92 Clubs – Day 24 – A Day Off
I did the same on the Monday. I’m slacking a bit, but then I’m trying to get my health a bit better. I just can’t believe that pollen levels have been high or moderate every day since the end of May.
At least I got a start on some of my planning for the rest of the week.
92 Clubs – Day 23 – A Day Off
It was a Sunday and because of the hay fever and things that I needed to do, like sort out my tablets and get some food in, I took the day off.
The Return Trip on a Train
Often the rerurn trip is the most difficult for anybody to book.
Tomorrow, for instance, I am visiting Norwich, the two Nottingham clubs and then returning from Manchester Piccadilly. Of late, I’ve been booking an off-peak ticket for the return journey, as I know it can be used on most trains in the evening. Usually, in comfort too, except on Virgin’s Glasgow services. So if I’m early, I don’t have to wait until some ungodly hour to get my booked train home.
But tomorrow, the return Off-Peak single from Manchester was over £40, whereas the Advance Standard Class single was just £15. But as the Advance First Class single was only seven pounds more I took that. I’ll get the diffeence back in three cups of coffee.
It seems to pay well, if you don’t follow rules and check all options.
One Law For The Stone Roses Drummer and One For Everyone Else!
Apparently, Ian Brown, the drummer of the Stone Roses, was only fined for doing 105 mph on the M6. The full report is here.
Everybody else would have been banned, but then he has to get to London to see his son and for rehearsals.
There’s nothing wrong with the train and it’s probably quicker. He could I suspect also afford a chauffeur!
Improving The Rail Ticket System
With all the tickets, I’ve been buying for my challenge, I’m starting to get strong views about how the system should be improved.
Global Account
The first thing that is needed is a global account that works for all of the train company sites.
It would be a complete profile and contain.
- All your personal details.
- Your preferred station for picking up tickets.
- Your preferred seating arrangements.
- Your credit card details.
It would of course have all of the tickets you’d ordered in a database, so you could use them for purposes like calculating expenses or rebooking a similar trip on another day.
The site would be run by ATOC and not by a company such as the trainline, which charges you a booking fee and doesn’t always give you the most logical routes.
So let’s say I want to book a London Liverpool train on Virgin similar to one I bought a month ago. I would click the Book Similar link on the previous ticket and this would put me into the Virgin site, showing me the prices I would be charged I would then book as normal, using the global preferences. It would make the process a lot simpler.
User-Defined Pick-Up Passwords
To pick up tickets you need the eight-digit reference number. Recently, I picked up seven tickets, with different reference numbers in one visit to Kings Cross. It was a nightmare, especially as my left-hand isn’t 100%. I do text the reference numbers to my mobile phone, but that only simiplifies it a small amount.
If you could define your own pick-up password, then the process would be much simpler. I might use VG1234 for Virgin, where 1234 is the last four digits of my phone number. This would mean the pick-up is as secure as it is now, but I should also be allowed at my risk to pick up the tickets on a credit card only. I would always use a simple password, I could remember.
Text Alerts
Virgin and others can text me details of my trip, but they send too much information and we need more messages.
I would just like the eight-digit reference followed say by Euston-Liverpool Lime Street, as this would then display the reference, when I held up the phone without opening the message, so it would be easier to pick-up the tickets.
But how about these messages.
- An alert if there was any engineering work or delay before the train leaves.
- An alert a specific number of minutes before the train leaves.
- An alert with the platform number. This might clear out the space in front of the departure boards.
- Alerts if the train was going to arrive late.
A Very Unhappy Bunny
Whilst travelling from Crewe to Lancaster on Day 21 on the very overcrowded Glasgow train, I came across a very unhappy bunny. She had booked the previous Glasgow train, but had then missed it because of a tube journey that took twenty minutes longer than it should. So to get to Glasgow, she’d had to buy a new ticket at £130 and stand all the way. She was saying she wouldn’t use the train again and would fly next time. But what would have happened if she’d turned up late for her flight?
The trouble is that many expect that when they use a train, they just turn up, buy a ticket at a good price and go. If I’ve bought a cheap ticket, I always make sure I get it, although in a couple of trips, I’ve bought a new ticket to get home early. It has cost me, but I’ve got to bed a couple of hours early.
