Britain By Bus

National Express Reject Thousands for Driver Jobs

2012-02-01T12:15:00.000-08:00

It appears that West Midlands bus operator National Express West Midlands might be pickier than most when it comes to selecting drivers for their buses.

Its been revealed that thousands of people who applied to drive West Midlands buses have been turned away by the company simply because of they have points on their driving licences.

Out of about 4,500 applicants last year, National Express apparently took on less than 10% and the company is carrying scores of driver vacancies as a result. And just to make things worse, they lost another 170 of their current drivers to retirement.

The company blames the failure rate on applicants having points on their licence, and this is where National Express West Midlands appears to diverge from the practices of other bus operators.

The bus industry standard is to accept drivers who have three points on their licence – the sort of penalty you can expect for one minor speeding offence – but no more. Not National Express, however - they don't allow anyone to pass the interview if they have any points.

The company also makes applicants undergo strict literacy and numeracy tests, and some applicants fail those as well.

Only those who pass all the tests and have a clean licence to show get through to become trainees who are then put through their paces at the company’s Walsall training centre. Then its more theory, more tests and more careful assessment before they are allowed out onto the road – and only then with a trained mentor.

But then National Express West Midlands aren't unique in demanding high standards from their drivers. I blogged last month about London-based bus company Abellio flying all the way to Poland to recruit drivers for their London buses because they couldn't find any which quite made the grade in Britain. At the time, I assumed it was because Polish drivers might be less demanding than British drivers – or cheaper, in other words – but perhaps that's not the case. Perhaps British drivers have just spent too long playing Grand Theft Auto for their own good.

At one time, people assumed that driving a bus was a dead easy, unskilled job. It's clearly not.

York's StreetCars To Be Replaced By Easter

2012-02-01T12:10:00.000-08:00

It looks like York's glamourous but unfeasably large ftr superbuses are on their way out.

News reports from the Northern city suggest the entire fleet will be replaced by double deckers by Easter.

First, who operate the articulated giants, said that they'd carried out a comprehensive review of passenger growth prospects and had “identified an opportunity” to launch the ftr elsewhere in its northern region following a refurbishment – although they failed to indicate where.

The ftr number 4 service from Acomb to the University would be replaced by easy access double-decker buses, with lower carbon emissions than the ftr, and the current frequent service would continue without any timetable changes.

Local press report that while the decision to withdraw the ftr had been a commercial one, First had been “mindful of the aspirations of York’s council leaders” to remove the vehicles from York.

Well, they could hardly not be. Even before Labour took control last year, their election manifesto made it clear that the party wanted to get rid of the ftr's completely. I blogged last month about the heat that was being generated over the City Council's intention to rid their medieval streets of the ftr and First's apparently equal determination not to let them.

However, something had to give. First say they are now going to utilise the opportunities that the ftr offers elsewhere in the region, and are confident, they say, of stimulating new public transport journeys on a route 'currently being developed outside of York'.

Ourtside of York? Well, yes. Mind, there's no news yet on just how far outside of York this new route may be. Thirty miles? Three hundred miles? Three miles..?

Perhaps York hasn't quite seen the last of the ftr after all....

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it even a bus?

2012-01-31T11:09:00.000-08:00

Bizarre stories have been cropping up in the Chinese press this week about a fleet of off-road buses sold to Kazakhstan by a Chinese manufacturer – and whether they are actually buses at all.

Stories have begun to appear in the press claiming that these buses are, in fact, "desert tanks" suitable for fighting terrorists in the desert on Kazakhstan's border with China.

The vehicles in question are Shaanxi SX6100 SPF, and are apparently nicknamed the ‘Desert Tank’ due to the fact that they are based on the mighty 6×6 Dongfeng truck chassis which is made for all-terrain duty in the desert.

It's been reported that Shaanxi sold twenty SX6100′s to the Kazakhstan security services for use in ‘anti-terrorism-patrol’ in the vast empty deserts near the border with China’s Xinjiang Province.

But as you can see from the photo above, even though the SX6100 looks a bit of a handful, its still more like of a bus than a tank. Don't be fooled, says the Chinese press – they can be upgraded, adding that Shanxi can easily fit a turret for a small machine gun on the roof.

Except they haven't, of course.

What makes the whole thing even more bizarre, however, is the fact that there really isn't a terror threat on the border with Xinjiang anyway. So why, I wonder, would the Kazakstanis want to arm their off-road buses - especially as they've all been fitted out as buses and they aren't even fitted with armour?

Paranoia, it seems, is alive and well in China...

Of course, I'm waiting for a London bus operator to acquire a couple of these. They look just about perfect for bludgeoning your way through the capital's traffic.

Not sure Boris would approve, though...

Brighton Bus Driver 'Babe' Ban

2012-01-31T11:05:00.000-08:00

Hmm. I should probably file these two stories under a new section named “Carry On Clippie” or something, even if neither of them are actually really laughing matters.

The first involves bus drivers in Brighton who have been warned about being too familiar with their female passengers.

Brighton and Hove Buses have been forced to warn their drivers not to be over-friendly with female passengers after a recent complaint from a lady who said that she felt the language used by the driver was demeaning to her.

She said she felt insulted after being called 'babe' when she boarded a bus.

Now, the bus company has posted warnings to all its drivers warning them that they could face the sack if they call passengers 'love', 'darling' or ‘babe’.

Given that women make up approximately 50% of the population, the company are clearly concerned that their drivers might be alienating a significant portion of the customer base. The last thing they want is for their drivers to get a reputation for leering sexism.

Mind you, one driver reckoned the whole thing was ‘... just the height of political correctness’ so perhaps there’s still some work to do.

Still, you can’t criticise the company for failing to act on customer feedback.

Meanwhile, Translink in Belfast is investigating one of its drivers after he reportedly went off-route to make an impromptu call at an off-licence while driving a bus full of passengers across the city.

One of his passengers later said she couldn’t believe what was happening when the bus turned off its normal route to make an unscheduled stop at an off-licence on the Ormeau Road

According to operator Translink, the driver has now admitted briefly abandoning his passengers and disembarking to purchase a soft drink and has apologised for his actions. However, Translink have said they will be “…following the appropriate corrective measures with this employee.”

Blimey. Does that sound like it might involve electric cattle prods or something…?

Reality of Government Funding Cuts Begins to Dawn

2012-01-31T11:02:00.001-08:00

It seems that the whole country is slowly beginning to appreciate the potential impact of the government’s public spending cuts.

I blogged about the situation in Cornwall recently and then immediately stumbled upon three more cases where cuts in public subsidy were leading to cuts in public services.

