On Trains & Buses

A tale of two Wayfarer tickets

Posted on October 14, 2012

Reading time: 4 minutes.

Confusingly, being in Cheshire means that we have access to not one but two Wayfarer tickets for getting out and about certain places using public transport. They are very different as I discovered when I asked for one a bus to Buxton one day; what I got wasn’t the ticket that I expected!

What I had expected to get for my money was Transport for Greater Manchester’s Manchester Wayfarer ticket.  For the £10 adult tariff, you can have a sheet of folded card where you scratch off the year, month and day for when you want to make use of it. The fact that it’s a multi-modal ticket makes it very useful because you can mix and match train and bus services on a day out.

The extent of the rail network in which the Manchester Wayfarer is valid is more than that in Greater Manchester itself with parts of Cheshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire included. Looking at the full map will tell you where you can go using the ticket.

The region within which the Manchester Wayfarer can be used on bus services is greater than with trains. Looking at the full map shows that parts of Staffordshire and West Yorkshire are included along with those in the validity area for train travel. It strikes me that a day out from Manchester to Ashbourne becomes a possibility and there’s a lot to be said for that flexibility.

In addition to the £10 adult ticket, there are other Manchester Wayfarer ones. For instance, there’s a £5 one for folk aged up to 15 or 60 and over along with holders of the National Concessionary Travel Pass. There’s a group one too for £20 that is an option for family groups. The maximum number of folk over the age of 15 for this four-person ticket is two but that still suffices for days out with kids in tow.

What I got on that bus that Sunday morning was a Derbyshire Wayfarer ticket printed using the vehicle’s ticket machine. This, as the name suggests, is for train and bus travel within Derbyshire and to only certain points outside the county’s boundaries. One of these is Macclesfield but the centres of Sheffield, Burton-on-Trent and Uttoxeter also gain coverage on journeys to and from the county. That Stockport wasn’t included became clear to me on attempting to travel to there from Buxton on the 199 bus service that then was operated by Trent Barton. The Wayfarer got me as far as the county boundary and another ticket was needed to get me the rest of the way, highlighting that I didn’t have the Wayfarer ticket that I thought I had.

The adult version of the Derbyshire Wayfarer costs £11.10 and allows you to have a child under the age of 16 travelling with you without the need for another ticket. There’s a concessionary version too for £5.55 which bizarrely allows you to bring a dog instead of a child and there I was thinking that dogs didn’t need tickets for using public transport! There’s a group ticket too for £20 that has the same rules as per its Manchester namesake. That’s not because Beeston and Nottingham train stations sell variants costing £15.80 for the adult version and £7.90 for its concessionary counterpart so that you can explore parts of Derbyshire with one of those stations as your starting (and ending) point.

So, what I needed to do on that Sunday was to go to Macclesfield’s train station for a Manchester Wayfarer as I have done a few times since then. While its Derbyshire equivalent is widely available on buses, trains and train stations, you need to go to train stations, Transport for Greater Manchester travel shops and some bus company offices for the Manchester one unless you get it by post. The great thing about these scratch and use rover tickets is that you scratch off the date panels only when you need to use a ticket, so you can have a few of them in hand until you want to travel using one. That makes the postal way of getting them less odd than otherwise would be the case.

Once you realise which Wayfarer is which, these are very useful rover tickets for their respective areas. Their having different names would make matters clearer, but that’s the only thing that is to be said against them. Unlimited multi-modal travel for a day for a small fee is no bad thing at all, especially with the monetary pressures that affect many people.

Update on 2016-05-10

The Derbyshire Wayfarer now costs £12.30 and the Manchester Wayfarer costs £12 from a train station.

Update on 2017-11-10

The Derbyshire Wayfarer now costs £12.60 and the Manchester Wayfarer costs £13.

Update on 2023-04-22

The Derbyshire Wayfarer now has bus-only and bus-and-train versions. The first is cheaper than the second and the information is available from Derbyshire County Council on their website.