I have read that a lot of people get to the station early for their trains. The trouble is that most stations don’t cater for those, who do and then have a coffee, buy a paper and have a read. It’s why you get so many people standing in front of the departure boards at stations, blocking the path for those hurrying to get on a train. So as more people travel by train, it just means that stations will get more and more congested.
I do wonder whether this congestion, meant that the unhappy bunny, deliberately delayed until the last minute to avoid the crush.
I’m lucky in that I’m a 30 minute or under bus ride from Liverpool Street, Kings Cross, St. Pancras, London Bridge and Euston, so if I watch the buses on-line through the Countdown system, I can usually have a better experience than most. It also means, I can catch the very early morning trains before six in the morning, when everything is less crowded. But if you live more than 30 minutes from the main station and there is no all-night bus, this isn’t possible in London. that it is like in Manchester or Birmingham say, I do not know.
But to return to my unhappy bunny. She was at fault for missing the train. But in her support, getting to stations early, is often not the best experience.
Trans Pennine Services
I’ve crossed the Pennines several times so far on a train. Sometimes I used the smart Trans Pennine expresses and at other times the slower trains of Northern Rail.
It would appear that a word of advice is not to use any of the expresses that go anywhere near Manchester Airport without a reservation, as they are generally overcrowded with both people and luggage. I first experienced the problems on Day 3, when getting from Horwich Parkway to Manchester Piccadilly. There also on that train seemed to be a surfeit of obese people sitting in more than one seat. A guy I talked to who was on his way to Prague for business says it was always like that.
But the line from Leeds to Preston is very pleasant as it winds its way through Bradford, Burnley, Accrington, Blackburn and other places, at a fairly leisurely but purposeful pace. On one trip two freight drivers said that the driver of our train was going a bit slower than he might. So do freight drivers think themselves the Kings of the Rail?
And of course there is the Tyne Valley line that I took from Carlisle to Newcastle, which winds through almost spectacular countryside, stopping at stations, straight out of film sets for Victorian melodramas.
How much pressure could be taken of the West Coast Main Line, by doing a small amount of evelopment on these lines? The expresses need more carriages and the slower services need modern units with an extra carriage or two.
Until the 1980s, if you had done the journey I’d done from Morecambe to Newcastle, you’d have just had one change at Leeds, rather than two at Lancaster and Carlisle. Go back even further and it was electrified all the way from Leeds to Heysham. Now the electrification ends at Skipton. Such is progress!
But then on another trip across the Pennines, I sat with a guy, who used to commute on the old Woodhead electrified line from Manchester to Sheffield. A lot of that line doesn’t even exist any more.
All of this just illustrates one of the real problems of railways all over England. East-West routes have not been developed as they should have been. Try to do a journey like Ipswich to Shrewsbury or Hereford?
Virgin Trains Glasgow Services
Inevitably in the last couple of weeks, I’ve ended up on some of Virgin Trains services that have started at or are going to Glasgow. If I take Day 21, where I went from London to Milton Keynes and then from Crewe to Lancaster for Morecambe, before going from Lancaster to Carlisle, all on trains going to Glasgow. The early train had plenty of space, although, a lot of people use it to commute to Milton Keynes, but the other two were very overcrowded. I didn’t have a seat reservation on either leg and although I got a seat from Crewe to Preston, it was stand up for the rest of the way.
It almost seems that there is a division, where trains are bearable south of Warrington, Wigan or Preston, but often unbearable to the north. More capacity is urgently needed, both on the Pendolino and Super Voyager services. I think the problem is compounded, by the fact, that the trains get used by locals, travelling just one or two stops. I met one guy commuting from Lancaster to Carlisle.
There are a few TransPennine services from Manchester Airport to Glasgow that use the route, but they are short 100 mph trains, which at best add a few seats to the route and at worst make it more congested. I experienced one going south and detailed it in this post. Perhaps, there is a case for a couple of High Speed Diesel Trains to replace the small Class 185‘s on this route until the line is fully-electrified and electric multiple units arrive.
It has been announced that extra Pendolino trains will be available soon, but some seem to have been put into store, rather than service. Surely, if the sums added up four years ago, and we’ve had an increase in passengers since then, that they are better earning revenue rather than getting rusty.
