On Trains & Buses

A Saturday outing to the western end of the Yorkshire Dales had me travelling around by Lancaster and that meant my train journey was set to take in the striking bottleneck that is the Manchester Piccadilly-Oxford Road-Deansgate-Salford line. While I had admit that it may be a difficult and expensive thing to do but the restrictive approach to Manchester Piccadilly always amazes me. It is, I think, a consequence of history in that it is a hangover from a time when Manchester had more termini than it does now. For instance, what is now the Museum of Science and Technology was once the terminus for the Manchester and Liverpool railway right back at the start of the railway revolution. Then, there was Manchester Central and that train shed has become G-Mex. Manchester Victoria was the terminus of choice of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway company, a map of whose network still adorns its walls. These days it seems underused with its better western connections but it is a mile away from Piccadilly so I suppose that makes it less convenient for some though its situation next to the Arndale Centre is more central than that of Piccadilly.

What reminded me of all of this was a 20-30 minute delay that afflicted the 07:54 Northern stopping service to Preston. My plan was to use the 08:15 Transpennine Express departure that was to follow it but I tend to use what is at hand rather than sticking rigidly to plans; in fact, my train was retarded so as not to delay the progress of that 08:15. The cause of the disruption was a fright train in difficulty, not a good thing to have on the line between Piccadilly and Oxford Road. Though it may prove expensive and disruptive, I would like to see quadrification of the through line from Piccadilly. In reality, we are probably more likely to get an HS2 rather than this kind of meaningful advance. Small changes that don’t arouse much in the way of excitement are less likely when there is cash about than the shiny one.

With a fine weekend in prospect, the mind turns to getting out and enjoying what’s on offer. In that vein, I tried looking up train times for a return journey between Macclesfield and Harlech, all on the same day with one change in Wolverhampton and maybe another in Machynlleth, only for the National Rail Enquiries website to tell me that it was impossible. The workaround was to look for a single outbound journey and a single return journey, not ideal but I got the information that I needed. While this was a case of curiosity more than anything else, I might be nonplussed if I was after a bargain fare in preference to the standard Off-Peak Return; knowing that such a search would prove fruitless anyway would have meant sticking with a walk on fare so I wasn’t bothered.

While it has come a way since its original incarnation, the episode illustrates that creases still need to be knocked of the National Rail Enquiries journey planning algorithm. When the website first came on the scene, I was left wondering why they couldn’t have used the excellent engine that Network Rail had inherited from Railtrack; it was one of the few things that they got right. It was all the more puzzling when the new planning engine was nowhere near as good as its predecessor. Glitches like not being told about journey options via Wilmslow when engineering work disrupted the normal Sunday services between Macclesfield and Manchester was but one of the inconsistencies.

Of course, any system is only ever as good as the data supplied to it. A striking example of that was the carrot of having an early Sunday morning rail replacement coach to Wilmslow for a day out in Wales. The advised coach service turned out to be a work of fiction so my travel arrangements had to change as did any plans that I had. A good day was enjoyed but not in the way in which I had envisaged it. The same sort of thing may explain the lack of available fares sometimes when there is engineering work ongoing and that between Lockerbie and Edinburgh earlier this year comes to mind.

While I can deal with this and find my way around the rail network anyway or even turn to other journey planning services, what must it all seem to someone who isn’t so savvy? I can see it looking very offputting and that’s a pity because public transport needs all the support that it can get in these leaner times. Taking this further, public transport needs to sell itself better and easier journey planning is part of this. Websites that don’t deliver may not cause someone to pick up a phone or visit their nearest staffed train station but set them to choose to drive or even fly instead, hardly the type of thing that should be happening. The National Rail Enquiries website may have won awards and offer the option to sort out accommodation along with your train ticket but what use is all of this if the journey finding algorithm or the information supplied to it aren’t up to scratch? After all, that’s why people go to the website so both of those need to take precedence over any other fancy features that some might care to add.

Most bus companies offer collections of timetables on their websites but Veolia Transport doesn’t bother, merely telling everyone to go Traveline instead. When the rest of your competition offers the more complete service, this looks lazy and makes your bus enterprise look like an afterthought bolted on to your environmental services, water and energy divisions. Going further, it gives the impression that the organisation is a jobsworth utility company, surely not what it wants to do at all. It wouldn’t be such a problem if all of the areas where Veolia operates took up the baton and compensated accordingly but that in’t always the case. Until recently, Powys was such an example but a new website seems to address this so it is a case of giving credit where it is due. Veolia probably still needs to make more of an effort though, even if it makes a good job of providing the actual services. For example, it operates LUAS, Dublin’s tram service, very well and I can vouch for the quality of the provided customer service but that needs to make its way onto the web for all to see.

A thought struck me while looking at the service frequency for D&G’s service 42 between Congleton and Crewe via Holmes Chapel. It is hourly Monday for the full route and two hourly on Saturdays for the same (it runs only between Leighton Hospital and Crewe on the intermediate hours); there is no Sunday service. Arriva’s 130 exhibits the same type of behaviour with an hourly daytime frequency on Saturdays and Sundays while it is half hourly during the other days of the week. Intuitively, you would have thought that, away from the rush hours, less folk would be using buses on a main work day in comparison to Saturday when the shops are open for the same hours and there are more folk off work to visit them. However, it doesn’t seem to go like that. Confounding factors might include folk spending their free time at home and not travelling about or people using services that are closed at weekends. Both of those could explain why the streets of Macclesfield are next to empty of an evening; if there is nowhere to go then nobody comes. Another thing to remember is that there is an inclination to spend a whole day going somewhere for some activity rather than dividing it up into short chunks. All of these must affect patronage and might explain why the service level of a Sunday simply drops over a cliff. All in all, the behaviour of hoards can be very odd and I suppose that it has its effects on bus timetables too.

Part of last Saturday’s journey to Burnsall had me using service 74 from Ilkley to Grassington. It is a subsidised service operated Monday to Saturday by Pride of the Dales on behalf of North Yorkshire County Council. The route travelled ensures that only small single decker buses are used with Optare Solos being the mainstay these days. An arch over the route at Bolton Abbey precludes the use of double deckers while the narrow road from Barden Bridge to Burnsall by Appletreewick (pronounced as “app-trick” by the locals) is challenging enough for a Solo driver let alone that of a larger vehicle.

The use of smaller vehicles would lead you to think that not many use the service and I was surprised to see the extent of the patronage of the 11:35 from Ilkley last Saturday. In the event, I was lucky enough to get on first and find a seat right at the back so that my rucksack didn’t get in the way of anyone and allowed others to sit around me because I knew that we’d struggle with the numbers. In the end, there was standing room only (with any of these looking unsteady on the legs being offered a seat) and I was inclined to wonder if my getting off at Burnsall would involve displacing standees from the vehicle only for them to have to re-embark afterwards. However, enough left us at Bolton Abbey to ease that possibility although there was a dog owner sat in the middle of the floor later on. Neither was I the only one to leave at Burnsall either so that made things easier and no more disturbance was caused than was needed.