Today has turned out to be a disruptive day to be travelling. Flooding has been the main problem and tomorrow is said to bring its share of problems too. With that in mind, I decided to see if I could find which train companies used JourneyCheck as a place to look for live travel information. The list is below, with links to the actual JourneyCheck websites, and you’ll see that not every train company has one.
The websites of course are only good as the information that’s entered into them. Regarding the Northern Rail one, I have seen complaints about the train formation information (number of carriages, mainly) not being as good as it could be. Otherwise, they could have their use on days like today when you need more information than can be provided by a Twitter feed. If you use an RSS feed reader such as Google Reader, then they could be even more useful again. After all, with engineering works and station problems listed along with train running information, these look like good places to be looking while on the move.
After D&G’s service withdrawals, there is a sliver of good news from Arriva regarding town services in Macclesfield and the same applies to those linking the town with nearby Bollington too. The company is going to give running Monday to Saturday evening services on a commercial basis a go. The timetables for services 5 and 6 are set to change and we have yet to see what they will involve for residents of Weston and Upton Priory. The equivalent journeys to Moss Rose and Bollington are set to stay unaffected for now.
Of course, it is over to us to make use of what survives or it’ll get the axe too. That we are seeing an attempt to stick with offering services at all is a bit of brightness amid what else is happening on our patch and Arriva deserves some credit for that. It would have been rough for Macclesfield to lose town services when Knutsford is to see them continued unaffected and with council funding too. That prospect is not set to come upon us in January anyway and it will be patronage that drives whatever follows next.
However, there has been no news from Arriva today about the soon to be unsupported early Saturday morning 130 journeys from Macclesfield to Manchester though. Macclesfield and Wythenshawe depots seem to be operating separately so we still have to wait to see. Could something be happening to 130 evening services as well? There may be some good news for bus users around Macclesfield but I am not holding my breath just yet. A little more patience is needed but there’s not so much remaining to be revealed at this point. Once all is stable again, it might be time to treat Macclesfield to a summary of its public network like what I have done already for Knutsford and Wilmslow. It looks as if any remaining bus services could do with any extra publicity that I can provide.
Update 2012-11-19: It seems that a bit of arm-twisting was involved in keeping the evening services between Macclesfield and Bollington going, according to last week’s Macclesfield Express. Seeing some community intervention has to be a good thing and the next steps would be better promotion of the service. That Macclesfield town services are continuing too may be a result of the same type of pressure but there was no mention of that in the article. One only can wonder if greater community campaigning would have helped the soon to be lost evening journeys on the 130 (Macclesfield to Manchester), 38 (Macclesfield to Crewe) and 84 (Crewe to Chester). Maybe that’s something that we need to start, as belated as it would be at this stage.
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.