Thursday 8th February 2024 BBC London News carried an all too familiar negative bus story at the end of last month featuring one of its own journalists (Paul Moss) alleging buses on his local TfL route 18, despite not being full, are not stopping at a bus stop in Kensal Town leaving passengers frustrated. Apparently... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 6th February 2024 Durham's new bus station opened for business on Sunday 7th January. At a cost of £10.4 million (£6.8 million from the County Council and £3.6 million from the Government's Transforming Cities Fund approved by the Combined Authority's Joint Transport Committee for the North East), it offers greatly improved facilities for passengers... Continue Reading →
Sunday 4th February 2024 The latest segment of TfL's Superloop network launched yesterday. Route SL5 is the shortest section of the loop-round-London-that-isn't-really-a-loop, lying roughly between five o'clock and six o'clock on a clock face analogy. In geographic terms that's from Bromley to Croydon. It has the fewest number of bus stops of the Superloop network... Continue Reading →
Saturday 3rd February 2024 Third in this year’s fortnightly route 100 odyssey is another cross-county-border inter-urban bus route but, unlike the first two already featured (Stevenage/Hitchin and Crawley/Redhill), this one really is pure inter-urban. No wandering around residential estates in the urban centres for this double deck operated 35 mile route across some of England’s... Continue Reading →
Thursday 1st February 2024 The infamous £3 million Barry Docks Transport Interchange, which opened last year without any buses, can now proudly boast it has at least one bus route enabling passengers to interchange with trains. Commencing on 8th January, Vale of Glamorgan Council introduced a new timetable on local town route B3 so it... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 30th January 2024 This month's Seen Around is a special miscellany garnered on a recent couple of days I spent in Glasgow where I was delighted to make a presentation to the McGills Group 'management team talk' Awayday held at Hampden Park Stadium, as you can see above. As usual, while in the City... Continue Reading →
Saturday 27th January 2024 A new monthly blog series for 2024 kicks off today, taking a look at Britain's Top Ten Busiest Railway Stations. Except without giving away any spoilers, as well as being 'Britain's Top Ten' they're also 'London's Top Ten', as perhaps not surprisingly, that's where they're all located. So let's begin the... Continue Reading →
Thursday 25th January 2024 I know I’m late to the “let’s finally welcome SWR’s new Arterio trains into service” party with lots of online coverage already available following SWR's 'soft launch' a fortnight ago of one train running a limited service, but 14 days is nothing compared to the four year wait to see these... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 23rd January 2024 Technology company Prospective and First Bus are seemingly very keen to promote and publicise the use of AI in schedules and timetable compilation. Following the article in trade magazine Coach & Bus Week last month, the story appeared on the BBC News website last Thursday repeating the claim about "20% more... Continue Reading →
Sunday 21st January 2023 “Our Simpler Fares pilot aims to make buying tickets even easier and give customers a better experience with just three ticket types.” That’s the pitch LNER’s marketing people are using to justify the new “70min Flex Ticket” announced on Tuesday that starts on Monday 5th February. But what the PR and... Continue Reading →
Saturday 20th January 2024 Metrobus 100 between Crawley and Redhill Second in this years fortnightly series featuring all Britain’s 26 bus routes numbered 100 brings us to another busy cross county border, inter-urban route in the shape of the Metrobus operated service between Crawley’s Maidenbower residential area and Redhill’s Park 25 development. It has similar... Continue Reading →
Thursday 18th January 2024 Sneaking into service just before Christmas with no first journey fanfare, ribbon cutting ceremony or any prior notice at all was the first of Glasgow Subway’s new Stadler built four coach trains. The 17 trains were ordered by SPT way back in 2016 with the first being delivered in 2019 but... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 16th January 2024 It's timely to have a DRT update. Firstly to Hertfordshire where the HertsLynx service based on Buntingford in 'North & East Herts' introduced in September 2021 and operated by UNO has been expanding across Hertfordshire. The scheme was extended from 4th December to include Hertford and Ware, making for quite a... Continue Reading →
Saturday 13th January 2024 Arriva introduced a new ‘Connexions’ brand with a suite of changed route numbers using the X prefix for its inter-urban network based on Aylesbury this week. It’s a very welcome step presenting a joined up route network with easy to understand timetables. The first rule of renumbering is to have plenty... Continue Reading →
Thursday 11th January 2024 London’s most bizarre bus route There wasn’t a cake and a candle to mark its first birthday, but there was definitely a celebratory atmosphere among the passengers and driver on board London’s most bizarre bus route yesterday morning. The one journey a week Rail Replacement bus service for Chiltern Railways between... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 9th January 2024 It was good to see Reading Borough Council kicking off the new year last Tuesday with funding for a bus route to serve the new Reading Green Park station which opened last May Perhaps not surprisingly Reading Buses won the tender to run what is an extension of hourly route 9... Continue Reading →
