On Trains & Buses

London Midland have published details of their Christmas and New Year train services as part of a general Christmas section that is also promotional in tone.

Arriva Trains Wales now have their Christmas and New Year service level details up on their website.

It took me until today find where Stagecoach Manchester have details of their Christmas and New Year bus services when this has been posted since last month.

Now have spotted details of CrossCountry train services for Christmas & New Year period. An interesting touch is the highlighting of the likely busy times for their services. Seat bookings are recommended too.

Connect 88 service between Knutsford, Wilmslow and Altrincham has its own website. You have to wonder if the GHA Gold branding is set to be applied to other services that they operate. Only time will tell…

Northern has added extra journeys from Manchester Victoria to and from both Preston and Wigan. They started doing this in mid-November and goes on until the last Saturday before Christmas.

Arriva now has an area on its website for details of Christmas and New Year travel time changes for its English and Welsh bus services. From the landing page, select your own region to get to the information that you need.

Scottish Citylink has published details of their Christmas and New Year coach services on their website. So have Irish Citylink but their message is much simpler: they are offering a full service every day apart from Christmas Day when no coaches are running.

Merseytravel has got in early with their Christmas and New Year services pages on their website and I first found out about them through their weekly email newsletter. An interesting development is the offering of additional night (extending into the early hours of the next morning) bus and train services on the final approach to Christmas Day itself. Other announcements may come yet.

Anyone that ever read Barry Doe’s column in Rail magazine will not that using more than one set of tickets for a train journey can save you money. An example is a day trip to Edinburgh made using an off-peak return between Macclesfield and an off-peak day return between Preston and Edinburgh. That combination has saved me a significant amount of money in the past and all that matters is that a train stops at a station where such a changeover is to be made. Recently I spotted a website called Split Your Ticket that has other such combinations for you to try. To my eyes, the list is not as yet exhaustive but has to be worth a look. After all, an off-peak return rail fare between Macclesfield and Edinburgh has increased by around £30 in fourteen years.

Update 2014-11-17: Since writing the above, I have discovered TrainSplit.com from Raileasy. It seems to be more what I expected from Split your Ticket in that there is a searchable database that can yield some savings on day return fares as I discovered with journeys between Macclesfield and the likes of Edinburgh and Berwick-on-Tweed, to name but two.