The first was a story which predicted that thousands of passengers in South Yorkshire could be stranded without a bus service in April as bus companies struggle to come to terms with reductions in their Bus Service Operators’ Grant.

The BSOG is an annual payment from the Government to subsidise the cost of fuel and is worth £12 million to South Yorkshire ’s transport companies each year – but the payment is being slashed by a fifth in April, which equates to a budget cut of £2.4 million.

South Yorkshire ’s Passenger Transport Executive has warned that a reduction on this scale would have a ‘big impact’ on services, and it seems they are right. First Group are already preparing for a 5% fare increase and Stagecoach have admitted that they’ll have to work hard to minimise the impact on passengers.

Things look no better in North Wales where passengers are facing the familiar double whammy of fare increases and service reductions.

Councils have been angered by the Welsh Government decision to impose a 27% reduction in subsidy for bus services from this April. That equates to cuts totalling £500,000 to the Local Transport Services Grant (LTG) and the Bus Service Operators Grant. The announcement of the cuts resulted in a rare show of unity as councillors, bus operators and passengers stood shoulder to shoulder to jointly blast the Welsh Government for its decision.

For its part, the Welsh Government said they’ve had to make some tough choices in what are increasingly harsh economic times. And there’s few that would deny that – including, one assumes, the good people of Preston who were no doubt upset to hear that their local bus operator Rotala, the owner of Preston Bus, is intending to review its fares in the Spring to tackle rising costs. And we all know what that means.

The stock market-listed company said that it needed to look again at its fare levels in April as it tries to cope with cuts in Government funding. Yes, you’ve guessed it, they’ve been hit by a reduction in Bus Services Operators’ Grant.

Rotala reflected the universal concern about the effects of the government’s cuts by admitting that bus operators all over the country are having to review their fares in light of their substantial rises in operating costs resulting from the subsidy reductions.

Fares on Rotala’s routes in the West Midlands rose 5.6% at the start of the year after a careful review and the company said it will be carrying out a similar review in Preston shortly.

The only glimmer of good news comes from Rotala’s acquisition of new hybrid buses which, it says, have been delivering improvements in fuel consumption of up to 50% on some routes. Eleven more hybrid vehicles are due to enter service soon and Rotala said they will be making a further application to the next round of the government’s Green Bus Fund to help buy more.

It’s doubtful whether any of the passengers will be see the benefits of the savings, though.

So – will there be any more stories about government subsidy cuts leading to bus service cuts? Oh, yes. I have a feeling that we're going to hear an awful lot more yet.

Villagers Complain About Too Many Buses

2012-01-30T13:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, Arriva must think they just can't please anyone...

While the residents of several County Durham villages are complaining about bus services being cuts, the residents of Howden-le-Wear are complaining they have too many.

The village, which is part way between Crook and Bishop Auckland, say they will be blighted by congestion thanks to the launch of a new service which will mean that up to 20 buses are passing through their village (population: 1,234) every hour.

Arriva already operate their 1 and 1b services through the village, but now Go North East have resurrected the old OK Motor Services brand and launched their OK1 service which although it takes a slightly different route it still competes with the Arriva services and goes through the middle of the village.

This has prompted Arriva to fight back and in the next few weeks they will be launching a new X1 service that competes directly with the OK1 and... yes, goes right through the middle of the village.

Villagers say they've had enough, but can't find anyone to turn to who can sort it out. Local councillors are just as exasperated.

For his part, Martin Harris of Go North East says the OK1 service was a valuable new service for residents, and feedback had been very positive. Nigel Featham, managing director for Arriva North East, on the other hand, reckons their X1 will be "great news for the community."

Well, perhaps not every community... Howden-le-Wear, for example.

Anyway, one local councillor reckons that both bus companies should work together. But they won't, of course – that would be anti-competitive. Isn't that what the Competition Commission report was all about?

What a mess...

Nexus Takes The Slow Road to Un-Deregulation

2012-01-30T13:19:00.001-08:00

Nexus, Tyne and Wear's passenger transport executive, is quietly going about the process of un-deregulating their local bus services.

Last year, it announced plans to introduce a Quality Contracts Scheme covering around 340 different bus routes in Tyne and Wear. This would transfer responsibility for almost everything - branding, fare structure, ticket prices - from the area's privately-owned bus companies to Nexus, and would be the biggest shake-up to the local bus market in 25 years.

Under a Quality Contracts Scheme (QCS), says Nexus, bus users would benefit from a high-frequency core of services which would be tied-in with Metro (as it was before deregulation), simplified fares, full and proper consultation on changes to routes, and a guaranteed standard of service.

Crucially, Nexus would determine where and when buses ran and how much they cost, with the private operators running the services under contract. Buses wouldn't be allowed to operate within Tyne and Wear except within the contract scheme, thus ending the deregulated market that has existed since 1986.

For the moment, Nexus are quietly and informally consulting people on their QCS proposals prior to making a formal start on its introduction. A number of other PTE's are also pursuing the QCS idea, with some either already part way down the road and others still considering them.

But here's the rub. Given that deregulation of local bus services was a major political landmark in Margaret Thatcher's reign as Prime Minister, and given that we have a Prime Minister of a remarkably similar hue today, isn't this all rather pointless? Surely Cameron would never allow one of Maggie's greatest triumphs - and the whole free market concept - to be abandoned in this way?

Well, not necessarily. To begin with, Cameron's Conservatives seem quite happy to let their Lib Dem colleagues loose on the transport portfolio – possibly on the basis that it has been the graveyard of many a parliamentary career in the past – especially it's an area which definitely interests the Lib Dems. Add to that the fact that legislation to unpick bus deregulation is already on the statue book, although it has never actually been used. That means no new bills taking up valuable parliamentary time.

A third point is that the current system isn't exactly flavour of the month anyway. The recent Competition Commission report into the deregulated bus industry made it pretty clear that, at best, there was virtually no competition and that this was clearly having a detrimental effect on passengers. The report, I think, stopped short of accusing bus companies of operating a virtual cartel aimed at extracting as much money as they could from passengers and local councils alike. But not far short.

Besides, Cameron's Conservatives wouldn't lose many votes on Tyneside if it all went pear-shaped. A Tory voter on the banks of the Tyne is about as rare as a taxi on a wet night.

All of which might suggest that this mad idea of de-constructing a piece of prime Thatcherite legislation is perhaps not quite as far-fetched as some might think.

How it will all be received on Tyneside is less certain. Obviously, passengers will like it as it will guarantee a better, more accountable and more reliable service, as will local councillors who currently pour around £62m of subsidies into the coffers of the local bus companies yet have absolutely no control over what they do with it. The bus companies themselves are likely to be hostile, even if the whole system is virtually identical to one most of them already operate under in London.

