Within the last few days, a number of changes to bus services serving Crewe have been announced. These are coming in three waves, one for each of three bus companies. D&G is first and largely sticks to tweaking times and routes as does First. Arriva sadly are doing a spot of pruning though this is no near as drastic as what was facing us this time last year.
The 22nd of September is when the first batch of changes will come to pass and they are being introduced by D&G. Service 85 from Crewe to Hanley (Stoke-on-Trent) will have two morning journeys starting later: 08:15 at 08:35 and 09:30 at 09:35. The 45/45A service between Nantwich and Crewe will see the 08:22 journey from Marshfield to Crewe start at the earlier time of 08:12. Crewe town services 8, 8A and 9 are seeing some swapping around with 8A replacing the 8 and 9 on some Monday to Friday afternoon journeys. All of these are tweaks compared to what was going on this time last year and any later or earlier starts affect later stopping points on those journeys by the same amount of time.
Next up for adjustment is the 20 service from Crewe to Hanley that is operated by First Potteries from 6th October. Again, these are timing changes apart from withdrawal of the extension to Haslington. Otherwise, it’s a matter of journeys such as the Sunday morning 09:08 arrival at Leighton Hospital seeing tweaks. Some other journeys from Leighton Hospital start three minutes early and more again will see timing changes between Crewe train station and Radway Green. All of this is for the sake of ensuring greater reliability so things most have changed on roads around there recently to necessitate the changes.
On 27th October, Arriva are adjusting services 31/31A between Crewe and Northwich and 6 between Crewe and Shavington. The latter is losing the first Monday to Saturday journey of the day in each direction. Late afternoon journeys on the 31/31A are being thinned out with Monday to Friday post 16:00 journeys from Northwich to two at 16:35 and 17:40. Their equivalents on Saturdays are to become hourly (16:15, 17:15, 18:15). Post 17:00 Northwich journeys from Crewe go down to two from Monday to Friday (17:20 & 17:55) and three on Saturday (17:01, 17:31, 18:31). In all of this, the last journey of the day from Crewe to Winsford escapes unscathed.
Within the last few days, it has come to my notice that BakerBus are sharply cutting the number of services they operate in and through Congleton. The 99 from Biddulph will largely remain, albeit with only very few journeys extending as far as Macclesfield. Thankfully, both D&G and High Peak appear to be stepping in with replacements for the services that are facing withdrawal.
The latter is set to offer a new service between Macclesfield, Buglawton and Congleton. While this has yet to gain traffic commissioner approval, it has gained the number 39, and it will be of interest to see how the timetable looks. When High Peak did operate service 27 on a council contract, a number of those journeys started from or terminated in Congleton so they may know the route anyway from those less austere days.
As for the Beartown Buses brand, this may be set to disappear now that D&G are running their replacements and I cannot see route branding like that applied to Crewe service 1 appearing here. The current 77 route between Congleton and Kidsgrove is being redirected to go along Padgbury Lane, Ullswater Road and Sandbach Road to leave a new 76 to serve Banky Fields and The Westlands. The current service 42 too is seeing changes to include West Heath on its route. Otherwise, D&G will take over services 90 and 91 with both keeping their half-hourly service frequencies.
Services are being lost with the 95 and the X38 ceasing to exist. However, D&G have registered a Monday to Friday service 36 between Crewe and Sandbach that is to be a partial replacement for the X38 while the 38 from Macclesfield to Crewe remains anyway.
The shape of all these new services has yet to become clear, but there is cause for optimism given that other operators are stepping in instead of BakerBus. The service news from D&G should be worth watching just like that from High Peak, especially since I have learned of forthcoming timing changes to service 392 (morning and evening peak services) between Macclesfield and Stockport (also from September). There has been little alteration to bus services in Cheshire East for a while now with only the summer school holiday 378 service between Wilmslow and Stockport being the only newsworthy change until this week.
Update 2013-07-30
Links to new D&G service timetables have been added now so it does look as if the Traffic Commissioner is giving these the go-ahead. Others should follow as soon as I get them; Traveline has yet to provide September travel information on its timetable lookup facility.
Update 2013-07-31
Details of High Peak service 39 have appeared today. It’s an hourly Monday to Saturday service that doesn’t operate on bank holidays and has extra peak-time journeys from Monday to Friday. All this seemingly is being offered on a commercial basis and the registration is under consideration by the traffic commissioner.
