Thursday 4th September 2025 Before today's blog - thanks to blog reader and avid Metro reader, John, here's a quick "you're not going to believe this" from TfL and the appalling handling of route 375's temporary withdrawal between Romford station and Chase Cross and its secret amended timetable. On Monday the usual PR hype page... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 2nd September 2025 This week sees a raft of bus services improvements with new Bus Service Improvement Plan funded routes in many areas as well as major changes to the TrawsCymru network and other services in Powys. I hope to sample many of these changed routes over the next few weeks but first up... Continue Reading →
Sunday 31st August 2025 Sorry readers, it's another one of those blogposts containing pure personal nostalgia. But, don't worry, more normal topics return this coming week with lots happening to report on. But this coming week .... 60 years ago in September 1965 .... also saw a major milestone in my life as I started... Continue Reading →
Saturday 30th August 2025 Welcome to another potpourri of miscellany not yet blogged about from the past month's travels .... Andover's no longer connected to Newbury I'd hoped to kick off this month's round up with a report hot off the computer keyboard from yesterday about the penultimate day for route 7 between Newbury and... Continue Reading →
Friday 29th August 2025 Welcome to a Friday bonus BusAndTrainUser Verify blog special checking out unbelievable incompetence in the Romford area this week. The much respected and popular Diamond Geezer (DG) blog first exposed the lunacy on Wednesday. It’s not that I don’t believe his description of how awful TfL has acted - DG’s blog... Continue Reading →
Thursday 28th August 2025 I recently experienced an enjoyable round trip through the Derbyshire Dales and Peaks which I thought I'd share. Alighting from the train at Derby's railway station a smart new '25' plate Kinchbus operated Enviro200 soon arrived on the Skylink branded route from Leicester and Loughborough to whisk me over to the... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 26th August 2025 Photo courtesy London Transport Museum collection Go-bus held an open day and bus rally on Saturday to mark the 100th anniversary of the former London Transport Country bus garage it now occupies in the town. Photo courtesy London Transport Museum collection And yes, that is a new name for what was... Continue Reading →
Sunday 24th August 2025 Richard Delahoy has kindly sent me a copy of his recently published book about the famous route X1 which plied between Southend and London in the 1980s. It's sub-title ‘The rise and fall of a deregulated phenomenon’ neatly encapsulates the book's substantial content. Richard has not only put together a truly... Continue Reading →
Saturday 23rd August 2025 Welcome to the western fringe of Kent for this latest review of a town with two stations, and another fairly small town too with Edenbridge containing around 10,000 population. Both Edenbridge's stations are run by Southern and both have an hourly off peak service with some additional journeys in the peaks.... Continue Reading →
Thursday 21st August 2025 The end of this month sees changes to two bus routes that cross London’s border with Hertfordshire so a small group of bus industry veterans recently joined me for an enjoyable wander cross-crossing the border four times to sample routes 84B and 610 for one last time. We began our travels... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 19th August 2025 Kent's Thameside Fastrack quietly expanded at the weekend with the opening of a new section of bus only road extending westwards from the new Whitecliife development by Castle Hill to the Bluewater Retail Park. It's definitely a case of getting buses installed before residents move in. Other than a few houses... Continue Reading →
Sunday 17th August 2025 The third review in this weekly trilogy of recently purchased books is a must read for anyone interested in the minutia of how bus networks develop to serve an expanding New Town over a period of three decades. Anyone who has devoured one of Laurie Akehurst’s previous books on London Transport... Continue Reading →
Saturday 16th August 2025 Regular readers may recall I blogged about this quirky bus route three years ago. It’s the one where security personnel remove you from the bus six miles before it reaches the advertised terminus because it's out of bounds other than for a few residents who live there. It’s this unique characteristic... Continue Reading →
A Friday bonus blog for 15th August 2025 Government controlled LNER is further restricting passenger choice and in some cases increasing fares again from 7th September as part of its Great Railway Ticket Rip Off on the East Coast Main Line. In the next phase of its "Simpler Fares pilot" LNER is withdrawing the availability... Continue Reading →
Thursday 14th August 2025 An open letter to Martijn Gilbert, Managing Director Arriva UK Bus As you begin your exciting new role next Monday I thought I'd drop you a line with a few thoughts based on impressions I've gained from extensive travel experiences with Arriva over the last few years. Let me say from... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 12th August 2025 Chiltern did it in January 2003. Greater Anglia did it (except Norwich/London) in January 2020. c2c did it in July 2021. Southeastern did it in December 2022. London NorthWestern did it in May 2023. The Overground has never had it. The Elizabeth Line has never had it. It's about time GTR... Continue Reading →
Sunday 10th August 2025 The second of the three books I bought recently is this wonderful Southdown photo album featuring prints from the Peter Mitchell collection of over 500 negatives of photographs he took in the heyday of that much loved bus company in the 1950s and 1960s and which Capital Transport arranged to have... Continue Reading →