Of course, it might be that the threat of a Quality Contracts Scheme being imposed might just be enough to stimulate the bus companies to negotiate and come up something a little less than a full QCS but a lot more than the status quo.

Time will tell.

'Trainspotter' Facing Terror Charges Over Photographs

2012-01-27T11:32:00.000-08:00

Pssst.! The next time you see a knot of slightly grubby men clutching notepads, cameras and thermos flasks outside of your local bus station, don’t just assume they are bus spotters. They may be (whisper it)… terrorists.

Witness the sorry case of Ryan Lavery, whose own solicitor describes as a ‘nerd, an anorak and a trainspotter’, who was arrested earlier this week near Downpatrick, Northern Ireland and promptly brought before the courts on terrorism charges.

Ryan, it seems, is accused of collecting information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism. The Police’s subsequent discovery of photographs of vehicles coming in and out of Ballykinlar Army Base on his computer seemed, to them, to endorse their action.

He is also charged with having a document likely to be of use to terrorists – to it, a list of vehicle registration numbers found at a house he used to live in overlooking the entrance to the barracks.

In court, Mr Lavery's defence solicitor argued that his client was "a trainspotter, a loner, an anorak, a nerd with no friends" and said that if he was put beside an airport "he would take pictures of planes". All of which sounds a bit harsh, frankly. I mean, he’s meant to be on Ryan’s side, isn’t he?

He added that Ryan's father works at Ballykinlar – no shortage of inside information there, I’d assume - and his client had visited an open day at the base last year where he had photographs taken of him holding a machine gun. So. Not exactly deep-cover, then….

Unfortunately, the District Judge refused him bail due to the risk of him committing further trainspotting offences and said it would have to be up to a High Court judge to decide if Mr Lavery really was a trainspotter or not.

I’ve heard plenty of cases of bus enthusiasts and other people innocently taking photos of buses being questioned – hassled, even - by the police, but this one seems a bit strong.

Mind you, it probably reflects the heightened awareness to such things in Northern Ireland, but it also brings to mind the case of the party of British aeroplane spotters in Greece who were imprisoned after being convicted of spying – all because the Greeks simply could not comprehend why anyone would want to collect aeroplane registration numbers for fun.

Let’s hope Ryan really is a dangerous terrorist otherwise the courts and the Police Service of Northern Ireland are going to look very silly indeed.

Council Seeks To Charge 50p Fare For Free Bus Trips

2012-01-27T11:08:00.000-08:00

There seems to be good news in Cornwall where the county council there has agreed a budget of £2.4m over the next two years to protect rural bus services.

Ninety-five of the county's services had been threatened because of a cut in government subsidy for bus services.

It's not all good news, though.

Cornwall County Council admitted that despite the new funding, it couldn't guarantee fares wouldn't go up. It is also going to ask the government if it can trial a 50p charge to free pass holders to further prop up the threatened routes - which seems to be an admission that the £2.4m is probably not enough.

It's a controversial step. One local councillor said that charging the neediest in society for bus journeys was a worrying move. "The bus passes are for people who can't, by and large, afford to pay,” he said. “How can they now afford to pay for buses which had been free?"

At the moment there are 126,000 free bus pass holders in Cornwall, plus thousands more visitors, who will all be affected if the Department of Transport allows the county to become a national pilot area for the 50p charge.

Councillors lay the blame for the threat to bus services squarely on the Government for shaving £2.3 million from the money the council needs to reimburse bus companies for concessionary bus journeys. At the moment the council reimburses almost three-quarters of the normal single adult fare on concessionary journeys - but this figure will tumble to just half in April.

Neither can the council guarantee that fares on ordinary commercial bus services, which are operated without subsidy, won't go up too.

Mark Howarth, managing director of Western Greyhound, reckoned that the extra funding was good news for the public.

"We've been saying all along the importance of bus services to the people of Cornwall, and I think that has been recognised by virtually all the councillors that they voted for extra money,” he told local media.

"We will only put fares up if we have to. But with the reduction in fuel duty rebate, with the cost of fuel going up, tyres, insurance, all these things are escalating beyond belief. We will keep our fares as low as possible, but inevitably they will have to rise."

Howarth also said that he didn't believe the Government would support the council's plans to make concessionary card holders pay a 50p charge for what is essentially a free journey.

He may very well be right. If so, Cornwall County Council could find itself in an even tighter financial spot before the year is out.

India Invests in Buses - Big Time

2012-01-26T10:15:00.000-08:00

Bus manufacturers with a keen eye for an export market will no doubt be interested to hear that big things may be happening in India.

Dipak K Dash of The Times of India reported this week that the Indian government is planning to roll out at least 85,000 new buses in rural areas... over the next five years!

I make that 17,000 new buses a year, every year, for the next five years.

The reason behind the proposal is a strikingly familiar one – the government wants to improve the quality and availability of public transport in a bid to shift people away from their personal vehicles and back onto public transport.

Experts from India's road transport and highways ministry have been concerned by the reductions in the numbers of people switching from bus to personal motor transport. Most Western observers would probably point to the growing wealth and aspiration of the country's population as the principal reason. However, the ministry believes that the gradual degeneration in the quality of public transport services is also a major reason why people are switching from public topersonal transport.

Introducing many, many more new buses, they feel, will reverse the trend.

Now, whether they are right or wrong in their assumptions, you have to admit that its certainly a bold plan.

More to the point, that's an awful lot of buses... and an awful lot of business for someone!

Buses Are Wrong Size For New Bus Stop

2012-01-26T10:12:00.000-08:00

A bus stop outside a hospital in Stoke on Trent can no longer being used - because it presents a danger to the public.
Health and safety experts have said that the bus stop can't be used safely because the road layout caters for the wrong size of bus.

Despite its convenience – it was built but a few feet from the main entrance to Haywood Hospital in Burslem - the stop and its shelters are now off-limits to traditional buses because drivers were putting pedestrians at risk by having to reverse into the stop.

One patient described the situation as 'almost laughable'.

“A bus stop with no buses is up there with a pub with no beer – totally pointless,” he said.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In this case, the bus stop and shelter were moved to just outside the main entrance so that patients and visitors wouldn't have to struggle across the sloping site from the next nearest bus stop 400 yards away.

A £36 million revamp of the hospital two years ago seemed to offer the opportnity to make things better for passengers, so the new bus stop and shelter was introduced.

