On Trains & Buses

Arriva’s Monday to Saturday mainly half hourly daytime bus service 16 between Altrincham, Sale and Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens is being withdrawn from April 27th. With bus budget savings of around £7m needing to be found by Transport for Greater Manchester, it is difficult to see its getting replaced unless an operator like first or Stagecoach steps in to provide an alternative.

Final details of cuts to North Yorkshire’s bus services are available and it is not a happy picture. It all starts in April but there is some solace in the introduction of summertime Dalesbus services around the same time. Many of these are seasonal weekend services but anything is better than nothing for visitors to Yorkshire’s dales who want to travel by public transport.

There are more changes to Cheshire East bus services from the end of April. Early morning Monday to Saturday journey on High Peak service 58 between Macclesfield and Buxton are being tweaked as follows:

Current 06:40 from Buxton to leave 10 minutes earlier at 06:30

Current 07:45 from Buxton to leave 3 minutes earlier at 07:42.

Current 07:10 from Macclesfield to leave 5 minutes earlier at 07:05.

Of these, only the 07:45/07:42 runs on Saturdays according to the High Peak timetable and the first Saturday departure from Macclesfield in at 09:15 and that comes as a surprise to me. It also rules out early starts from the Cat and Fiddle Inn for walking outings.

Less favourably, Saturday journeys on Arriva’s service 130 are changing due to the withdrawal of financial support from Transport for Greater Manchester. The full impact of this is as yet unknown to me but I will post details as soon as I get them. The week commencing 2014-04-27 is to see the introduction of these alterations as well as those applying to buses between Buxton and Macclesfield.

Transport for Greater Manchester have a dedicated website telling of their plans for the metropolitan county’s tram system: Metrolink Transformation Information. It amazes me now to think how tram lines there will be when, not so long ago, you were talking about two main ones. In the next few years, we will have Manchester Airport being served and the system already extends as far as Oldham and Rochdale. That was an unthinkable idea for some of us when I first moved to the north of England.

D&G is altering some of their bus services that serve Crewe as follows:

6: Leighton Hospital – Crewe – Shavington

For Monday to Saturday services, the Cliffe Road timing point is to get re-timed. Saturday journeys to be extended to and from Leighton Hospital.

9: Wistaston – South Cheshire College – Crewe – Elm Drive

Amendments to Monday to Friday service include the withdrawal of the 14:41 and 15:41 journeys from Kings Drive together with the 09:25, 15:25, 16:05 ones from Crewe. The 14:09 journey to Elm Drive gets shortened to Kings Drive and the 14:39 one to Elm Drive now extends to Shelley Drive.

85: Crewe – Hanley

Route and timetable revised with extra Sunday morning journeys from Crewe. Madeley short journeys to be renumbered 85B. Some journeys now extended to serve Bridgemere Garden World.

While most of what you find on here is for any user of public transport, this is a rare diversionary item for those with a greater interest in Sussex train running and has an element of train set watching in it too. Here are two web pages showing the progress of trains around Sussex railway lines with the trains as blocks on network diagrams:

Diagrams

The codes are those for the train routes themselves, much like bus service numbering, and would make more sense to anyone with a trainspotting inclination. The same kind of person also might be interested in the RailCam website for seeing trains running on certain railway lines like you would see them if you were there yourself.

While no I am no trainspotter, these curiosities are too good to cast into a virtual waste paper basket. On the block diagrams, a lot of work has been done with Network Rail’s data feeds and these are available to anyone with a more technical computing bent that fancies either a challenge or needs to create something as part of working for a living.

Adding things like this will not become a regular habit so it should not affect those who just need trains and buses to get them where they need to be. Sometimes, the occasional deviation is healthy and that’s all this is. If anything, they allow you into the world of the dedicated railway enthusiast, if only for a little while.

As I write this, there is snow in a lot of places and North Yorkshire County Council tweeted the address of their roadside webcam page for anyone needing to see how the conditions are. Looking at them now, it appears that North Yorkshire got its share of snowfall when lower levels of Cheshire like Macclesfield escaped.

Recently, I encountered a document describing Cheshire East Council’s response to the devolution of Bus Service Operators Grant (BSOG) administration to local transport authorities for their contracted services. Operators of council contracted services will no longer be able to claim the BSOG separately and will instead increase the prices of their tenders in order to be compensated for its loss. Until 2017, the funding is to be ring fenced but it will become part of the central government block grant to councils after then. Given the cutbacks we have seen in council spending and funding, this is a concern but there will be a general election before then so there is little point in getting too worried just yet. Maybe council tax increases will offset drops in funding before then but we are a while away from that yet.

Every Tuesday aside from any public holidays, Clowes Coaches runs a bus service between Leek and Congleton that has one morning outbound journey and one early afternoon return journey. Thought it also services places such as Endon and Biddulph, the service cannot be called regular and its forthcoming cancellation hopefully will not have very much of an impact. The service continues until the last Tuesday in April and no longer runs after that. Anyone who has uses it will need to use different means for their travel needs and I hope no one gets cut off completely.

Yesterday morning, an Arriva bus heading for Macclesfield on service 130 (there was a picture on the Manchester Evening News website showing the destination display of the bus before it was turned off and a replacement bus was seen going through Wilmslow on its way to the Macclesfield for the 10:10 journey to Manchester) was involved in an accident with several Stagecoach buses. It is something that leaves questions outstanding since the Arriva bus was leaving on time even if the timing surprised me; it was the 08:15 departure. No longer are we talking about near hourly or near half-hourly departures from Manchester Piccadilly all day because early morning Monday to Friday timings now are less regular than they once were.

Police have been working out what happened and have a definite line of enquiry. It is consistent with one witness account from Manchester Evening News that caught my eye:

“We were arriving at Piccadilly and we saw an Arriva bus pull out from the station going the other way. It was going quite fast then it hit us and the Magic Bus behind us.”

The possible cause that police are investigating is an accelerator failure on the Arriva bus and it fits in with the above. So, driver error looks unlikely although stopping a vehicle with this problem cannot be easy. It even might explain the side of the road on which the bus came to rest in another picture on the MEN website. That to some eyes would appear to be on the wrong side of the road and I have no doubt that police would explain that too if it were the case.

Thankfully, there were no serious injuries though travelling on a vehicle caught up in the accident cannot have been pleasant even if speeds most likely were low. Hopefully, the fifteen people who were injured will make a full recovery. Apart from avoiding this happening again, that very much is the most important consideration.

In the past, I have been on Arriva buses that have broken down or been driven in a reckless manner (some late-night journeys to Macclesfield from Crewe or Manchester come to mind) but things are much steadier on them these days and it’s best to keep it like that, mechanical failures notwithstanding. However, those previous experiences do not have you thinking good things when you first hear of accidents involving five buses