Saturday 6th January 2024 A new year heralds a new fortnightly series of BusAndTrainUser blogposts. And for 2024, instead of another A-to-Z, I'll be featuring all Britain's bus routes numbered 100, as by the wonders of numerical coincidence there just happen to be 26 of them. Britain's bus routes numbered 100 provide a fascinating mixture... Continue Reading →
Thursday 4th January 2024 My very first work experience as a fresh faced management trainee almost fifty years ago was a placement in the schedules office at Belle Isle bus depot in Wakefield where four members of staff, including the long experienced Harry and Ted, compiled vehicle workings and staff duties for West Riding and... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 2nd January 2024 For many years Transport for Edinburgh has enjoyed a monopoly on the lucrative travel market between Edinburgh Airport and the city centre. That’s not to say passengers haven’t been well served. Lothian Buses regularly upgrades its Airlink 100 branded frequent bus route by investing in impressive new buses creating a high... Continue Reading →
Sunday 31st December 2023 To round off this series of special blogs for the festive period here's a timely look forward to what promises to be another action packed transport year ahead in 2024. Among the much delayed and long awaited projects which absolutely must happen in 2024 are the introduction into service of the... Continue Reading →
Saturday 30th December 2023 Another month end; another miscellany round up. Misleading Thameslink Passengers Sunday 10th December saw yet another Sunday closure of the Thameslink core between London Bridge and St Pancras. On that day, as usual in such circumstances, southbound Thameslink trains either depart from the terminating platforms at London Bridge or the usual... Continue Reading →
... costing £250 per passenger. Thursday 28th December 2023 Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority Mayor Nik Johnson has aspirations to take control of the region’s bus network through franchising but if a recent meeting of the Authority’s Transport & Infrastructure Committee is anything to go by, he’s going to have his work cut out to... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 26th December 2023 I'm transitioning from a blogger to a vlogger. But for one day only. Click on this link for a visual reminder of 100 things that happened in the world of buses and trains in 2023. It's my one and only YouTube upload of the year. And it's all over in 10... Continue Reading →
Sunday 24th December 2023 The wait is finally over. After twelve long months of anticipation that's seen entries flood in for the bus and rail industries' most coveted and prestigous awards, the winners can now be exclusively revealed in this Christmas Eve Blog Special. These really are the accolades to proudly display for all to... Continue Reading →
Saturday 23rd December 2023 Welcome to another end of year nostalgic look back over the last twelve months of frenzied bus and train activity in the UK with BusAndTrainUser's Review of the Year along with the ever popular Quiz of the Year testing your knowledge and memory recall of the year's quirkier happenings. And if... Continue Reading →
Thursday 21st December 2023 Newbury & District (part of the Reading Buses suite of bus operations) has recently introduced three new Volvo B8R Plaxton Panther 3 coaches on the fledgling flightline branded route between Basingstoke, Frimley, Camberley, Bagshot and Heathrow Airport, so I made a return visit last Saturday to see how the route was... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 19th December 2023 Welcome back to my occasional blog series which fact checks the veracity of headline grabbing negative claims about buses and trains so beloved of modern main stream and social media channels. This time I'm investigating a story that appeared across most newspapers back in August reporting a new car park had... Continue Reading →
Saturday 16th December 2023 370 miles north of the brand new Brent Cross West station is the location of this week's second new addition to the rail network map; in the tiny village of East Linton, population 1,790. No, I haven't missed a 0 off. It's a new station for a population of 1,790. It... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 12th December 2023 The west side entrance to Brent Cross West The seventh and eighth new railway stations for 2023 opened this week; on Sunday (Brent Cross West) and yesterday (East Linton). I'll tell you about East Linton in an upcoming blog, but for today it's a visit to Brent Cross West. Located between... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 12th December 2023 I knew there might be challenging peak hour traffic conditions on the North Circular Road on a Monday morning…….but never expected it to be as bad as it turned out yesterday. If TfL knew about the disruptive utility roadworks on the North Circular Road near Colney Hatch Lane (and presumably someone... Continue Reading →
Sunday 10th December 2023 Yesterday saw TfL introduce the Superloop route that heads up its new SL number sequence. Route SL1 covers the northern arc taking over where route SL10 ends in North Finchley thereby extending the loop via Arnos Grove, Palmers Green and Edmonton to Walthamstow, terminating in the bus station by Walthamstow Central... Continue Reading →
Saturday 9th December 2023 It’s not only Leicester City Council running a free circular bus service around the city centre with electric buses; Hereford also started giving it a go a couple of weeks ago, on 24th November, with its new City Zipper. Operated on the City Council’s behalf by Yeomans Travel, the 15 minute... Continue Reading →
Thursday 7th December 2023 By the 1820s the River Thames at Rotherhithe was so congested it had become the M25 of its day. The nearest river crossing for merchants and citizens was London Bridge but that was over two miles away as well as being busy and expensive to use. It's said the river was... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 5th December 2023 It’s not just Hertfordshire rolling out new bus routes as Bus Service Improvement Plan funds flow through local authority finances. Oxfordshire’s councillors have also had their crayons out adding country roads long devoid of buses back to the County's bus network. Three new Monday to Saturday bus routes with fairly limited... Continue Reading →