At the time, the hospital was served by mini-buses operated by Wardle Transport – but then they introduced bigger single-deckers which couldn't pull up at the bus stop without reversing. And they couldn't do that without causing a danger to pedestrians.

Now local NHS officials are pleading with ther bus companies to use smaller buses again so they can re-introduce the half-hourly hospital service.

Wardle Transport, however, told their local paper "We have no plans to change local bus services there at this stage."

Oh, dear....

Yorkshire Passenger Group Urges Friday Bus Boycott

2012-01-25T12:40:00.000-08:00

Passengers in West Yorkshire are being urged to boycott their buses this Friday to show operators that the people are not to be messed with.

The boycott call comes less than a month after two of the largest bus companies in West Yorkshire angered customers by putting up the price of their tickets.

First, who are the main operators in Leeds, increased their fares on January 2 by an average of seven per cent, blaming soaring fuel costs and the fact that they hadn't raised their prices for almost a year and a half.

On the same day, Arriva put 20p on the the price of their £2.10, £2.30, £2.60 and £2.80 tickets, saying that the current economic pressures were forcing them to increase income just to maintain service levels.

Now, the local campaign group Better Bus is urging passengers to boycott buses on Friday and walk to work, cycle or car share instead. They suggest that the money people save on bus tickets could be sent to one of four local charities, providing a welcome boost for them as well as an unwelcome raspberry to the bus operators.

Campaigners reckon that the latest price increases simply underline the need for Metro, West Yorkshire's passenger transport authority, to move forward with plans for a whole new system of ‘quality contracts’. This would take all decisions about fares and levels of service away from the bus operators – who are driven by the need to make profits - and hand them over to the PTE, who are driven by the need to provide a public service.

Under this system, operators would bid for contracts issued by the PTE to provide bus services, with service levels, fare prices and even the type of vehicle used being pre-determined by the contract. The move would effectively reverse the de-regulation of bus services introduced by then Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley during the 1980's.

Metro are by no means the only PTE who are thinking about de-deregulating the bus industry in their area. This is a subject I expect I'll be returning to in the near future.

Meanwhile, all eyes will be on West Yorkshire on Friday.

The Return of Bus Building in Blackburn?

2012-01-25T11:59:00.001-08:00

Rumours of the death of bus building in Blackburn may, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Hot on the heels of Optare’s announcement that they are withdrawing from Blackburn to concentrate production at their splendid new Sherburn factory, ending eighty years of bus manufacture in Blackburn in the process, a local bus refurbishment business says that they might begin manufacturing themselves.

And it just so happens that they have a rather familiar name they could use!

Father and son team of Philip and Robert Hilton set up a bus refurbishment business called Bus and Coach World in 2006. It was a logical step, given the amount of experience with buses and coaches tey both had - Philip had just retired as joint managing director of Optare’s predecessor East Lancashire Coachbuilders at the same that son Robert was made redundant.

In fact, Philip had started as an apprentice at East Lancashire Coachbuilders in 1960 rising to become joint managing director in 1990, so he knew the business inside out. He clearly didn’t want an easy retirement on the golf course, so Bus and Coach World was the result

Now, with the company positively thriving - they now employ 35 mostly ex-East Lancs Coachbuilders workers – they are ready to move to the next level by building their own buses. And by great good fortune, they just happen to own the famous old trade name East Lancashire Coachbuilders which they bought with the intention of starting manufacturing.

“We are looking at building from scratch again in Blackburn ,” Philip told his local newspaper. “The vehicles would be specialist, perhaps open-top.”

“At the moment we need to make sure we don’t run out of cash and we have to look for investment.”

If all goes well, then bus building might remain a Blackburn trade for a little bit longer. And there'll be many who will be genuinely delighted to welcome back a familiar name onto the streets of Britain.

Transport Chiefs Oppose Means-Testing of Pensioners

2012-01-25T11:54:00.000-08:00

The deputy prime minister's suggestion that pensioners should have their benefits means-tested look set to be opposed by Transport for Greater Manchester.

TfGM reckons that means-testing the over-60's and withholding concessionary bus passes from people who has income above a certain level would discourage elderly people from using public transport.

More to the point, they say the move could leave pensioners isolated and not reduce costs as expected as administration costs would increase.

So, councillors on the TfGM committee are being asked to oppose any introduction of means testing, and to ask their chairman to write to local MPs, Integrated Transport Authorities and the Local Government Association to press them to back the continuation of a national scheme that is fully funded by central Government, and oppose the introduction of means-testing.

A recent study by the Transport Action Group — Manchester said: “The variety of pursuits for which bus passes are used demonstrates it is a key tool for supporting national, regional and local policy objectives of promoting active and sustainable travel.”

“It also improves levels of mental and physical health and well-being through keeping pass-holders mobile and socially connected.

“Continued support for the current arrangements should therefore be considered a high priority, when allocating funding.”

In Greater Manchester there were 540,100 people aged over 60 last year, with some 467,500 of them having a concessionary pass.

A Question of Damage Limitation

2012-01-24T13:16:00.001-08:00

I came across an interesting story in Bus and Coach magazine the other day which must have slightly chilled the hearts of our bus manufacturers.

The author reckoned that bus operators are adapting to our brave new age of austerity, stagnant business growth and public sector cuts by putting off vehicle replacements and instead making do and mending wherever possible.

He quoted numerous examples of the lengths that operators are now going to to reduce costs – such as using repair techniques more familiar to car repair shops to, for example, remove dents in a body panel whilst its still attached to the vehicle instead of just taking it off and fitting a new one.

Instead of replacing broken plastic parts, some are being welded back together and given a new life with the benefit of a hot glue gun.

Of course, one of the upsides of this is that operators don’t have to keep their vehicles out of revenue-earning service for days on end whilst they wait for new parts to arrive. More worrying for the big bus manufacturers, however, is the growing interest in refurbishment over replacement.

Companies who specialise in such work are reporting a lot of interest from operators, with new seats and seat coverings apparently a popular way of giving an older vehicle a timely refresh. Other refurbishment work typically includes replacing the passenger saloon’s headlining, re-trimming the side panels and replacing or renewing floor coverings.

Of course, this is only putting off the inevitable and operators are only too well aware of the diminishing returns they get from hanging onto older, less reliable, less efficient and less popular vehicles. But many of them can probably suspend their replacement programme for longer than most manufacturers would like, and that will hurt them.

Quite how long the can bear the hurt remains to be seen.

Burnley Bus Station ‘One of the Safest in Britain’

2012-01-24T12:50:00.001-08:00

Let's hear it for Burnley Bus Station, which last week was declared one of the safest bus stations in Britain.

