On Trains & Buses

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.

Bus services operated by First Leeds are set to change as follows from next Sunday. Thankfully, we are mainly in tweaking territory here apart from the service X84 Sunday extension to Skipton being suspended for the wintertime.

Service 10 Leeds – Temple Newsam Dates of operation have been extended – this service will continue to run on Saturdays & Sundays, with the last day being Sunday 7 December.

Service 49 Bramley – Leeds – Monkswood Gate A revised timetable will be introduced, to improve early evening reliability.

Services 50/50A Horsforth – Leeds – Seacroft A revised timetable will be introduced, to improve early evening reliability.

Service 64 Middleton – Leeds – Aberford A revised timetable will be introduced, to improve reliability, with most journeys from Thorpe Lane (Middleton) running up to four minutes earlier towards ASDA.

Service 74 Horsforth – Leeds – Seacroft A revised timetable will be introduced, to improve reliability, with most journeys from Middleton ASDA running up to four minutes earlier via Hunslet, towards Leeds.

Service 508 Halifax – Shelf – Odsal – Farsley – Kirkstall – Leeds To resolve problems with timekeeping and to improve reliability we’re introducing a completely revised timetable. Between Halifax and Odsal, this service will be better coordinated with services 681/682.

Service X14 Leeds – Armley – Swinnow – Pudsey A revised timetable will be introduced, to improve reliability.

Service X84 Leeds – Otley – Ilkley – Skipton A revised Sunday timetable will be introduced, with buses running between Leeds, Otley and Ilkley. The Sunday service to Skipton will be withdrawn for the winter period.

Most of the changes being made by First Manchester on 2014-10-26 are punctuality improvements. Service 42 is an exception to this with an increase in its Sunday frequency. The forthcoming timetables are available too.

Service 42 East Didsbury – Manchester Sunday frequency increased up to eight buses an hour so that there is a bus every 7/8 minutes.

Service 58 Rochdale – Middleton Monday to Friday punctuality improvements.

Service 59 Rushcroft – Manchester Monday to Friday punctuality improvements.

Service 63 Brookhouse – Manchester New times will apply for evening journeys, to improve punctuality, with buses running up to five minutes later.

Service 64 Oldham – Manchester Monday to Saturday punctuality improvements.

Service 81 White Moss – Manchester Increased the frequency between White Moss and Manchester, with buses running up to every 20 minutes. Otherwise, there are no changes to the times of buses on services 81/81A between Holts/Derker, Oldham, Moston and Manchester.

Services 88/89 White Moss/Blackley Circular – Manchester A revised timetable will be introduced, with buses running every 20 minutes on Mondays to Saturdays.

Service 154 Cheetham Hill – Bury Monday to Friday punctuality improvements.

Service 163 Bury – Middleton – Manchester We’ll be making some minor changes to Monday to Saturday evening journeys to improve punctuality. Mondays to Friday 19:22 departure from Piccadilly Gardens sees extra time added throughout the journey. On, Saturdays, the 1755 departure from Piccadilly Gardens sees revised times at some stops while the 19:22 departure from Bury gets revised to set off at 19:17 and extra time is added throughout its journey and the 20:22 departure from Piccadilly also sees extra time added throughout the route.

Service 348 Carrbrook – Ashton Monday to Saturday punctuality improvements.

Service 350 Oldham – Saddleworth – Ashton Monday to Saturday punctuality improvements: some journeys will terminate at Micklehurst, rather than Hey Farm, serving Mansfield Road and Micklehurst Road.

Service 533 Egerton – Bolton Minor changes to times at some stops, to improve punctuality and times of buses from Egerton and Bolton will not change.

Northern Rail are introducing a Monday to Friday evening peak time from 16:01 through to 18:30 where off-peak tickets will not be valid from the 8th of next month, increasing the cost of travel for anyone commencing journeys at those times. Much is made of the fact that season ticket holders are not affected by the change, so it is occasional travellers who will notice the change more than most.

Unfortunately, the abolition of Cheap Evening Return fares would be abolished are becoming reality even though there is no mention of them In Northern Rail’s information of the introduction of the evening peak period either. Also, it took some probing of those manning the company’s Twitter account before they confirmed this for me and the intervention of someone else was needed to make that happen. Make of that what you will…

There is a petition set up for signing by Campaign for Better Transport for anyone who feels strongly about the change. Fare rises are a sensitive subject as you’ll notice whenever the annual regulated fare rises are announced and, for 2015, it is to be 3.5% in England, which is lower than recent years. Finding other increases appearing elsewhere though changes undermines any relief that such news might bring.