Posted on June 6th, 2012
During the Jubilee bank holiday weekend, I popped up to Scotland for a few days and, in so doing, learned more about some extra train and coach services that are laid on for the summer up there. Of course, that wasn’t my real reason for going. The chance of getting some dry weather while sampling more of the country’s scenery was the actual motivation.
A copy of ScotRail’s Insight on-train magazine alerted me to the return of a direct Sunday return train service between Edinburgh and Oban. It leaves the former at 08:10 and arrives at 12:06 having called at Haymarket, Linlithgow, Polmont and Falkirk along the way. It then leaves Oban at 17:11 and arrives back in Edinburgh at 21:09. It hasn’t started yet though and you’ll need to wait until the 24th of this month for the first running. It then continues until August 26th and the return fare is a not that unreasonable £36.
Scottish Citylink offer extra services for the summer season and, unlike ScotRail’s Edinburgh-Oban service, most of these are available now. Ones that stand out for me are service 913 from Edinburgh to Fort William, service 978 from Edinburgh to Oban and service 973 from Dundee to Oban. The 913 and 973 add useful travel connections around Loch Tay as well as adding to the service level west of Crianlarich.
While on the subject of Scottish Citylink, year round services also see their service level increased. For instance, there is a 978 service via Tyndrum between Glasgow and Oban and a 975 shuttle between the latter and Tyndrum where coaches between Glasgow and Fort William are met. Speaking of the the latter, they are expanded for the summer too as are their continuations to the Isle of Skye. While speaking about West Highland coach services, it is worth mentioning that the Glasgow-Campbeltown 926 service is operating as five services each way daily; three was all we got not so long ago.
Though these are the summertime service increases that stand out for me. For instance, there are extra ones running between the Scotland’s Central Belt and Inverness as I discovered on Monday morning. Also, Edinburgh’s festival season in August sees extra late night services between Glasgow and Edinburgh and there are events like T in the Park too. Well, it’s worth spending some time on Citylink’s website to see what’s available because I only may be scratching the surface here.
Apart from the above, there may be other summer only services on offer of which I have no knowledge and Caber Coaches’ service 93 around Loch Tay on Saturdays is one such find. If any come my way, I’ll get them noted because summer passes so quickly. With some of the ones that we have seen, there are those who may see that as a good thing but I’ll reserve my judgement.
Posted on May 1st, 2012
A timetable change last Sunday (2012-04-29) should have been the end of the story for a few months but Arriva have another timetable change for service 130 between Macclesfield and Manchester next Sunday (2012-05-06), On inspection of the new timetable, it would be to extend the Monday to Friday 18:04 departure from Manchester as far as Wilmslow to arrive at 19:10 before returning to the depot again. That certainly makes more sense than terminating at Cheadle Hulme as is the case for this week and having an 18:18 continuing as far as Wilmslow on Saturdays. The new arrangements look more consistent even if Saturday timings differ from the rest of the week; buses run hourly than when they are half-hourly on other weekdays.
Otherwise, the changes introduced in the current timetable remain. These include the termination of the 17:40 evening journey from Macclesfield at Parr’s Wood on Mondays to Fridays and the retiming of the xx:15 journeys from Macclesfield to depart at xx:35 when the inbound buses are arriving into the town at the same time as before. That change gives an 18:35 for Manchester on Saturday before the D&G Monday to Saturday evening service commences at the times that have been in place for a few years now.
The main Monday to Saturday remains unaltered even with these tweaks and it looks as if depot changes in the Greater Manchester area have been the cause. That hasn’t changed the Sunday timetable at all though you have to wonder what cuts to the Bus Service Operators Grant could do yet. Have they contributed to the closure of Arriva’s depot near Piccadilly railway station in Manchester, for instance?
Update 2012-05-05: Noticed that driver rosters have changed with morning drivers appearing to work evening services and vice versa. The depot changes must have had some bearing on this.
After yesterday’s snow, public transport seems to be returning to normal though there may be changes from the usual timetable in the morning. For one thing, the Bletchley disruption on the WCML is continuing and some train and bus operators in the south-east are still experiencing some difficulties. Of these, Southern Trains is just one with their website’s front page being a summary of service running information; their website must have run into bother earlier.
Other websites felt the strain too and the new Greater Anglia (formerly National Express East Anglia) website got a baptism of fire. Like Southern, it too has a front-page giving a service overview but there’s their JourneyCheck page and Twitter feed too and that has been very active throughout today. The rest of the website doesn’t seem to have been put into place though.
Yet another website that went down on everybody was that for Arriva Buses. Nevertheless, bus users in Yorkshire and the Northeast of England were well served with Twitter feeds. One wonders why we don’t get the same in the English Northwest too. After all, there is a Twitter account but it never seems to get used.
Though the BBC did sterling work when it came to overviews, Twitter seemed to come into its own (Facebook may have done the same but I am keeping out of there given Mark Zuckerberg’s approach to privacy and the IPO that has happened) during the weekend, especially with everything developing so quickly. In fact, you could tell where the snow was by the number of disruption information tweets. Some operators ran into the 1000 tweets (includes retweets and replies too) per day limit though waiting until after 00 or 30 minutes past the hour was enough to get going again, albeit with a 20 tweet per 30 minute quota as I found out last night. Some operators have backup accounts for dealing with this situation so you have to ask what the 1000 tweet limit achieves.