Opened in 2002, Burnley's modern bus interchange has just received the SafeMark award which assures its users that this is an area in which they can genuinely feel safe.

Apparently, this is not an easy award to win. It involves ‘mystery shoppers' carrying out secret visits and marking it against a set of strict criteria including health and safety, CCTV coverage, and measures to tackle anti-social behaviour.

The judges want to be sure there were no dark corners where people could lurk, and that the design and monitoring of the toilets headed off any illegal activities.

In fact, the station boasts a lot more than that. Like a fully enclosed passenger waiting area, for example, with departure bays accessed by automatic doors. There's also a newsagent, a staffed information centre, there's even a cafe.

Receiving the SafeMark award has been described as a bit like getting a Michelin star, but just like the Michelin judges the 'mystery shoppers' will be back next year to check that Burnley has let its standards slip and that the £3m bus station warrants retaining its honour.

There are obviously a well-sorted lot in Lancashire, though, as Nelson and Chorley have also achieved the award in the past.

But perhaps its not that surprising given that the station’s architects, RoC Consulting, previously received a Bus Industry award for the station's design.

Bus Firm Wants Park and Ride Site For Staff Car Park

2012-01-24T12:47:00.000-08:00

The death knell for one of Poole's park and ride schemes appears to have sounded with the news that the town's under-used Creekmoor site could soon have a new lease of life – ironically, as a car park for bus company staff.

Local bus operator Wilts & Dorset has asked permission to use the Creekmoor park and ride site as a private car park for 50 of their employees.

According to a report to Poole Borough Council, the site has never been fully used for a public service and costs around £15,000 a year to maintain.

Wilts & Dorset's interest appears to have prompted the council to seek to modify some of the site's planning conditions to allow other temporary uses on the site, presumably including parking for bus company staff.

I understand the council's head of transportation services Julian McLaughlin says in a report to the council’s transportation advisory group that conditions were 'not currently favourable' for a public park and ride, and that in the meantime it would make sense to encourage other uses on the site either for community use or commercial gain.

I say 'understand' because I couldn't actually find the report on the Council's website, so I haven't been able to confirm these remarks.

So I dipped further into the Poole Borough Council website to see what I could find out about the Creekmoor Park and Ride, but I found it all rather confusing. From what I could see, it seems to be mostly hospital and council parking anyway, and if there is a public service it only operates on Saturday's before Christmas.

Is that right?

If not, then might this not explain why the whole thing is so under-used?

If You Don't Have The Full Fare, Just Punch The Driver

2012-01-23T12:21:00.000-08:00

An alarming story came my way, ironically just moments after I'd blogged about Thamesdown's exact fares policy.

There was I thinking about the frustrations of getting on a bus and finding that you don't have the correct change when I came across a news report about someone getting on a bus to find that they didn't have the correct fare.

Under similar circumstances, any one of us might be tempted to ask the driver to let us off that last 20p, or ask a kindly fellow passenger for a sub, or if you are like me then you just get off, find a cash machine and a newsagent, buy a tube of mints and wait for the next bus (as I did last time I travelled between Coventry and Birmingham).

Unfortunately for the driver of a bus in Seattle's University district recently, his frustrated passenger decided to treat him as a punchbag.

According to SeattlePI.com, the passenger had boarded the bus with only $1.50 of the $2.50 needed to get to his workplace. Angry that he'd be late for work, the man allegedly lost his temper and began beating up the driver, who promptly lost control of his bus on the icy road and ended up in a tree.

The poor driver was carried off to hospital with bruises, a swollen face and a broken leg while his assailant, bizarrely, was still sitting impatiently on the bus when the police arrived to find out why a bus was parked up a tree. He was quickly taken into custody.

Apparently, this particular bus was equipped with a video camera, so not only will it make the prosecution straightforward, it should also mean we'll be able to enoy the full horror of the incident on one of those police caught-on-camera TV shows I'm so addicted to.

Blackburn's 80-Year History Comes To An End

2012-01-23T11:24:00.001-08:00

This year will see the end of an era as eighty years of bus manufacturing comes to an end in Blackburn, Lancashire.

Optare have announced that from March 31 its Blackburn factory will close and all of its vehicle manufacturing will be consolidated at its new purpose-built factory in Sherburn, near Leeds (pictured).

The former East Lancs Coachworks site in Blackburn will remain as a storage and specialist conversion facility, but the company says it will only need around 40 of its current 99-strong workforce there.

All staff have been offered the opportunity to transfer to the new Sherburn works, but redundancies seem inevitable.

Buses have been manufactured in Blackburn since 1934, originally by East Lancashire Coach-builders. In 2008, East Lancs merged with Optare and the local engineering business Darwen Group and at that time more than 300 people were employed in building buses at the Blackburn site. However, the growing economic downturn soon led to job cuts.

Now, the factory itself has been cut and all manufacturing will now being concentrated at Sherburn. The company has already announced the closure of the former Roe works in Leeds with all work, and workers, transferring to nearby Sherburn.

Optare itself was recently bought-out by Indian-owned Ashok Leyland, who announced earlier this month that they had secured a majority shareholding in the company – see my blog of 11 January. However, in truth the future of the Blackburn factory had been in doubt for some time.

Jack Straw, MP for Blackburn said: “It is obviously a sad day to see an East Lancashire tradition go.

"I understand the commercial logic which has faced the company and I’m glad they are making every effort to relocate staff or provide them with a redundancy package.

“There’s no question the bus industry is a highly competitive market. I just hope some jobs can be retained on this side of the Pennines and on an individual level I’ll help any employees as they face difficulties.”

Yet More Dissatisfied Customers

2012-01-23T11:15:00.000-08:00

Two more stories about service cuts and the anger they cause came my way last week.

The first involves the good people of Skegness, where the people running the town's Ex-Servicemen’s Club fear they may have to lay-off staff because of lack of trade caused, they say, by cuts in local bus services.

Stagecoach introduced a winter timetable in October which reduced the frequency of a number of services, with the result that club members are no longer able to get into Skegness at night, says the club.

Stagecoach say they can't run more services than they currently do because Lincolnshire County Council has cut the subsidies which would have been used to support those very winter bus services. The result is that no buses now run between Skegness and Mablethorpe on a Sunday, and the last bus between Skegness and Chapel St Leonards leaves at 7.15pm every weekday evening.

There's been no job losses yet, but...

Meanwhile, in Swindon passengers are equally incensed by the cuts which Thamesdown Transport has made to their local services – especially as they have now discovered that they have been massively over-charged by them in the first place.

A request for information under the Freedom of Information Act has revealed that Thamesdown trousered £78,955 in overpayments during 2011 alone as a result of its exact fare policy, which means that bus drivers cannot give change.

