On Trains & Buses

There have been updates to the Cheshire East Council Bus Subsidy Reductions and Bus Service Changes page today. Most are new links to D&G Bus timetables that are set to come into force in January. One of these is for the 38 between Macclesfield and Crewe. Sunday evening services are set to finish with the 17:35 from Crewe and the 18:50 from Macclesfield since D&G are unwilling to operate them without council funding, confirming what was in the offing from last week. There is a new timetable on their website with this information and it’s a shame to see those Sunday evening services going and I hope that it’s not forever. Also, their Cheshire timetables page also is a good place to be looking for other service changes by the latest round of funding cuts too.

As yet, there is no word from Arriva about what is happening to services that they operate which are going to lose their funding. Monday to Saturday evening journeys on the 10 between Macclesfield and Bollington is one that has attracted a good deal of interest and publicity but there are Macclesfield evening town services affected for the same days. Early Saturday morning journeys on the 130 from Macclesfield still face an uncertain future while the fate of their Monday to Saturday evening services is sealed unless a surprise is sprung on us yet. Form last week, we know that D&G are not going to offer these on a commercial basis.

The passing the 56 day bus service change notice period last week must have triggered all the alterations that we have seen so far. It does make you wondering what is happening with Arriva’s operations. Are there discussions going on behind the scenes of which we know nothing as of now? Enough grotesqueness has appeared already and we still are left wondering what more is to come. Is pointless to hope that this round of cuts will be the last? That’s the way that I’d like it to be but doubts exist in my mind about it. Whatever comes next, my plan is to continue sharing the main points of detail on here as I have been doing so far.

With the uncertainty that increasingly seems to be pervading Cheshire East Council support of bus services, I am adding another summary of the public transport services available in Wilmslow to follow the earlier one for Knutsford, just so more folk realise the options that are available. As things stand, Wilmslow does gain something over its nearby neighbour when it comes to bus travel, but it really seems to score when it comes to train services, even bettering Macclesfield in some respects.

Trains

Wilmslow’s four platform station is a busy one for the size of the place and probably gets a lot of commuters to and from work every day too. That’s thanks to there being several services an hour between it and Manchester, some of them being local stopping ones. These include one that goes via Manchester Airport, not as far away as the name suggests, and then into Manchester Piccadilly calling at places such as Heald Green, Burnage and East Didsbury. These usually come from Crewe so connections with other Cheshire towns like Holmes Chapel and Sandbach are afforded as well as with Alderley Edge. There are more local Crewe to Manchester services than these and most go via Stockport.

Aside from the above Northern Rail offerings, there are a number of longer distance offerings too. These are provided by Virgin, CrossCountry and Transport for Wales. The first on the list operates hourly services to and from London as part of its three per hour frequency from Manchester. CrossCountry again starts from Manchester but continue south to Birmingham and beyond, with there being an earlier Sunday start than we have in Macclesfield. The last of the listed long distance operators runs its Manchester to south Wales services by Wilmslow. Once, all of these terminated at Cardiff, but most now continue to places in Pembrokeshire such as Pembroke, Milford Haven, Haverfordwest and Fishguard. These places are reached after a stop in Swansea too. Trains for these aren’t stabled in Manchester though but in Crewe for some reason and that ensures earlier services to Manchester of a Sunday morning than Macclesfield, so it is tempting that Wilmslow is being a little spoilt by what they get from the railways.

Buses

Wilmslow gets on a little better than Knutsford when it comes to bus travel. After all, there are Sunday services for three of the town’s services. These are the 130 that goes from Macclesfield to Manchester, the 200 from Wilmslow to Manchester Airport via Styal and the 378 from Wilmslow to Stockport. Two of these sadly are seeing council funding withdrawal for some of their journeys with 130 weekday evening services looking like they’ll be ceasing to exist and 378 weekday evening and Sunday services also under threat. It does look odd to see the 200 being left untouched while these are facing cuts since there cannot be as many using it; certainly, I found myself using some pretty quiet journeys when I did travel to Manchester Airport by bus. Let’s hope that too much doesn’t get lost with all that’s happening.

Along with the two return weekday evening Macclesfield to East Didsbury, early morning Saturday services to Manchester are in doubt too. Otherwise, 130 services are set to remain untouched with most of them being operated commercially. The Monday to Friday daytime frequency is next to half-hourly and these buses get well-used too. On Saturdays and Sundays, the frequency is largely hourly, so the service remains more than a little useful.

