On Trains & Buses

With all the noise that there is about the closures of Heathrow and Gatwick due to the heavy snow that hit the south over the weekend, it is worth remembering that other parts are affected as well and that more snow hit the southwest and Wales today. For instance, Wales seems to be seeing disruption to its train services and MerseyRail is running a Sunday service tomorrow to ensure resilience (how’s that going to work with folk going to work and about their business?).

There may have been snow in the Manchester, Stockport and Macclesfield areas on Friday night but local buses and trains seem to be running well. The way in which we have been feeling the effects of what happened on Saturday are in the form of train cancellations and delays with Virgin faring worse than CrossCountry from what I could see. Macclesfield town bus services are being operated as are those to Crewe and Manchester. We may have to take care where we walk but that’s the extent of what the cold weather has done to us in the town.

A recent trip to Glossop confirms the same sort of conditions. Most buses seem to be running there too and trains seem not to be missing a beat. Good accumulations are there to be seen in the surrounding hills but any roads that I saw were clearer than the pavements by their side. Apart from greasy soft snow, the only real ice was to be found on a bridleway and that needed footwear with spikes for it to be crossed. Otherwise, busier routes could be negotiated though some needed care in order to do so.

Ireland hasn’t escaped the snow either with a heavy fall this evening having closed Dublin Airport to arrivals and departures until at least 23:00.The general Dublin area seems to have had quite a dump of the white stuff too, much as the southwest of the country did over the weekend. That has made road conditions tricky in usually mild parts such as the county of Limerick; the town of Newcastlewest is badly affected by ice due to the very low temperatures.

All in all, I could see folk in Britain and Ireland welcoming a wet Christmas if it took away the snow and ice that we currently have. With all the excitement of white Christmases in previous years, who’d have seen that coming about? After all, I suppose that it’s harder to enjoy a visual feast if you feel that your normal way of life is disrupted.

A change of job over the summer has brought me more in the way of business train travel with two trips south so far, one to Hitchin and the other to Oxford. The first of these involved journeys on trains full enough to feel cosy on the outbound and return legs. The outbound journey to Oxford was in a similar vein but the return trip  was one of extremes.

The cause was a power failure that interrupted signalling on the line between Reading, Swindon and Oxford. The result was that I was travelling on a very busy CrossCountry service that itself was around an hour late. That passengers wanting to travel from Oxford to London were told to board the service to get to Banbury only ensured that many (including me, as it happened) were cheek by jowl with one another. The last time that happened was when Operation Princess was in progress and overloaded the then freshly introduced Voyagers with folk attracted by overenthusiastic and overoptimistic advertising by Virgin. It looked as if many weren’t regular train users so I do wonder what the experience did for their impressions of rail travel.

Things changed markedly after those London passengers were disgorged at Banbury to pack a Chiltern service instead, not the most pleasant of thoughts really. After Banbury, seats were to be found and I made use of one for the rest of the journey while expecting a busy service all the way back to Macclesfield. However, there was a continuing trend of an emptying train as we continued further north and even Birmingham New Street didn’t affect that greatly. In fact, the seat beside me became vacant when someone got off at Stafford. From then on, I was reminded of how it is to travel on early morning services on Saturdays, not at all unpleasant.

All in all, it was a journey of remarkable contrasts and the weather was another of them. What were rain showers in Oxfordshire were snow flurries further north so a definite temperature drop could be noticed on going north with the train conductor warning us about slippery platform surfaces. Was that the cause of there being a less packed service?

The current round of snow is having quite an effect on the transport network in some places. Thankfully, Macclesfield doesn’t seem to be the worst hit though there must be a considerable snow covering on the hills not far from the town and Buxton cannot escape either. The A537/A54 are closed to traffic, so things cannot be good up on the heights. If it’s like what we got at the start of the year, they’ll need snowblowers to clear roads.

Bowers are unable to offer the full service that they usually do and the 27 Macclesfield-Knutsford route was only operated for part of the afternoon, and it looked as if the same applied to the 19 Macclesfield - Whirley - Prestbury service. They are based in Chapel-en-le-Frith so that cannot help them. It’s one thing to struggle to get buses out from a depot, but it’s another if drivers cannot get there in the first place.

From the bus tracker, Arriva seems to be able to keep the 130 Macclesfield-Manchester service going, though there are delays and thoughts of them persuaded me to work from home today. A look at their latest update conveys to me the impression that we are getting off more lightly than some other places. They have created a summary in PDF to stop people hammering the website like they did at the start of the year.

One look at an update for the north of England confirms that a number of places cannot be served by rail, even, and Northern Rail has details on its website too. Sheffield is but one badly hit area and a work colleague of mine has a foot of snow covering his garden! No wonder First cannot run buses around the city. Northumberland and parts of east Yorkshire are taking the brunt of the weather and the disruption by the appearances of things. All in all, it seems that the weather is getting the better of the railways in places.

Ireland may have a maritime climate, but it too is feeling the effects of the cold spell. Though most trains are running (only Docklands station in Dublin is not getting a service this evening), if subject to delays, the Irish Rail website is getting hammered. That may be due in part to the problems that Dublin Bus and Bus Éireann are having. The former’s services stopped around 20:00 this evening and the latter has been struggling to run services up and down the east coast of the country, to point that 19:30 was the end of operations for the day on many of them. The severe weather pages of the Irish Department of Transport are another calling point for general information, particularly about road conditions and any gritting.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given its reputation, Scotland has got a right blast of the arctic conditions with even Edinburgh’s Lothian Buses being unable to offer a full service. The mixture of hilly terrain and hefty snowfalls must be at the heart of the problem, but one only can imagine how much more challenging it is in the Highlands though train running problems are happening throughout Scotland.

Though numerous, what I have collected here is only a sample of what is happening out there. Maybe, it is too hard to keep on top of it all when you have a day job in another profession, but I’ll see if I can share what I can on here.

Last week’s Macclesfield Express carried a front-page headline about the potential closure of the passenger enquiries office in Macclesfield Bus Station and the effect it might have on the more vulnerable in our society, particularly the visually impaired who cannot use the usual timetable displays. That is not all because they are looking at whether to keep the station’s public conveniences too. After the announcement of North Yorkshire County Council’s draconian plans, this sadly doesn’t come as a surprise. All that can be done is to hope that it stops at this though I do have my doubts. It looks as if the next few months will tell a story and we’ll have to wait to see what that is. If there’s more, we can expect to hear some unyielding statements from councillors from the governing party and very different opinions from the rest. Times look set to get interesting and some opposition can be expected too, by the looks of things. Whether or not it has any effect is another matter but disagreements over how to handle the situation have already cost one council cabinet member their job.

It was about this time two years ago that I finally decided to move public transport musings from my outdoors blog to a dedicated site on the web and that’s exactly what this is. Since then, some things have changed and some haven’t. One of the former has been our economic fortunes and what that has done to the public finances. Now, after a change of government, bus and rail travel is facing more uncertain times. It is for that reason that organisations such as the Campaign for Better Transport will come into their own and I am certain that any developments will give me something to say too. Nevertheless, it is always heartening to learn that others care about bus and train services as much as you do so that’s why I have been collecting a list of fellow bloggers on the sidebar. We’ll be living in interesting times after the previous Labour government’s largely more benevolent attitude to public transport (barring a sarcastic response at PMQ’s from Gordon Brown, of course; maybe that Birmingham bus issue was better raised with the relevant local authority instead…). Misimpressions regarding such matters as vehicle taxation or that there ever has been a war on motorists will need challenging and it might be up to those of us who need to confront such ideas to stand up and be counted. Whatever comes, we’ll see what happens.