Not surprisingly, passengers feel just a little bit cheated by this and believe that some of this windfall should be spent on re-instating the discontinued services. Local councillors and the town's MP agree.

Thamesdown introduced its exact fare policy in 2005 and and has enjoyed a certain amount of over-payment ever since, though never on this scale. The extra money, it says, helps them to meet their operating costs - though apparently not enough to insure them against having to trim their services from time to time.

The reason for their recent service changes? Simple. They were 'not commercially viable'.

You don't have to be a transport genius to spot that there's something fundamentally wrong with the way we are doing things. However, finding an answer that will a) provide passengers with a reliable and usable service whilst b) delivering reasonable profits to the operator without c) bringing the Treasury to its knees seems at present beyond us.

Meanwhile, passengers will complain and stay away, and operators will shrug their shoulders and complain about lack of passengers. And the government will complain about how much it all costs. Madness.

Bus Cuts Cut Off Durham Village, say Villagers

2012-01-20T12:14:00.001-08:00

Villagers in County Durham are claiming that their community has been ‘cut off’ after Arriva changed their local bus services.

More than 50 residents of Quarrington Hill, a small village a few miles south-east of Durham City, turned out for a hastily-convened public meeting to voice their anger after Arriva imposed changes which left them with only one bus service – and even that misses out most of the village.

They left their local MP in no doubt about the depth of their disgust. "It’s the worst bus service in living memory,” said one. "It’s disgraceful,” said another. “We’re the forgotten village.”

Though not exactly confronted by a baying mob, Roberta Blackman-Woods MP still felt compelled to agree. She described the way Arriva treated communities as ‘shocking’ and ‘absolutely disgraceful’.

"With no thought and no consultation, they have cut off this village. People can’t get to the doctor’s, the shops or to and from work”, she said.

"I understand they might have to make cuts, but they should be consulting with local communities about how to make those cuts in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily inconvenience people."

The MP now plans to hold meetings with Durham County Council and Arriva to discuss the issue.

It’s a familiar story, of course. And Arriva’s reasons for withdrawing the service are equally familiar – low passenger numbers, increased fuel prices and a cut in fuel duty rebate meant it had ceased to be commercially viable, they said.

But people seem as upset about the lack of consultation as they are with the lack of a bus service. And that’s a familiar one, too.

I don’t suppose anyone is keeping count of the number of sudden changes or service reductions imposed by operators nationally, but there must be hundreds during the course of a year. The amount of copy they generate in the local press is enormous, too.

Bus companies clearly make people very, very angry when they do this, and it makes you wonder if there isn’t somehow a better way of doing this, some way which will keep the customer on-side and still deliver the savings they need.

As they say on all the best A-level exam paper’s, discuss…

What is obvious, though, is that with many bus operators feeling the pinch at the moment - much like their passengers – I’m sure there’ll be many more stories like this one.

Free Wi-Fi Boosts Bus Ridership

2012-01-20T12:04:00.000-08:00

News from across the pond suggests that the internet is leading to a ressurgence in bus use – and not just from online bookings.

Researchers at De Paul University in Chicago have discovered that more and more people in the US are ditching their cars and going by bus – and they cite the ability to surf the internet as they travel as a major reason.

Higher fuel prices have made driving a car less attractive at the same time as buses have begun to offer access to free Wi-Fi, though mostly on long distance routes.

As a result, though buses were once viewed as the transport choice of last resort in the US, bus travel is now beginning to attract more affluent riders, students and women travelling alone.

School boards in some parts of America are already ahead of the game, though. Several began to offer free wi-fi on board their yellow school buses last year and have transformed pupil behaviour. Instead of the usual end-of-school boisterous riot at the back of the bus, kids sit and quietly surf the net. It’s unnerving, says one driver.

Bus companies in the UK have looked at mobile wi-fi, too, and one or two operators – Reading Buses, for example, and Greyhound services from Southampton to London - have even introduced it on some select services. There’s even talk of free wi-fi being available on all London buses in the near future (we’ll keep you posted).

However, so far nobody has rushed to offer free wi-fi on ordinary bus routes. Installation and operating costs are obviously as issue, but these will certainly decline in time so I reckon its only a question of who jumps first, and when.

The signs in the US look positive, though.

“Bus travel is suddenly cool,” said Joseph Schwieterman, director of DePaul’s Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development who lead the research. “There’s a fatigue over driving combined with a revitalized image of the bus.”

No wonder Megabus, which is owned by Stagecoach, and BoltBus, which is owned by First Group, have seen a 32% boost in passenger numbers in the past year year, though to be fair the switch from bus station to curbside pick-up has proved popular, too. Nonetheless, DePaul’s report that bus traffic grew in 2011 at the fastest pace since 2008 and fares are rising, too, with routes where fares of $20 or less were once common now seeing tickets priced at $35 or more.

Snatching the Bus

2012-01-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

Travelling by bus may be one of the safest ways of getting from A to B, but perhaps its beginning to attract the wrong kind of passenger.

According to a recent report in the Daily Telegraph, police are warning that around one in five of all pickpocket crimes and bag snatches now take place on public transport .

Buses, trains and tubes have become the target of choice for thieves, they say, overtaking shops and supermarkets or bag snatches in the street, which had all previously been the more popular.

Last year there were 563,000 such thefts reported, with 20 per cent of them occurring on public transport, 18 per cent in shops and 16 per cent in the street.

Not surprisingly, the most common items to be stolen are wallets, cash and mobile phones, though I was surprised to find that the average value of goods taken per person was around £153, which seems high.

However, senior police officers warn that criminals see bag snatches and pocket-picking as increasingly lucrative ways to earn a living, given that people now routinely carry hundreds of pounds worth of gadgets like mobile phones and personal stereos with them.

Add to that the UK's economic downturn which they reckon is fuelling an increase in acquisitive crime generally, and you have a growing problem with crime of public transport.

Police advice is for passengers to do their bit and protect their belongings by ensuring that valuable items are not visible. Rucksacks and hand bags should be carried in front of you and phones and wallets not stowed in the outer pockets of bags where they can be easily lifted.

Bus Driver Suspended for Using Phone While Driving

2012-01-19T12:05:00.000-08:00

Nobody much likes drivers who wantonly put other peoples' lives at risk by using their phones whilst on the move. So you can imagine the anger when a school bus driver was caught doing precisely that.

Greig Elrick, a driver for Kineil Coaches of Fraserburgh, was taking pupils home from Old Meldrum Academy to the north of Aberdeen on September 22 last year when he was spotted talking into his phone whilst driving.

