On Trains & Buses

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.

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.

Northumberland’s bus service have seen big changes within the last few months so I have decided to highlight them here. Unfortunately, it only was reshaping this website in recent weeks that alerted me to what has happened. Ideally, I’d like to share the information before any changes have taken place so it’s a case of better late than never…

The main recipients of the upheaval have been users of longer distance bus services through the county. The ones that are no more are as follows:

• 501 Newcastle to Berwick-upon-Tweed via the coast
• 505 Newcastle to Berwick-upon-Tweed via A1
• 518 Newcastle to Alnwick

The first two of these ran via the A1 to Alnwick before taking their different routes north from there while the latter ran by the coast to take in places such as Amble, Warkworth and Alnmouth. Now, they have been replaced by two services:

• X15 Newcastle to Berwick-upon-Tweed via A1
• X18 Newcastle to Berwick-upon-Tweed via the coast

The first of these essentially is a renumbering of the old 505 where the second is an amalgamation of the 518 and the 501. That makes the latter a very slow service since it takes four hours to get the length of its route. It is an hourly service with not every service extending north of Alnwick and that part of the route hasn’t lost its daily hourly service. The X15 takes less time to do its route but it still in no quick service since the train does the same distance in around 45 minutes and it takes more than double that (nearly two and a half hours in fact). Sunday frequency now is two hourly and it doesn’t extend beyond Alnwick like it does on other days of the week when it’s the extensions north of Alnwick virtually are two hourly on a service that is hourly on the southern section.

There is one other change that arrived later than the others, coming on the very first day of this month as opposed to the middle of the previous one, September 16th as it happened. It now looks as if the creation of the X18 partially removed the need for the former 410 Alnwick to Bamburgh via Beadnell and 411 Beadnell to Berwick-upon-Tweed via Bamburgh services because those services finished at the end of September. What began running on October 1st was the 418, a new service that operates Monday to Saturday between Alnwick to Belford service that goes via Beadnell and Bamburgh. The timetable shows a service that has two journeys going the full length of its route on all its days of operation and an extra Belford to Craster return journey from Monday to Friday. Looking at how it compares to the X18, I am left wondering how it got retained but that I suppose that argument applied to the former 401 and 411 services too. Local needs are important so who am I to question what has been retained. So long as folk know what’s there for them, that’s the most important thing.

With all this upheaval, one has to wonder what advantage comes from it. There is one though: connections to places like Bamburgh and Craster from Alnmouth train station have become more frequent although they still aren’t perfect. You still have to cross reference train and bus times to get them to work or enlist the services of Traveline. Otherwise, route changes like the ones that have been implemented do need good communication and I hope that has happened given that the telling of folk about bus services is far from ideal at the best of times. Something tells me that the changes have needed time to bed in and I hope that things are settling down now and with no loss in ridership too.

After next to four years of this site being on WordPress.com, I decided that it was time to go independent with it. If you have been here before, then you shouldn’t see too much changes in appearance apart from a restructuring of content.

Wanting to have this as more of website with a blog attached was the reason for the move. WordPress still powers things behind the scenes but having more more control that I can achieve the aim of having something that collates longer living travel information as well as new and views on current events. Experiences will continue to feature too as things go from here.

My hope now is that this builds as a public transport information for Cheshire East and beyond. Wherever things go, I hope that they will continue to have value for you. If you have any suggestions, just let me know. Freedom from the constraints of where this thing used to may allow them to become a reality.