers dying all rising exponentially); the alert level rising to highest status five (“a material risk of healthcare services being overwhelmed”); and a new full-on, stay-at-home, Union-flag-in the-background, occasional-fist-thumping-the-table, grim-faced Prime Ministerial lockdown announcement... Continue Reading →
Sunday 3rd January 2021 Today marks the end of a train era on the Isle of Wight as the Island Line's infamous former Underground stock dating from 1938 is finally retired after 82 years front line service. They're by far the oldest trains running on the national network. Like a lot of people I enjoy... Continue Reading →
Sunday 20th December 2020 A very warm welcome to this socially distanced, Covid secure venue for our annual event in which we celebrate the 'World of Buses and Trains' with a round up of what's been happening in 2020 as well as handing out some very special awards and a quiz to test your knowledge... Continue Reading →
Saturday 19th December 2020 How appropriate that aside from my usual "Annual Review, Quiz and Awards of the year" which will post tomorrow, for the penultimate blog of 2020 I was able to try out Transdev Blazefield's smart new "Sky Class" buses today. What a positive end to a rather dismal year. Photos and promotional... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 16th December 2020 No they won’t be; only joking. But the latest edition of TfL's Tube map has been updated and published both online and in print today. After much campaigning the Thameslink operated National Rail line has been added back ... and not just between Elephant & Castle through the 'core' to Kentish... Continue Reading →
Saturday 12th December 2020 If you're thinking nothing quite matches the lengthy delays between new trains being ordered and when they finally enter service, you're ignoring the world of bus network developments in London. Today sees the implementation of TfL’s bus review in the Richmond and Twickenham area. It follows a public consultation held way... Continue Reading →
Thursday 10th December 2020 Have you heard of ‘Seatfrog’? It’s been LNER’s way of offering upgrades from standard class to first class on its trains since 2017. More recently it's begun doing the same for Avanti West Coast and GWR . Although it’s been around for three years I only gave it a try for... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 8th December 2020 Greater Anglia’s fleet of 33 five-car Bombardier Class 720 ‘Aventra’ trains have finally entered service after many months of delays caused by software issues and more recently due to Covid. The original train order, placed with Bombardier in September 2016 (you have to be patient in the world of new train... Continue Reading →
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