Elrick later explained that he was using the phone to talk to his depot manager who had phoned him to tell him where he wanted the vehicle returned to after his school run. This wasn't an excuse which cut any ice at Aberdeen Sheriff Court, however.

Elrick was fined £500 and given three penalty points on his driving licence at Aberdeen Sheriff Court. The Traffic Commissioner for Scotland Joan Aitken also took the opportunity to suspend his bus driver licence for eight weeks, adding that the suspension took account of Elrick's previous good record during a a long career as a driver and that he appeared to recognise the seriousness of his action.

Kineil Coaches are not exactly off the hook, though. The commissioner has said she is now to ask the company to explain just why they were phoning one of their drivers when they knew him to be driving his bus.

Don't Let Google Drive You Round The Bend

2012-01-19T12:00:00.001-08:00

If you are trying to find your way around Tyneside, then frankly it probably best not to rely on Google.

Nexus, which is Tyne and Wear's local PTE, have been moved to make this warning to passengers looking for accurate travel advice on North East bus services and the Metro and who might be tempted to give a new ‘public transport’ route finder launched through Google Maps a try.

In fact, staff at Nexus were just as keen to try this latest addition to the Google stable, but they quickly discovered that the advice on offer was, well... variable to say the least.

For example, when asked for advice for a journey from Newcastle to Tynemouth, Google chose to completely ignore the many, many buses which run the nine miles between the two and instead rather bizarrely advised that you catch a National Express coach leaving seven hours later as far as North Shields, then walking the remaining mile. In the rain, presumably.

And for the short journey from Newcastle to Blaydon, home of the historic Blaydon races and barely six miles distant, Google advised that you catch one of only two trains a day to call at Blaydon railway station - and wait five hours to do so – rather than catching any one of the 10 buses an hour which Go North East operate between the two.

And anyone unlucky enough to want to travel from Gateshead to the nearby Team Valley Trading Estate, which is one of the UK's biggest industrial estates and home to literally thousands of jobs, is even more unlucky because Google will tel you that there is no public transport at all. In fact, it's one of Go North East's busiest routes with up to ten buses an hour. I mean, how do they think people get to work?

In fact, Google Maps successfully provided the right travel information on only one out of every seven journeys entered into it. The only journey which it did seem to get right was from Newcastle city centre to Sunderland railway station, which it correctly said could be made by Metro from Central station. Or train.

Ever get the feeling there's something missing?

Yep. Google has somehow entirely omitted every single bus service on Tyneside and most Metro journeys from its journey planner. From this you might assume that Google's employees don't travel by bus or Metro, or frankly even recognise their existence.

Or could it be that local bus operators have chosen not to advertise on Google?

However, every cloud has a silver lining and Google's ignominious failings have given Nexus the perfect excuse to plug the excellent journey planning tools their have on their own splendid website.

“This now includes MyTravel – a new service where you can find your nearest bus or Metro stop on a local map and see the next departures from it, as well as a journey planner where you can enter start and end points,” says Tobyn Hughes, Director of Customer Services, who also happened to mention that nexus.org.uk has both a conventional and mobile-adapted website for people on the go, and that people can also call North East Traveline on 0871 200 22 33 to speak to an operator if they prefer the human touch.

Yes, yes, thank you Tobyn...

I think you could say that was Nexus 1, Google nil....

B&H Put the Squeeze on The Big Lemon

2012-01-18T10:55:00.000-08:00

Brighton's The Big Lemon Bus Company has claimed it has been driven off the road by unfair competition.

The company, which was set up as a social enterprise in 2007, operates a fleet of eight distinctive yellow buses fuelled purely by waste cooking oil from restaurants in Brighton. Now, however, they say they have been forced to quit one of their main routes between Brighton's two universities because of a 'predatory pricing policy' introduced by their bigger local rivals, Brighton and Hove.

Big Lemon founder Tom Druitt claims Brighton and Hove deliberately reduced the price of a day saver ticket on services which directly compete with The Big Lemon by a third but left all their other fares unchanged. Foul play, he cries.

Not so, says Brighton and Hove, who claim not to be deliberately squeezing The Big Lemon out of business. They say they are merely doing what they have done ever since buses were deregulated – introduced promotional prices on different routes in different parts of the city. Pricing, they say, is determined by market.

Whatever the truth, what is certainly true is that the market which Brighton and Hove say dictates their fares is now a little less crowded. The traffic commissioner has decided that The Big Lemon's route 42 will stop running from 6 February, a decision which will no doubt please Brighton and Hove but which will directly affect some 10,000 weekly Big Lemon passengers, among them several hundred students who pay an annual subscription for unlimited travel.

And not just passengers. The Big Lemon Bus Company started small but now employs 18 full- and part-time staff. Losing route 42 means that some of those full-timers will now have to become part-timers.

It's estimated that the closure of route 42 will rob The Big Lemon of about 30% of its total income, but fortunately it has other growth areas. The shorter 44 route between Brighton and Sussex universities in the evenings and weekends is still profitable, and private hire which now represent around 50% of its revenue is blossoming.

Once Brighton & Hove City Council's supported bus service contracts go out to tender later this year, The Big Lemon hope to add a few more services to their portfolio, especially as they now have a more modern fleet – when they started four years ago, the average age of their vehicles was 26, whereas now it more like 16.

Is competition between bus operators a good thing? Well, we'll see. But with The Big Lemon off route 42, everyone in the city will now be watching for the much-reduced Day Saver fares on Brighton and Hove buses to suddenly start going up again...

Government Announces £2m For Green Buses in Scotland

2012-01-18T10:53:00.000-08:00

A few more Scottish buses may soon be belching out a little less carbon dioxide after the government announced it had set aside £2m to help Scottish bus operators to buy low-carbon vehicles for their fleets.

Transport Minister Keith Brown made the announced the funding as the latest round of the Scottish Green Bus Fund during his keynote address to the 2012 Transport Conference in Glasgow this week.

The Scottish Green Bus Fund operates as a Challenge Fund with grants offered to successful bidders for up to 100% of the price difference between a low-carbon vehicle and its diesel equivalent.

Last year's fund totalled £4.4m and enabled five operators – Lothian Buses, Stagecoach, First Glasgow, Stagecoach Bluebird and Colchri – to purchase 48 new low-carbon vehicles, with grants of between £66,000 and £131,000 per bus.

The government says it hopes that the next round of applications for the Scottish Green Bus Fund will continue to make bus services "greener, more efficient and easier to use".

On the face of it, the government's announcement will lead to perhaps another 20 low-carbon buses entering service in Scotland, which is not a lot. But let's not be churlish - it's better than nothing.