That hourly service pattern also applies to the 378 and the 200, with the latter only being a daytime service operated with a single bus and one driver; these days it’s in the hands of Welsh operator GHA. Other than these, there’s also the next to hourly Connect 88 from Knutsford to Altrincham and that doesn’t run on Sundays or bank holidays like the others.

Very Usable, Albeit in Uncertain Times

Wilmslow doesn’t come off badly when it comes to public transport options. The main worry is about supported services given cuts in public spending. Greater use would help too and increasing awareness is the main reason for this little piece. Things have come a long way over the last decade, and it would be better not to lose the gains that have been made. It looks as if improved economic fortunes cannot come fast enough, but they may surprise us when they do; just as upturns never last forever, neither do downturns like this one.

Today, my email inbox saw automated messages from the Cheshire East Council website telling me that the bus service changes and bus subsidy reductions pages had been updated and there’s a lot on them for digestion now. For sake of a summary, I have decided to highlight a few of the forthcoming alterations here.

38

D&G are revising their registration for this Sunday service between Macclesfield and Crewe. The content is not something to which I am party so I will need to see what it involves when more information becomes available.

130

D&G have cancelled the Monday to Saturday evening journeys between Macclesfield and Didsbury from the start of 2013. Since the service takes them outside their area, their deciding to do this is understandable. Still, it leaves me wondering if Arriva might be able to do something towards blunting the loss like they did around East Yorkshire a while back. Some depend on the first of the weekday evening Macclesfield-bound journeys to get home from work so I am left wondering if something will be done to help them.

378

The timetable for this service between Wilmslow and Stockport will stay as it is until 28th January when Transport for Greater Manchester will review it. Then, we will learn what comes next.

391/392/393

The 391 Poynton to Stockport service is getting canned but will survive until March 2nd. From March 4th, the 392 and 393 services will be truncated so as to operate only between Macclesfield and Hazel Grove where I expect that they will meet with the 192 Stagecoach service to Stockport and Manchester. Another change to those routes is that they’ll be diverted around Poynton so as to make up in some way for the absence of the 391.

More to come

The above are the changes that stand out for me but there are others with some operations becoming commercial, others changing and some being lost altogether. Interestingly, there is no news yet from Arriva about affected journeys on their services. Macclesfield town services are extensively impacted by the council’s decision so it is of interest to see what happens to those, particularly the one to nearby Bollington since it has attracted so much interest. Trunk service journeys on the 130 between Macclesfield and Manchester (early Saturday mornings) and Sunday evenings on the 84 Crewe to Chester service are among these too. Thus, there is quiet a bit more to come yet.

Once, there was a comment from a young lady doing a school project on Knutsford bus services. Then, I directed her to Cheshire East Council’s website and I hope that she got what she needed from there. Yesterday saw me spend a few hours in Knutsford and the recent changes to the Macclesfield to Knutsford bus service reminded me of that question and got me thinking that saying a bit more on Knutsford’s public transport services wouldn’t go amiss. This information is intended for anyone who needs to make use of public transport for getting to and from Knutsford so I hope that I am not doing a school project for someone though that is a risk that I am taking with compiling what’s here.

Buses

The town’s bus connections do not operate on Sundays but provide a useful level of service on other days of the week. Until the start of October this year, the 27/27A/27B provided an hourly service to Chelford, Henbury and Macclesfield. Now, it’s been reduced to departures running every ninety minutes and Monday to Friday calls to Alderley Edge have been reduced considerably also. Most of the journeys taken by the current service diverts from the A537 to pass Radbroke and Over Peover. The service once was operated by Bakerbus before Bowers Coaches, now part of High Peak, took it over. Until last year, there was a summer Sunday and bank holiday service on offer too with extensions to Tatton Park and three journeys each way a day. Council funding cuts have seen to the end of that and may explain the recently curtailed frequency on other days of the week too.

The largely hourly Connect 88 service to Wilmslow to Altrincham remains though. Once the 288 operated by Arriva, this now is run by GHA’s Vale Travel mainly with Optare Versa single deckers dating from 2008. These fresh new buses were a far cry from the ageing step-entrance Dennis Darts that Arriva had been using. The service extends from around 07:00 until around 19:00 so covers a good part of the day goes by Ilford’s site at Mobberley and passes not far from Manchester Airport’s cargo handling facility either, offering something of use to anyone needing to go to work at either place.