Saturday 2nd December 2023 And so to Z. Z&S Transport is one of several small bus companies in the Buckinghamshire area around Aylesbury which have prospered from gaining bus tenders as well as contracts for school tansport and bus and coach hire. It's typical of a whole genus of bus company that's the backbone of... Continue Reading →
Thursday 30th November 2023 The end of another month so time for a round up of observations garnered as I've travelled around over these past few weeks that may have merited an X but haven't been worthy of a full blown blog. Elizabeth in Control One of the benefits membership of the Chartered Institute of... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 28th November 2023 The autonomous vehicle industry is certainly booming as more trials get underway on the UK's public roads including this latest one in Milton Keynes involving a rather strange looking bus. It follows both the Didcot trial involving funding from the DfT's Centre for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CCAV) operated by First... Continue Reading →
Sunday 26th November 2023 We’ve had the SL6. SL7, SL8 and SL9 but they were just aperitifs and starters, being reheated routes X68, X26, 607 and X140, and two of them aren’t even part of a loop so shouldn’t even have been on the menu. But now comes the main course in the form of... Continue Reading →
Saturday 25th November 2023 As highlighted in my recent blog about Hertfordshire’s new bus route 908, two further new routes began in the County on Monday this week so I took a ride on that first day to see what they bring to the network. Route numbers used are 721 and 725 rather than in... Continue Reading →
Thursday 23rd November 2023 The new arrivals concourse with passageways to the airport terminal marked with an arrow. After three years of intensive work it’s very welcome to see the £250 million upgrade to Gatwick Airport’s railway station finally finished and opened for passengers on Tuesday. The new arrivals concourse can be seen above the... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 21st November 2023 2023 hasn't exactly been a bumper year for new train introductions. Until now we've only had Stadler built Class 777s for Merseyrail and Class 231s for Transport for Wales back in January/February followed by c2c getting a few Class 720s for peak hour journeys, but on Monday last week West Midlands... Continue Reading →
Saturday 18th November 2023 The current use of the York Pullman name began as recently as 2007. That’s when haulage firm K&J Logistics which had a small fleet of buses and coaches resurrected the York Pullman brand, it being unregistered having been abandoned five years earlier by First York which in turn had acquired the... Continue Reading →
Thursday 16th November 2023 When I wrote about Wiltshire Council's launch of Wiltshire Connect three months ago I mentioned the Council would be expanding the geographic area covered by its semi-flex DRT scheme in two more phases; in September and at the end of October. Sure enough the full operation is now up and running... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 14th November 2023 Cardiff may be struggling to get its Transport Hub completed (as featured in Saturday’s blog) but up in the North East North Tyneside Council opened a sparkly new facility in North Shields at the beginning of September having only finalised plans for its construction as recently as February 2022. North Shields... Continue Reading →
Saturday 11th November 2023 How do you move a railway station 80 yards further along the tracks? I've been to Morley to find out. Morley's new platforms, footbridge and lifts can be seen in the distance. Located in West Yorkshire, Morley lies six miles south west of Leeds and 13 miles north east of Huddersfield.... Continue Reading →
Thursday 9th November 2023 If the pre-launch photo-call is anything to go by everyone at Shropshire Council is very excited about the County's introduction of DRT. Shropshire Council officers and councillors with their new electric Mellor Sigma. Photo courtesy Shropshire Council. After much anticipation and about two years in the planning, Shropshire Council's Connect On-Demand... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 7th November 2023 Readers across the detail of former Green Line routes may recall in a blog in August about retracing route 705 between Sevenoaks and Windsor I made reference to the inability of doing the same for sister route 704 (Tunbridge Wells to Windsor) due to the lack of a daytime bus route... Continue Reading →
Saturday 4th November 2023 The newest of my fortnightly AtoZ of bus and train companies, Xelabus was only formed as recently as November 2010 by Gareth Blair. Based in Eastleigh on an adjacent unit to Bluestar on the Barton Park Industrial Estate, I recall an enjoyable visit there back in 2019 as part of the... Continue Reading →
Thursday 2nd November 2023 Hot on the heels of last Thursday's blog catching up with the six month old route 907 between Stevenage and Cheshunt comes another Hertfordshire County Council inspired new bus route introduced this week. It's numbered 908 and runs between Stevenage and Welwyn Garden City. Like the 907 it falls under the... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 31st October 2023 It's the end of another month so time for a recap of those things that caught my eye as I travelled around that may have made it into an X but didn't make it into a full blown blog. Travelcard reprieve Let's start with the excellent news that a compromise was... Continue Reading →
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