On Trains & Buses

From Monday 2022-06-22, First South Yorkshire will be operating a new service numbered MAN4 for Amazon workers. This will call at Renishaw and Eckington for shift times at Amazon at Barlborough.

The reopening of Leicester St. Margaret’s bus station was postponed from 2022-05-30; a revised opening date has yet to be confirmed.

Next week, the railway network across England, Scotland and Wales will be heavily disrupted by strike action. Nominally, the stoppage is for three individual days (2022-06-21, 2022-06-23 and 2022-06-25) but the effects are such that passengers are being advised not to travel for six days because train positioning movements cannot happen. In effect, that makes it a Tuesday to Sunday stoppage so many will need to find other ways to travel. Rail magazine has criticised this action and it is difficult to see this practice getting continual repeats given the lasting damage to the rail industry that could be caused. Hopefully, sense eventually will prevail and I do recognise that some fear job losses and have been suffering from constraints to their earnings in these times of high inflation. There needs to be a compromise sooner and not later.

High Peak’s service 19 between Macclesfield and Prestbury has been revised with the frequency reduced to every 90 minutes to reflect current demand and to provide better reliability. There are no changes to the journeys that serve The Fallibroome Academy or McCann’s.

While I cannot recall what led me to the mention of European interrailing, here are two websites from the same organisation that help you get passes for rail travel across Europe and within different European countries: Interrail Eurail and Eurail. The first of these is for residents of one of the thirty-three member countries of the scheme to travel in one or more of the other members while the second is for those living outside the thirty-three country block.

The passes typically allow travel in so many days out of a longer period such as a month and, though cheaper than all the required equivalent tickets, the costs are in the region of hundreds of euro so there is an upfront investment that is not inconsiderable in these times of high inflation. Still, the operation is around more than fifty years and dates from its original beginnings in the nineteen fifties. Its early days were spent offering services to young people but everyone is entitled these days and seat reservations are a possibility too.

There is a lot of advice against travelling during Storm Eunice when it passes over us tomorrow. This has featured not only on Twitter but also in operator emails from the likes of Northern. Storm Dudley passed without causing anything untoward around me but working from home does tend to shield you from these things.

From next Sunday (2022-02-20), D&G will be tweaking the timings of its service 16 (Hanley - Werrington - Cheddleton - Leek - Buxton) and dropping Abbey Hulton as a stopping point on its evening journeys. One thing that escaped my notice is that the Leek-Buxton section of the route only sees service from Monday to Friday with service 108 (Ashbourne - Waterhouses - Leek - Buxton) getting extended to cover this section on Saturdays. There also are different timings as a result with the first journey from Buxton on Saturdays being disappointingly late in the day for making more extensive explorations of the hill country between there and Leek.

The junction at Grimshaw Lane/Wellington Road is going to be closed from 2022-02-19 to 2022-02-27. This means that Arriva service 10 will operate only to and from South West Avenue. Goodwins services 391, 392 will operate as far as South West Avenue before going via Flash Lane to the A523 to Adlington and then going via Brookledge Lane and the normal route. During this period, there will be no service to either Kerridge or the top of Bollington.

Changes are forthcoming on the D&G bus network on Sunday (2022-02-02). Saturday services 94, 94A and 94B will operate only between Newcastle and Tunstall in Stoke-on-Trent rather than extending as far as Biddulph and Congleton as they do now. Service 85 will not operate on Sundays or bank holidays. Otherwise, these commercially operate routes will not be affected on their other days of operation. Council-contracted services 42 and 317 will see journeys retimed.

The current contract for service 130 in Cheshire East is set to expire at the end of March. The tendering process for a new contract to apply from the start of April is underway. An announcement of a new contract and timetable should follow on its completion. It remains to be seen what this means for service level but it is promising that a new supported contract is in the offing.