The Connect 88 isn’t the only service going from Knutsford and Altrincham because there’s also the 289 that has Northwich as its other terminus. There are five services each way a day with the overall period of operation starting before 07:00 and finishing after 20:00, making for a long day.

After those, there’s the town service 300 to mention and it’s shared by High Peak and Tomlinson Travel with a decent spread of service from around 08:00 until after 23:00 and the frequency largely is half-hourly too so Knutsford residents cannot complain too much, especially it is escaping the planned council spending cuts unlike its counterparts in Macclesfield.

The mention of Tomlinson Travel brings me to the last service on the list: the Tuesday and Friday only service 47 from Holmes Chapel to Warrington. Knutsford gains two services to Warrington from this while Holmes Chapel only has the one. Saying that, the service finishes up in the early afternoon so it looks like a weekday shopping bus for some folk.

All of these services call at the town’s bus station, an unfussy but not grotesque annex to Booth’s supermarket. It’s away from the town centre though and a busy road needs crossing to get there. Like Knutsford’s train station, you have to go uphill to reach it too so that’s another consideration. It’s just as well that there are public toilets there and I saw a bus driver making use of them yesterday too. The adjacent Booth’s also operate a cafe so that could be a handy way to spend some time while awaiting a bus so it’s far from bad.

Trains

The town sits on the mid-Cheshire line that connects Chester with the likes of Northwich, Altrincham and Stockport. Northern Rail is the sole operator here and there is a staffed ticket office at Knutsford’s none too shabby train station; it looks as if the main station building got a rebuild in the eighties or nineties but I have not been able to find anything about it so far. Service frequency is two-hourly on Sundays and that’s a vast improvement on the three services each way a day that it used to get. Apart from Monday to Friday peak times when additional services run, the frequency is hourly on other days of the week.

Other Thoughts

It’s a pity that Knutsford gets a bit more cut off from the world in terms of public transport of a Sunday since it’s a pretty place to visit and oozes plenty of character too. It started out as an estate village owned by the Egertons of Tatton Park and mercifully escaped the industrialisation of places like nearby Macclesfield. Tatton Park passed into National Trust hands in the middle of the last century with Cheshire East Council now managing it on their behalf. That was what drew me to Knutsford yesterday and I untidily tracked down a walking route around Tatton Mere; finding its source first wasn’t too bright.

What amazed me yesterday were the streams of slow moving cars in the two narrow one-way streets in the heart of the town: King Street and Princess Street. That made me wonder if it wasn’t possible to pedestrianise these but the need for car parking probably puts paid to that one. Shops were busy with folk too so those narrow footways in King Street could do with a bit more girth.

Maybe if we could persuade more folk to visit by bus, then the Sunday service situation could be sorted but council finances do not permit our testing that out again and there were a few years of half-heartedly trying too. Some of those Macclesfield Sunday services got extended as far as Manchester Airport’s viewing for some reason so there were some efforts made, as odd as they might seem now. For now though, train services are that little bit more dependable so they’ll need to be the public transport backstop until the economy and the public finances both improve enough for the bus travel option to be enhanced again.

Cheshire East Council seemingly is exceeding its budget for the year by something of the order of £7.7m and that may explain why they have been looking for cuts in services. That appears to include subsidised bus services and the sort of savings that were being sought were £750,000. Thus, it comes as no surprise that they have agreed with the proposals to withdraw financial support from quite a few bus services to achieve this. Notices have appeared to inform bus users of what is happening, possibly at the same time as they were updating the timetables for the Macclesfield to Knutsford service in our area.

The only change from the submitted proposals is that they take effect from the start of next year instead of the week before Christmas. Now, all that remains is to see which unsupported services and journeys are continued on a commercial basis and which don’t. It may be that some will survive like Sunday bus services between Macclesfield and Bollington, which lost their funding over a year ago. That is the only hope for the likes of the weekday (Monday to Saturday) evening 130 Macclesfield to Parr’s Wood service, which now has a very uncertain future.

The council have a page informing us what is happening, and the updates should prove interesting. The only hope is that we will see reductions instead of wholesale service withdrawals and hope is all that we have been left now. For everyone’s information, here are the affected services:

While it’s not good to see that number of journeys under threat, I believe that folk need to be aware of it too. To mind, this is far more than “some” of the services that the council supports as is their wording for what is coming. One only can hope that this is the last of the bus service cuts, but it is impossible to rule out another round of them either.