Saturday 9th August 2025 The most conveniently sited of Gainsborough’s two railway stations is Gainsborough Central. As its name implies, it’s located right bang in the centre of town, next to a large shopping complex and massive Tesco and a short walk from the bus station. The only snag is the station sees just two... Continue Reading →
Thursday 7th August 2025 Photo credit: Emma West A much welcome upgrade to the bus route between Reading and Oxford launched this week. Not only has the timetable for Thames Travel’s River Rapids branded route X40 been improved from half hourly to every 20 minutes with new late night journeys added on Fridays and Saturdays... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 5th August 2025 I thought it was about time I gave the recently introduced FlixBus express coach service between Brighton and London a try out. It began on 13th June providing two journeys from the south coast city to Cambridge via Gatwick Airport and, intriguingly, Stratford, as the coach stop in London rather than... Continue Reading →
Sunday 3rd August 2025 While passing through Covent Garden recently I naturally called by London Transport Museum’s slimmed down, sad-shadow-of-it’s-former-glory bookshop, but still managed to splash the cash (or more accurately, tap the card) and buy three books, each with a personal connection. Here’s the first: it’s the sad tale of the London Merlins told... Continue Reading →
Saturday 2nd August 2025 Before today’s blog a quick update on the mystery of the missing route 15 on 16th July and non replies from AtoB Bus and Coach. Following publication of Thursday’s blog I was contacted by AtoB’s owner Brian who apologised for the silence in response to my emails/phone calls explaining the company... Continue Reading →
Thursday 31st July 2025 Welcome to Part Two of this month's miscellany round up, with Part One being an all London version having appeared on Tuesday. And we begin with some rather misleading announcements from Train Companies... Urgent repairs or not? Something very odd happened on the Brighton Main Line earlier this month. A major... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 29th July 2025 July's month end round up is over brimming with items not previously blogged about so I'm splitting it into two bites with today's installment covering a few items ‘seen around’ London and Thursday's post will be devoted to matters spotted outside London. Welcome to an extended route 241 I got round... Continue Reading →
Sunday 27th July 2025 Having tried out new route 714 and the soon-to-be-amended 'almost quirky' route 555 to one of Britain's best served villages, I can also report on a few other enjoyable journeys I made in the north of Surrey earlier this month. As previously explained on my first abortive attempt to visit Wisley,... Continue Reading →
Saturday 26th July 2025 Welcome to another blog featuring the fourth station pair to be found within a town or city on precisely the same line of longitude but on completely different rail lines (see Canterbury, Yeovil and New Mills, previously featured in this fortnightly series) But, as you can see from the above map,... Continue Reading →
Thursday 24th July 2025 Two more new bus routes launched this week and, once again, they're pure commercial ventures and come from one of Britain's newest bus companies. Who said deregulation and entrepreneurialism in the bus industry was dead? New ‘express’ routes X22 and X43 began on Monday linking Chester-le-Street (X22) and Stanley (X43) directly... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 24th July 2025 A new bus route for 2025 has been introduced for the summer season by Southern Vectis on the Isle of Wight. It’s a purely commercial venture with no public support through Bus Service Improvement Plan funding. And it’s not so much a bus route, more an open-top leisure travel experience. Called... Continue Reading →
Sunday 20th July 2025 I’m writing this blog on Saturday morning (yesterday) sitting in the shadow of Scafell Pike at Wasdale Head, in the Cumbrian Mountains, having arrived on one of Britain’s most scenic and quirkiest bus routes, and as the blogpost title confirms, it’s free for all passengers too. Sounds too good to be... Continue Reading →
Saturday 19th July 2025 Brothers Kevin, Ian and Anthony Delaine-Smith Longer term readers may recall the D is for Delaine blog I wrote a couple of years ago for 2023's A-to-Z of bus and train companies series. It coincided with Anthony Delaine-Smith's tenure as Omnibus Society President that year including his fascinating talk to members... Continue Reading →
Thursday 17th July 2025 Regular blog readers will appreciate I couldn’t resist giving last week’s media reports about the bus route costing a £180 subsidy per passenger journey in the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority area the BusAndTrainUser Verify treatment. Not that I disbelieved for one moment the veracity of the claim as it came... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 15th July 2025 It's the middle of the month, so time for another Quirky Bus Route. Cumbria Classic Coaches is based in Ravenstonedale, Cumbria about four miles south east of Kirkby Stephen. The company has a small collection of vintage vehicles for use on private hires, especially weddings. It also has a few more... Continue Reading →
Sunday 13th July 2025 I'd never been to Whiteley Village prior to my bus wanderings around Surrey last week. I'd known it from seeing the destination emblazoned on the front of buses serving Heathrow Airport on route 555.... ....Whiteley Village being the southern terminus of the meandering route operated by White Bus which connects the... Continue Reading →