Remember that my particular expertise is resource scheduling. I just think, that someone’s objective function is not comprehensive enough or there are some dark politics involved. If nothing, adding extra seats to the Glasgow services might encourage people to use them rather than flying, which would reduce our carbon footprint.
Given the overcrowding, something should be done as soon as possible.
At present all I can advise, is make sure you have a seat reservation when you travel anywhere between Warrington and Glasgow.
But the real problems of the West Coast Main Line are historic, as Wikipedia states.
Because of opposition by landowners along the route, in places some railway lines were built so that they avoided large estates and rural towns, and to reduce construction costs the railways followed natural contours, resulting in many curves and bends. The WCML also passes through some hilly areas, such as the Chilterns (Tring cutting), the Watford Gap and Northampton uplands followed by the Trent Valley, the mountains of Cumbria with a summit at Shap, and Beattock Summit in southern Lanarkshire. This legacy of gradients and curves, and the fact that it was not originally conceived as a single trunk route, means the WCML was never ideal as a long-distance main line, with lower maximum speeds than the East Coast Main Line (ECML) route, the other major main line from London to Scotland.
And this still means that for long distances north of Crewe, that only a double track is possible. So this limits the number of paths available, which means that running say a slower connecting service from Warrington to Carlisle, is just not on, even though it would remove the one or two station travellers.
And then you have the freight trains!
So perhaps the problem is not actually about trains, but is more about tracks and paths. The only way then, to get more through, would be to increase the size of the trains from nine to eleven coaches, for which many of the carriages have been built and are in store.
But at some point, the West Coast Main Line will have to have extra tracks, especially if more and more freight trains need to run to and from Scotland from the south. As I believe has been shown around Ipswich, the more freight trains you can run, the less trucks use the roads and you get greater capacity for cars and coaches.
I add the latter, as there is now a London to Glasgow coach service with sleeping berths.
My Local Bus Stop
My local stop is just around the corner and has buses that go everywhere, as this picture shows.
Mildmay Park (Balls Pond Road) Spider Map
Note that the actual spider maps, like this one have more information than their equivalent on the web.
The stop also has a Next Bus Information Number.
Next Bus Information Number
Note in the picture, the local street map.
The stop also has a Next Bus Display.
Next Bus Display
I wonder how long we’ll keep it though, as for many people the text message system will be better.
It is too much to expect all stops to be to this standard, but all important ones should have all the information, travellers might need.
I’m using the system in several ways now.
- I often check before I leave home when the next bus is due, to avoid waiting in the cold, say when I have an early train out of Kings Cross.
- If I’m expecting a visitor, I often ask them to text from say The Angel and then I can be at the appropriate stop to meet them.
- If a suitable bus doesn’t appear imminent, then I might change plan and say walk to Daldston Junction.
The only prediction is that these systems will get better and better. You might for instance text the number with say Euston attached to find the quickest way to get to that station. And I still haven’t brought up the subject of a smart phone. But then who needs one, for this purpose, if you have a smart text messaging system.
Suppose to find your way home in London, all you needed to do was text the stop code like 59415, followed by your post code to 87287. You would then be sent instructions on which bus to catch and where to change to get home.
As children, my friends and myself would wander all over London on Red Rovers. Children probably don’t do that now! But it was great fun. Being able to text to get you to your home, could make it safer.
Should We Londonise All Buses?
I know I’m a Londoner and live in the finest city in Europe, let alone the UK or England, but in my travels around the country, I have come to the conclusion, that most bus services outside the capital are very second-rate.
To start with, I should say that in most places it isn’t mainly the buses themselves, as towns and cities like Leeds, Manchester, Bristol and several others have buses that on a quick look to be on average to be the same condition and age, as those in London.
But there are three major differences.
- Most London buses are front entrance and centre exit, which effectively means that they pick up and set down passengers a lot quicker. It also means in London’s case, that a wheelchair passenger has an easier route to get on and off, as he or she uses the middle door. Because of the smaller dwell time at stops, two door buses actually travel faster and carry more people more efficiently. Whether this means the capital cost per passenger journey is lower, I don’t know. But it may well be so!
- London buses also announce the next stop both visually and audibly. Many visitors to my house are very surprised, when I say something like take the 141 to Balls Pond Road and get off there. The system also announces route changes and can be used by the driver to send a selection of common messages to the passengers.