There also are details of the revised 99 and 99B service (again a non-bank holiday Monday to Saturday affair as has been the case until now so no change there) available with Biddulph, Congleton and Buglawton being the main extent of the route and enjoying an essentially hourly frequency. The only journeys to Macclesfield are one in the morning that acts as a positioning journey for service 11 between Macclesfield and Kerridge and one in the evening that does likewise for the Monday to Saturday evening Macclesfield to Crewe Cheshire East Council contract (service 38). There is one evening journey from Macclesfield and that’s all for the day; it facilitates the return of the service 11 bus from Macclesfield to the BakerBus depot.
When doing a refresh of the Rural Services: NI page, it came to my attention that Ulsterbus have several seasonal services on offer in addition to their Rambler ones for visitors to and residents of Northern Ireland. The first of these is Goldline Express 221 which operates one journey each way between Belfast and Giant’s Causeway, giving you a next to next to 3-hour stay at the World Heritage Site (with a reduction on entry fees to the National Trust Visitor Centre too if the weather isn’t being kind) if you opt for a return day trip. Along the way, there are stops in Ballymena and Bushmills but it otherwise appears to be very much an express service and it continues until the start of September.
For those who fancy a longer stay at the Giant’s Causeway than three hours, there’s a later evening departure offered by Goldline 252, also known as the Antrim Coaster since it calls at so many places along the said county’s coastline between Belfast and Coleraine. There is one return journey over the whole route each way and another one between Coleraine and Larne to compliment it. The latter meets with service 256 for those wishing to travel onward to Belfast or go the other way. The 252 continues until the end of September and operates Monday to Saturday until the end of this month when Sunday services start for it and the 256 connecting journeys.
Since it was those rambler services that were the cause alerting me to the above, I suppose that I’d better mention these too. There are four in total that I have found with two being seasonal and others being year-round. The first of the latter is Monday to Friday (no bank holidays) service 407 from Kilkeel to Attcal and Cranfield and the second is Monday to Saturday service 403 (three journeys each way) from Magherafelt to Omagh. The 407 is known also as the Kilkeel Rambler and the 403 gets the Sperrin Rambler name. The Mourne Rambler is a seasonal offering that starts from Newcastle and embarks on a good circuit through the Mourne Mountains. It gets the service number of 405 and operates five journeys from Tuesday to Sunday and bank holiday Mondays until the start of September. There also is a Causeway Rambler for those spending longer along the north Antrim coast and it runs daily with an hourly frequency until the end of September as service 402.
Usefully, there is a Bus Rambler ticket for travelling across Northern Ireland on Ulsterbus services that is available during the main summer school holidays after 09:15. It costs £9 for adults and £4.50 for children. Also, there’s a Family and Friends ticket for £20 that is available during weekends all year round and every day during the summer holiday months of July and August. The latter allows two adults and four children to go together as a group (and it’s an extra £4 per extra child) so it looks like a tempting offer for families in times when money is a scarer commodity.
With all the above, there should be more scope for looking around Northern Ireland’s more scenic spots without needing to use a car. It would be better if more of these services were year-round and not seasonal but there always is the matter of demand to be considered. As it happens, an Easter or May to September span of the year isn’t so bad anyway. Maybe I might be tempted to pop over there myself.
Previously, I reported the then upcoming decimation of Monday to Saturday evening services on service 38 between Macclesfield and Crewe. Now, it seems that Bakerbus have a contract to run later evening journeys on an hourly basis from 20:35 to 23:35 in either direction, albeit without having to honour tickets issued Arriva or D&G. This is promising news and makes me wonder now becomes of the planned short Arriva journeys between Macclesfield and Congleton (20:30 and 20:57 in each direction) and the 20:25 from Crewe to Sandbach. Maybe, all will become more clear in time but the continuation of something like the current is nothing but good news. Apparently, the 38 gets considered a strategic service and the 130 from Macclesfield to Manchester gets nothing like the same status, as can be seen from the severe service reductions in recent times.
This changeover is to take place on June 3rd and there is another on July 1st: the return of council funding for service 77 between Congleton and Kidsgrove. The current timetable will not be changing so the current set up of four journeys in each direction from morning into early afternoon is to remain. Though the days of the route all the way to Hanley bus station in Stoke-on-Trent, it is encouraging to see its continuation given that Astbury and Mow Cop are calling points, the latter of these being especially important for being on the Gritstone Trail.