Saturday 12th July 2025 Today's blog features the two separate stations located closest together in this fortnightly series. They're in the south London suburb of Catford in the London Borough of Lewisham. Frankly, if it wasn’t for the fact they’re named differently and the railway lines don't connect, they could be marketed as one station,... Continue Reading →
Thursday 10th July 2025 New bus links to RHS Wisley have been in operation for a few weeks so I thought it was time to give them the BusAndTrainUser once over. Woking Community Transport had been providing a shuttle bus on behalf of RHS between Woking and the Gardens and there was also a bus... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 8th July 2025 The end of an era for two odd ball tendered bus routes beckons in a few weeks time. I took a ride on both routes last week to experience the passing of the old guard. Both upcoming changes are as a consequence of a county council re-tender exercise resulting in a... Continue Reading →
Sunday 6th July 2025 Back in April readers may recall I blogged about a raft of changes to bus routes in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead involving tendered services passing between Thames Valley and Carousel while in March, after many years absence, the latter introduced a new commercial route (127) between Maidenhead and... Continue Reading →
Saturday 5th July 2025 As TfL's Superloop brand becomes ever more nonsensical with more routes planned that are questionably 'super' and are certainly nothing about being part of a 'loop', I took a ride on one of the longest standing and original non-loop routes to be added to the brand - the SL6, renumbered from... Continue Reading →
Thursday 3rd July 2025 You’d think in an age when travel between many urban centres is booming, not least by passengers pursuing leisure activities, a bus service between Wetherby (population 11,000) and Leeds, its nearest regional centre lying 13 miles south west, would be prime territory for a successful commercial operation. All the more so... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 1st July 2025 Congratulations to Hazel Grove's Park & Ride celebrating its 10th Anniversary today. I thought I'd check out how it's going ten years on. Hailed as "the first privately funded Park and Ride in the country", the £3 million 400 space facility, purchased by Stagecoach, was destined to "take 6,000 cars off... Continue Reading →
Sunday 29th June 2025 A bumper bundle for this month's round up of previously unblogged travels and sightings from the last four weeks, so let's get straight into them with more autonomous bus riding.... Autonomous Cambridge Connector ... this time in Cambridge. The latest trial of "driver-less" bus provision began this last week on a... Continue Reading →
Saturday 28th June 2025 The 36,000 residents of Falkirk are lucky to have enjoyed the choice of travelling by train to and from the town’s two railway stations for the past 175 years. It was back in 1850 the Stirlingshire Midland Junction Railway opened its new Grahamston (Falkirk) station joining the town’s original station named... Continue Reading →
Thursday 26th June 2025 It’s a brand name I believe can be traced back sixty years to 1965 when Crosville first launched Cymru Coastliner to promote its lengthy route from Chester all the way along the North Wales coast to Caernarfon. Way ahead of its time, the name stuck for decades, even though in the... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 24th June 2025 Transport planners love track based solutions for large conurbations, especially trams. Bus based systems just don’t cut it in the same way, they reckon. Look at Leeds, for example; for years city leaders have lamented its lack of trams (“the largest city in Europe without a mass transit system”) looking enviously... Continue Reading →
Sunday 22nd June 2025 Cast your mind back to March 2020. That's when Arriva was stripped of the Northern Trains franchise and control passed to the Government's Operator of Last Resort (subsequently becoming DfT Operator). Poor beleaguered Northern never recovered from the May 2018 timetable meltdown nor the strait jacket of a no growth franchise... Continue Reading →
Saturday 21st June 2025 Quite a bit of negativity was expressed on various online forums earlier this year when news broke First Bus was ceasing its extensive use of open-top buses in Cornwall this summer. These had run over the last few years with particular emphasis on attracting the post Covid growth in the leisure... Continue Reading →
Thursday 19th June 2025 I enjoyed a fleeting visit to the far south west corner of Cornwall at the beginning of this week to check out a few developments in the county’s bus network. Here’s the first of a couple of posts about those travels. (Part 2 follows on Saturday). First up when I arrived,... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 17th June 2025 It’s the middle of the month so time for this year’s monthly countdown of quirky bus routes and after the inclusion of TfL route 969 as Britain's eighth quirkiest bus route in my Top 10, I'm back in south west London for a ride on another quirky favourite taking sixth place.... Continue Reading →
Sunday 15th June 2025 As the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority gears up for bus franchising, recently elected (six weeks ago) Conservative Mayor Paul Bristow wasted no time launching a raft of new bus roues at the end of last month. But I wonder if he really appreciates what a waste of money some of... Continue Reading →
Saturday 14th June 2025 It’s the biggest contrast yet. One station at the end of a single track branch line with an hourly shuttle service with a 17 minute journey time and the other a four platform affair with two entrances/exits, two footbridges, lifts, 10 southbound trains and six northbound trains an hour including direct... Continue Reading →
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