- But the biggest difference is that all London buses are touch on, either with an Oyster card or a concession like my Freedom Pass. If you have a paper ticket, you show it to the driver and they tell you to get on. There is no timewasting mucking about with paper tickets, that London obviously deems to be just litter.
- From next summer, you will be able to touch in on your bus journey with any credit card, as Oyster is being augmented for the Olympics.
But it is the field of information that London buses are streets ahead of every other bus system in the UK.
- As a child, you were always told, that every tube station had a street map of the local area. So if you got lost, just go to the Underground station. So now, like many Londoners, when you are going somewhere foreign like Croydon for a North Londoner or Wembley for a South Londoner, you never carry a map and rely on the map at the destination station. It usually works. Now this street map system has been extended to the buses and most bus stops have a local street map. Only last night, whilst walking back from the pub, I used a map on a stop to show a tourist from Germany, how to walk to the pub where he was meeting a friend.
- These street maps are paired with spider maps, which show all the routes in the area, where they go and at which stop you catch the bus. Frank Pick and Harry Beck would be proud of this idea from their successors. Spider maps work well and if I’m lost after a walk, I just find the nearest bus and work out how to get home. Incidentally, Transport for London call them bus route diagrams, but you can’t argue with umpteen million Londoners, who call them spider maps and that term is now the one generally used by all.
- London has recently introduced text messaging at stops to find out how long you have to wait for the next bus. Other cities have this and it should be the norm everywhere.
- Important London bus stops have displays showing how long you’ll have to wait for the next bus. But as people are starting to use the text system more and more, I suspect, the number of these displays will decrease.
- You can also see when buses will arrive at a stop either through the web or from a phone app. I don’t have a smartphone, but my dumb Nokia 6310i is perfectly capable of telling me if a 30 bus, which is my preferred route home, is due ten minutes out of Kings Cross or Euston.
So how do some of the places I’ve visited compare to London in various areas?
Two Door Buses
You see the odd ones about, but not many.
On-Bus Information Systems
I’ve never seen one, but I’m told Colchester has them.
Maps at Bus Stops
Very few and most that I’ve seen have been very inferior and totally useless for visitors.
Text Information
This is a typical London next bus information notice.
London Sign For Bus Information By Text Message
And here’s one from Leeds.
Leeds Sign For Bus Information By Text Message
No prizes for guessing, which is the simpler system.
Not only is London, just a five digit number but the sign is easily read and is as low as they can put it, so that everybody from say eight to eighty can read it with ease. I can’t believe that there are over 45 million bus stops in Yorkshire! The london sign has the great advantage that it is small and just strapped to the post. So perhaps it could even be used on a temporary bus stop at road works.
I’ll let Frank Pick have the last word on this.
The test of the goodness of a thing is its fitness for use. If it fails on this first test, no amount of ornamentation or finish will make it any better; it will only make it more expensive, more foolish.
And he was born before the age of modern technology. He would have had a field day, if he was still alive and in charge of transport for the whole of the UK.
So to answer my original question, the answer must be an undoubted yes! London has proven that good, frequent and understandable bus services attract more riders, so the sooner we Londonise all buses the better.
People will go on about cost, but the first thing to do is get the maps at stops in place and get sensible text messaging systems working. And then we just have to make all new buses to the London standard! Remember too, that London retires quite a few buses each year. Many of these with a bit of refurbishment would be very suitable for lighter use in the provinces. Certainly, many of the older ones in London are much better, than the disabled-unfriendly old banger, I got back to the centre from Elland Road.
I think too, that we will underestimate the benefits of having the same bus information systems all over the country.
As an example, how much of my time and effort have I wasted trying to find out where to catch a bus on my challenge? And how much money have I wasted on unnecessary taxis?
So if it made travel easier and cheaper, would it make it easier for people to travel to work in the next town or perhaps have a day with Aunt Edna in Felixstowe?
We need any economic stimuli however small.
Remember too, that if we need new buses, that these are generally built in the UK, so much of the capital cost of new buses stays here. So if that is the case, why did Red Ken betray British workers, by buying a load of useless bendy buses? Few liked them, except perhaps fare dodgers.
The Anonymous Widower 