On Trains & Buses

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.

Last Saturday saw me journey by train to Ilkley. Due to work being done by Network Rail, I ended up going around by Bradford, something that I had never done before. A feature of the way that I went was that I ended up hotfooting it between train stations in Manchester and in Bradford. For the former, I could have used the Metrolink but it’s just as quick and easy to walk (around 20  minutes for me); that comment applies as much when the trams are running as it does at the moment when improvement works are in progress with trams replaced by buses in the centre of Manchester. In Bradford, the transfer took around ten minutes and that was even with my never visiting the place before. Its nearby neighbour Leeds seems to have all of the buzz and bustle but Bradford has its quiet appeal too so another visit seems appropriate.

Even with the walking, connections were being made with ample time and all was well until I tried to get from Bradford to Ilkley. Between Shipley and Guisley, there is a single track chord linking the Airedale and Wharfedale lines and all that’s needed to cause a spot of chaos was for a train to break down and that seems to be what happened. The 10:16 from Bradford was what I had in mind but that was cancelled and I ended up on the Skipton train as far as Shipley to pick up a train from there. In fact, this was to be the train that I would have caught in Bradford if it wasn’t to terminate in Shipley and turn around there. A train did turn up but no passengers were taken on board and that after it being late. When that sort of thing happens, you can imagine the mix of confusion, anger and annoyance among those awaiting the service (contingencies were beginning to enter my mind). It didn’t help that we had to cross from one side of Shipley station, not the shortest of walks, to the other either. Luckily, the 10:53 did arrive on time but the observed confusion, miscommunication and lack of communication did nothing to inspire confidence. It was no fault of the station staff because they did their best but those in the Northern Rail control room could do with learning something from this. Thankfully, things sorted themselves out by the time that I was going home again after a good walk by the Wharfe and that worked out as expected. As with everything, you get extremes of flawless working and total breakages.