On Trains & Buses

Herefordshire Council is reviewing their bus services now and cuts are in the pipeline. You have until 21st April to make your views known. £1m of savings are being sought so this is not going to be a painless exercise and an annual subsidy budget of around £1.6m with an annual concessionary travel reimbursement budget of around £1.4m put the two-year saving target in perspective. Maybe a council tax rise would be better?

Few places in England are escaping the chill wind of bus service cuts with Greater Manchester now joining their number. Only generalities are known for now but subsidised bus services in the area are under threat and Arriva’s service 130 between Macclesfield and Manchester is et to lose funding for Saturday services with changes coming into place from April 27th. Quite what form these will take is unknown to me at the moment apart from a general comment about some journeys not going between Parr’s Wood and Piccadilly Gardens but I will share more details when I do. Other services may see reductions in time.

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mainly half hourly daytime bus service 16 between Altrincham, Sale and Manchester’s Piccadilly Gardens is being withdrawn from April 27th.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.