Saturday 21st January 2023 Tomorrow sees one of England’s seven jointly operated inter-urban bus routes change to be operated by just one company. After today Arriva are quitting the long established route 685 between Newcastle and Carlisle with fellow operator Stagecoach taking over Arriva’s three bus workings increasing their commitment from two buses up to... Continue Reading →
Thursday 18th January 2023 This month’s miscellany I spotted on recent travels. Coalville information I was in Coalville on Tuesday. It has two locations in the town centre where buses congregate - one called Marlborough Square and the other Memorial Square. It can be confusing for visitors but credit to Leicestershire County Council which has... Continue Reading →
Thursday 12th January 2023 The Chiltern Railways ‘ghost bus’ ran for the first time yesterday demonstrating our railway at its most bizarre. It was a whacky Wednesday welcome to a superfluous one-journey-a-week outing between West Ealing and West Ruislip stations which no passengers in their right minds will ever use other than for the enjoyment... Continue Reading →
Thursday 1st December 2022 There aren’t many instances of head to head competition between bus companies these days, particularly not on inter urban corridors. So I was a bit surprised to see Arriva and D&G Bus are battling it out between Crewe and Macclesfield with each company running an hourly service numbered 38. The route... Continue Reading →
Thursday 20th October 2022 I can’t let Rannoch Moor, Bodmin Moor, Dartmoor and Exmoor get all the bus blog action so thought it was high time I paid another visit to the lovely North York Moors and take a bus ride across this scenic delight of a National Park. You just can’t beat a double... Continue Reading →
Tuesday 11th October 2022 Welcome to an occasional series of London bus rides on palindrome route numbers. And first up for consecutive number lovers are routes 123 and 321. I’m delighted to kick off with a ride on the 123 for two reasons. Firstly this year marks 50 years since I began my bus conducting... Continue Reading →
Saturday 3rd September 2022 I know; it’s not a mid size town in its own right; not even a small size town come to that. More just a crossroads in Flintshire’s sprawling Deeside conurbation but ‘beggars can’t be choosers’ when it comes to awkward letters in my fortnightly A-to-Z visiting odyssey. The town gained its... Continue Reading →
Thursday 25th August 2022 Firstly an update to Tuesday's blog regarding Kent's bus cull for blog subscribers and early morning online readers before the post was updated at 07:30. Thanks to reader Darryl I added an update after it had been published to confirm at a Kent County Council Scrutiny Committee meeting last Thursday the... Continue Reading →
Saturday 6th August 2022 It’s the smallest town I’ve visited in my fortnightly AtoZ safaris but there aren’t many O options to choose from. Oswestry’s population at around 17,000 means it’s not my normal ‘mid size’ town for a visit although by Shropshire standards it is in fact the second largest town in the unitary... Continue Reading →
Saturday 16th July 2022 It's been a busy few weeks for new bus station openings. Joining Stevenage (see Tuesday's blog) is the city of Leicester which unveiled its all new St Margaret's Bus Station to the public on Sunday 26th June. I was able to pay a visit last Sunday to check out the new... Continue Reading →
Saturday 26th February 2022 It's time for my fortnightly visit to a small to mid sized town and for D I selected one of England's most beautiful and iconic cities which I hadn't explored for many months. The city of Durham's population is around 50,000. It's the administrative centre of its namesake Durham County Council... Continue Reading →
Sunday 6th February 2022 Readers will have seen my recent news update about Essex County Council promoting its "spring clean" of Harlow's notorious bus station “with help from Arriva and Harlow Council”. It was good news that "public transport posters and timetables have been updated, alongside a deep clean" so as I was passing through... Continue Reading →
Saturday 20th November 2021 It’s been a long lingering death sentence. 'The writing was on the wall’ way before the pandemic destroyed passenger numbers so it came as no surprise to hear news Arriva are withdrawing its Green Line branded route 758 between Hemel Hempstead and London Victoria. The route will cease after service on... Continue Reading →
Saturday 6th November 2021 I’m conscious there’ve been a few blogs recently about bus routes in Essex; well, sorry folks, here’s another one. The issue is, each time I visit I spot something that attracts my attention justifying a return visit to investigate further. I did the same a year ago when I took a... 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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 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 →
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 →
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 →
Friday 25th September 2020 Bus provision in the Harlow area has been challenging for many years. Not helped by a myriad of small bus companies of dubious quality coming and going into the market causing inevitable instability to the network, nor the town being seemingly left out on a limb in Arriva's various management reorganisations... Continue Reading →
Thursday 24th September 2020 Fifty-one years ago it was all very straightforward. London’s red buses ventured north as far as Potters Bar, Cheshunt and Waltham Cross in Hertfordshire as well as Waltham Abbey, Epping and Debden in Essex (oh, and Ongar as well of course). London’s green buses ventured much further north to serve places... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 26th August 2020 It's been trailed on social media as making "it easier than ever to connect with the people and places that matter to you". Arriva'smuch vaunted new website and app were launched yesterday. It gets a one star rating from me, and that's being generous. Bring back the previous website famed for... Continue Reading →
Friday 14th February 2020 Three different bus routes link Aylesbury, the county town of Buckinghamshire, with the county's former largest town, Milton Keynes (once in Bucks but elevated to its own Unitary status in April 1997). Taking the train between the two towns isn't really a viable option as you have to go via London,... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 6th November 2019 Today's been an auspicious day for me. It's not my birthday but by dint of political chicanery back in 2010, my postcode and date-of-birth numbers have today, at last, come up in the concessionary bus fares entitlement lottery. There are now 8,500,001 people in England enjoying free travel on local bus... Continue Reading →
Wednesday 1st May 2019 It's day three of Arriva's latest Click venture introduced in Leicester on Monday, so I thought it was worth a trip to see how it's panning out. Corporates love to boast about being the first to do something; they salivate over 'ground-breaking initiatives' and associated hype reckoning it makes for a... Continue Reading →
Monday 7th January 2019 It's all happening in Guildford this week. Stagecoach South introduced a fleet of nine ADL Enviro 200EV electric buses on the Guildford Park and Ride services today while, as predicted in my post on 16th November last year, the bus war between Arriva and Safeguard has escalated into Bellfields. I had... Continue Reading →
Friday 16th November Head to head bus competition broke out in Guildford last week. It won't last; one operator will blink first - read on to find out which. Long established family owned Safeguard Coaches runs circular routes 4/5 linking the city centre with Aldershot Road, Park Barn and the Royal Surrey County Hospital. Eight years... Continue Reading →
I arrived in Liverpool yesterday lunchtime to try out Arriva’s new Click service and soon spotted the awful ‘Say Yes To Bus’ bus with its gaudy contravision vinyl, passing by on route 53. 'Say Yes To Bus’ is a campaign funded by partners in the ‘Liverpool Alliance’ with the laudable objective of encouraging bus travel... Continue Reading →
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