Crewe gets its share of support for town services too with D&G’s service 9 between Crewe and Wistaston getting support for its Saturday journeys. The result is that there are more journeys over near enough the full route (Elm Drive is not served) for more of the day than was the case before. To compensate for the omission of Elm Drive from service 9, all current service 8 journeys are to follow the 8A route (with a consequent change in route number) instead as they go between Wistaston Green, Crewe and Sidney. This new arrangement comes into place from June 9th and June 3rd also sees tweaks to services 44 and 44M between Crewe and Nantwich (44M gets re-timed and Monday to Friday 08:55 from Crewe changed to start from Shavington at 09:08 instead).
June 3rd also sees D&G taking over daytime journeys on Knutsford town service 300 from High Peak without a change in timetable. There is no word of council financial support for this but the sense of High Peak leaving Knutsford is not hard to see now that they no longer operate service 27 to there from Macclesfield. It still is out on a limb for D&G too and Tomlinson Travel continue with the evening ones and I have heard some complaints on the service that they provide.
For a change, this latest round of bus service announcements is good news; developments haven’t looked this harmless for a while. It also is intriguing to see council funding appearing now after what was looking like bus services being left to their own devices with some falling on such hard times that they couldn’t continue as they were. For a good while. it almost felt like the approach was a managed decline somewhat akin to that applied to the railways in Britain for a few decades and was quite ironic given that bus services were mooted as replacements for soon to be defunct railway lines in Beeching’s plans.
What makes me wonder a little though is the timing of all of this. Cheshire East Council has seen hefty staffing upheaval in recent months. Having experienced this sort of re-organisation myself a number of times during my career so far, I realise how much stasis they can cause and I find myself asking if the same thing befell Cheshire East; folk in fear of their jobs can be unable to make decisions and it looks like that was happening before what we see now. Beyond what was happening, it might be that folk can see their way ahead again.
Seeing the recognition of the 38 as a strategic service was a great development and I’d like to think that its Sunday evening journeys may be graced by the same thinking at some point in the near future. Maybe that’s being overly optimistic but I was beginning to think that Northern Rail’s service between Manchester and Stoke-on-Trent might have made services like those on routes 38 and 77 less critical in the eyes of some and hence more vulnerable to withdrawal. After all, loss of trust in bus services is a dangerous thing and seeing what was happening was making my mind veer towards the apparent safe haven of train services. Let’s hope that we have found the bottom now and that bus service news may be a bit more positive from this point forward.
Previously, it was my understanding that D&G were interested in running Monday to Saturday evening journeys on bus service 38 between Macclesfield and Crewe from the start of June. However, that interest has waned and these are left to Arriva now. D&G were to operate them on a commercial basis and I am left to wonder if Arriva are having to do likewise.
My reasoning for this is that there are significant reductions to the journeys that will be available. What will survive are the 18:20 and 19:20 departures from Macclesfield with an additional 20:30 going as far as Congleton that returns from there at 20:57. From Crewe, we will be left with departures at 18:20 and 19:20 for Macclesfield and a 20:25 one going as far as Sandbach.
The above mean that a once stalwart and dependable service now is even more hobbled than it was after the withdrawal of Sunday evening services. It also has had another consequence: the withdrawal of all Arriva operated journeys on service 14 between Macclesfield and Langley. This makes it just a Monday to Saturday daytime service being provided by High Peak. What had facilitated the provision of Monday to Saturday evening services were the buses used to go between Macclesfield and Crewe that otherwise would have had an unused layover.
One only can surmise from this that bus service cuts are not done yet and the first Sunday in June is set to see the above come into place. For the 38, train services are going to have to act as a partial substitute yet again as they have needed to do at other times. Of course,they do nothing for places like Langley or Gawsworth whose residents don’t have a nearby train station at all. Folk wanting to get from Congleton to and from Macclesfield or vice versa are more fortunate, though.
The evening service reductions between Macclesfield and Crewe have me recalling the times when the 38 was very handy when returning from walking trips to Wales. Also, the same service often got me to Crewe for Caledonian Sleeper train services to the Scottish Highlands too. Those days will be past from the start of June and it makes me wonder if we ever will see an end to austerity or see bus service levels increase again. One only can hope for the best…