Along the way, I got to learn of some new operators: Marshalls of Sutton-on-Trent and Premiere Buses (of Nottingham, it seems). Links to both have been added to the bus companies page on here and it’s always good to grow more comprehensive.
Around Cheshire, most major roads are now clear though Bowers weren’t too trusting of the A537 for their 58 service between Macclesfield and Buxton. Buses were serving Bollington and the 130 to Manchester seemed to be going too though the live bus tracker seemed to be playing its usual non-availability games as it has been for the last few weeks. Both today and yesterday would have made good days for having it going given the weather that we got.
Continuing with road conditions, there is a lot of slush about the place and I don’t fancy the outcomes if either that or any standing water froze tonight. So far, temperatures seem to be held at 2° C so there’s hope that any frost will not be so severe and there was a lot of melt-water around when I was last out and about. Cheshire East Council don’t seem to be taking chances though and there are gritters out and about again tonight although there’s no sign that pavements are being gritted by the council; maybe that’s being left to householders (before Christmas 2010, there was a statement to that effect from the then Transport Secretary, Philip Hammond) and I was out clearing that next to mine today. With all the lying snow and the threat of ice, we’ll have to see what the morning brings when it comes.
Snow arrived today as promised and travel disruption ensued. At the time of writing, Arriva Yorkshire and Nottingham City Transport are operating no bus services at all rail and disruption is hitting both the East Coast Mainline along with services around Bolton and Blackburn. More generally, bus services are experiencing difficulties across the north of England and into the English midlands so it’s best to check with your operator to make sure that your service is operating.
Twitter has been a good place to see what’s happening and those of us who are on there need to watch our daily limit of 1000 updates (20 per half hour, it seems) too. Even transport operators such as Virgin Trains and London Midland have been known to hit these limits on days like yesterday when severe disruption was caused by a derailment near Bletchley. For these eventualities, they have been known to open more accounts so you wonder what the limit achieves.
More roads than those used by buses get affected too and the A537 between Macclesfield and Buxton and the A54 between the latter and Buxton are closed tonight. It is an open question as to whether Bowers’ service 58 between Macclesfield and Buxton will operate tomorrow given that it was off the road last Saturday. Today, it kept going until at least 15:00 since I spotted one on the Cat and Fiddle Inn’s webcam.
Whatever you do tonight, I hope that you stay safe. Tomorrow could be interesting as well though we are promised milder weather as the new week wears on. It seems that Ireland has been unaffected by wintry weather apart from disruption to U.K. flights. That really drives home how regional how weather can be.
In February, I was travelling by train from Oxford to Macclesfield and got held up in Oxford for longer than was planned. The cause was a familiar one: someone was struck by a train and died of their injuries. In cases like these, investigations are needed and it takes an hour or more to complete those and reopen the line. My only complaint about that was that we weren’t told sooner what was going on. Of course, when there fatalities, you have to think about those who are left after the deceased. Compared to their lot, disruption to a journey seems trivial.
Tonight, something very similar has happened on the East Coast Mainline around Alexandra Palace in North London. There is no account as to whether the person struck by a train has died or not though it clearly is a concern. Having witnessed a suicide attempt in front a First Transpennine Express train at Oxenholme after a day spent walking in the Lake District, I do realise that these can be survived. That incident may have left me feeling shaken but the vigilance of railway staff meant that all was under control very quickly though that train from Scotland to Manchester Airport got cancelled if my memory serves me correctly. Police investigations always are needed when things like these happen.
Returning to the present, there is no doubt that this evening’s incident has been the cause of disruption for many commuters and other travellers who were headed north from London. In the middle of this, First Capital Connect made available useful maps showing alternative routes for those caught up in the disruption. Hopefully, that information got put into the hands of those who need it because this precisely is what’s needed for onward travel when railway lines are closed like this. Compounding that, a train broke down around Shepreth too so passenger travelling between Hitchin and Cambridge were inconvenienced too though the reason is a less worrying one.
Near the end of September, I too walked into similar disruption at King’s Cross Station while bound for Hatfield. Then, that kind of information was scarce and there was an hour’s wait before I got to know that travelling to St. Albans and taking a bus from there would get me where I wanted to go that night. The cause then was less tragic: rats had eaten cable near Finsbury Park and caused a signal failure that made journeys for everyone so rough that it got into BBC London news bulletins.
For me, it came at the end of a month spent commuting from home to work on site at a client and it brought me face to face with other delays too. Even without fatalities, Virgin Trains were struggling to keep trains running to schedule. A signalling mistake was all it took to delay me between Macclesfield and London one evening, the very same one that I have described above as it happens. Friday night departures from Euston hardly ran on time for me though I have done better with earlier Wednesday and Thursday evening ones since then. Signalling problems around Wembley were to blame one evening so it does look as if railways in the north of London are a little on the fragile and criminality in the form of cable theft does not help either.
While my thoughts starting with persons being struck by trains on Britain’s railway, they seem to have meandering to other causes of railway disruption. Nevertheless, fatalities are the most tragic of all these and thoughts to be with those left behind by such incidents regardless of the amount of disruption that is caused.
Update 2011-12-13: There seem to be two such casualties tonight, one around East Croydon and another near Brighton. Of course, disruption ensues but it’s the families of those struck by trains who should be uppermost in anyone’s mind. Hopefully, everyone gets home O.K.