A thought struck me while looking at the service frequency for D&G’s service 42 between Congleton and Crewe via Holmes Chapel. It is hourly Monday for the full route and two hourly on Saturdays for the same (it runs only between Leighton Hospital and Crewe on the intermediate hours); there is no Sunday service. Arriva’s 130 exhibits the same type of behaviour with an hourly daytime frequency on Saturdays and Sundays while it is half hourly during the other days of the week. Intuitively, you would have thought that, away from the rush hours, less folk would be using buses on a main work day in comparison to Saturday when the shops are open for the same hours and there are more folk off work to visit them. However, it doesn’t seem to go like that. Confounding factors might include folk spending their free time at home and not travelling about or people using services that are closed at weekends. Both of those could explain why the streets of Macclesfield are next to empty of an evening; if there is nowhere to go then nobody comes. Another thing to remember is that there is an inclination to spend a whole day going somewhere for some activity rather than dividing it up into short chunks. All of these must affect patronage and might explain why the service level of a Sunday simply drops over a cliff. All in all, the behaviour of hoards can be very odd and I suppose that it has its effects on bus timetables too.
Tag Archives: Crewe
A month full of changes
A quick look at Cheshire East Council’s list of bus service changes for October will confirm that something of an upheaval will be going on in southeast Cheshire’s bus network at the end of the month. Places like Crewe, Sandbach, Nantwich and Congleton are seeing the bulk of the action with interurban changes showing the most of the transformation. Of course, your only hope is that no reduction in service quality will result and that’s how it looks to me with BakerBus and GHA increasing their footprints with no mention of Arriva at all and plenty of references to D&G. It would seem that Cheshire’s formerly main operator is but a minor player now. There is no sign of anything planned for November or December but my hope is the Cheshire East’s newly refreshed website would be where we would find out about any changes. After all, trying to find out anything from a traffic commissioner website is dead loss, even if it is they who process all of the supporting paperwork.
No engine required for a hell of a racket
Last week saw me travel to Aviemore for a few day’s stay by way of the Caledonian Sleeper and I perhaps foolishly stuck with seated accommodation in the spirit of thrift. Scotrail seem to use Mk 2 carriages for that role and the roar when the brakes are applies cannot be missed. Might I suggest earplugs for a more peaceful night’s rest? The same din was to be heard from Mk 1 Craven carriages used by Iarnród Éireann (Irish Rail) until not so long ago but I reckon that they have been banished by newer coaching stock. In the days before the introduction of the Voyagers, the same metallic sound pervaded a cold December nighttime journey from Birmingham to Edinburgh after a job interview. In this day and age, it just makes me wonder why no one ever thought to change the bogies on the Mk 2 coaches to quieter ones like what are common on their Mk 3 and Mk 4 successors. However, that may have had something to do with the money available for such work when they were more commonly used. Replacing them with Mk 3 rolling stock is probably more sensible now that there has been an influx of new trains over the last decade and that the SuperExpress is in the offing. That leaves me to wonder when Scotrail might get to releasing the Mk 2′s from overnight duties. With the economic environment right now, that well may be a matter of money, a scarcer commodity in these troubled times.
A day ticket wouldn’t have cost much more…
Yesterday, I got out for a walk that took me from Kidsgrove to Wheelock near Sandbach. To get home, I caught the 38 and the single fare was £3.60. Arriva operate the Macclesfield-Crewe service both commercially and with council support, depending on the day of the week and the time of day. Gratifyingly, it was being well used when I was travelling yesterday evening with a healthy mixture of fare-paying and pass-wielding patrons. It was well driven too, not an experience that I can always about my experiences of using this service, particularly for occasions when travelling on the last one of a Sunday; Crewe bus drivers apparently have a reputation for being a bit mad in the driving, justified, so I may have had one. To return to the issue of the cost of travel, I don’t begrudge the fare that I was charged but the price of an Arriva day ticket is £4 and that makes me wonder if there are single fares of more than the price of a day ticket. Perhaps, asking for a day ticket when travelling from Crewe to Macclesfield or vice versa might be an idea even when embarking on a one way trip. It’s a thought that I’ll keep in mind.