Bus operators, local authorities and regional transport partnerships will now be invited to apply to the Scottish Green Bus Fund for help with the up-front costs of buying new low-carbon buses for their fleets.

Public Transport is Definitely Not Pants

2012-01-17T11:04:00.001-08:00

People travelling on the Minneapolis Light Rail system got something of a shock this month when a group of fellow commuters suddenly all began taking off their trousers.

The pant-less passengers had boarded specifically to take part in a trouser-less demonstration as a part of the city's fourth annual No-Pants Light Rail Ride.

After unpopping their flies and unzipping their zippers, the pant-less participants then just acted as they would normally do on any normal commute - talking on their mobile phones, chatting to fellow passengers and enjoying the odd game of Angry Birds. Only without any trousers on.

The organisers said it was all meant to bring a little strangeness into the routine and tedium of the day, and there's no doubt that it did. They also said that the display was not meant to be indecent or offensive or anything and that thongs and banana hammocks were therefore strictly forbidden.

I understand the idea for the demonstration came orginally from the brilliant New York mass improvisation group Improv Everywhere, who have been doing No Pants Subway rides (and much else besides) for some time.

It's mad, of course, but essentially harmless - which is possibly more than can be said for some of the activities on Minneapolis's Light Rail system at times.

However, one crucial question remains.

What exactly is a banana hammock?

Scarlet Band Brings A Touch of Glamour to the Dales

2012-01-17T10:58:00.001-08:00

Bus passengers in Teesdale don’t seem to be mourning the loss of their Arriva bus service – as they are now being driven around the dale by a close friend of the stars.

Local independent Scarlet Band took over a number of services previously operated by Arriva, who had been subject to criticism from local residents over its poor timekeeping and who eventually walked away from the services saying they couldn’t operate them profitably.

Scarlet Band's replacement service has been greeted with praise – especially as one of its driver’s appears have brought a touch of glamour to the Dale.

Driver Andy Pounder, who hails originally from the East End on London, turns out to be a long-term friend of comedian Paul O’Grady, the man behind the loud and lairy drag queen Lily Savage.

“My partner is a singer but used to be a very successful drag queen and performed with Paul as Lily Savage,” he recently disclosed to his local paper, the Teesdale Mercury.

“Paul is a great friend, and his partner works with the EastEnders cast and crew so we are friends with a lot of them. June Brown, who plays Dot Cotton, and Jessie Wallace, who play Kat Moon, are brilliant fun.

“Paul recently rang us and said, ‘Get the kettle on girls!’ I asked him where he was and he told me he had just landed his helicopter at Durham Tees Valley airport!”

Scarlet Band stepped in when Arriva abandoned its services in Teesdale and are hoping to have their contract made permanent when Durham County Council conducts a review of bus services in the spring.

In the meantime, they appear to be winning lots of new friends by going that extra mile for their customers.

Andy gives an example of a woman who used to catch the bus each morning from her home, which is near the company’s depot in West Cornforth, each morning into Darlington but who complained that she had to get three buses.

Scarlet Band’s owner told her that if she came into the depot early enough in a morning, she could get a lift into Darlington on one of their empty buses. She is now a regular customer and enjoys her very own personal bus service every morning.

Now I doubt I whether Arriva would be able to offer a service quite as personal as that…

Abellio Shows High Opinion Of Poles

2012-01-16T10:10:00.000-08:00

Bus operator Abellio seems to have ignited the fury of several of the tabloids after it was revealed that the company had flown bosses all the way to Poland in search of drivers for its London buses.

The Daily Mail criticised the company – which, it pointed out, is subsidiary of the Dutch state rail operator – for turning to Poland to recruit 51 London bus drivers when almost two and a half million Britons are currently on the dole.

Abellio claimed it could find no suitable candidates in Britain – though an insider at the firm reckoned to have known several fellow drivers who had been interviewed and turned down for the jobs.

And another anonymous driver told The Sun, “The Routemaster will soon be back in the capital. What a shame if British drivers miss out on the chance to drive it.”

The combination of much-loved British transport icon and 'migrant steals British job' story was one the tabloids obviously couldn't resist and poor old Abellio took a bit of pasting. For it's part, the company said that it's trip to Poland was simply to '... supplement recruitment in the UK' and they successfully recruited 51 experienced bus drivers there.

'We are not aware of any occasion where a suitable candidate has been turned away,' they added, suggesting that they'd felt the British candidates they'd previously turned away had simply not been up to scratch.

All of which prompted the usual inflammatory statements about migrants 'stealing' jobs from British workers. The Daily Mail seized the opportunity to quote figures suggesting that 160,000 Britons have missed out on paid employment because the work was taken by 'foreigners', and that according to 'experts' every four migrant workers who come to the Britain from outside the EU leads to one British job being lost.

As ever, the truth in one form or other will be in there somewhere, though I suspect this probably says more about the challenge of living in London on a relatively low wage and little affordable housing. How anyone manages to live there I just can't understand – but I can understand how a British family might baulk at the kind of sacrifices they'd be required to make just to allow their husbands or wives to drive a London bus.

And I doubt whether even the Daily Mail has an answer to that one.

First Reveals A Worrying North-South Divide

2012-01-13T12:43:00.001-08:00

We may not quite be in economic recession, but these are still troubling times for many of Britain's bus operators.

First Group are the latest to broadcast their woes after they announced this week that they are to withdraw all their bus services in Bury St Edmunds from March this year.

The bus operator announced its intention to cease running all services in the town because they have not been 'commercially viable' for some time. The company points to a reduction in their Bus Service Operators Grant as one reason for their decision.

First's Bury St Edmunds depot will close at the end of March and staff will be offered alternative employment at First’s Ipswich depot.

Its problems in the south of England are nothing to the challenges the Aberdeen-based company says it is facing in Scotland and Northern England – where 60% of the company's non-London revenue comes from. This week, First Group blamed a weak economy and lower consumer spending in the north for what it says is growing evidence of a north-south divide.

As well as falling consumer spending, the company has also been hampered by poor market conditions which have made the sale of major assets such as bus depot sites much more difficult.

First will no doubt be cheered by the view across the Atlantic, though, where their American school bus business continues to show promise and where their Greyhound inter-city coach operation is continuing to show modest growth.

Chinese Whispers As Arriva Turns East

2012-01-12T11:39:00.000-08:00

Arriva’s announcement that it was intending to work alongside Chinese bus builder King Long to develop new buses must have come as a bit of a shock to British manufacturers.

Competition between the three main British bus builders is already intense, so the propsect of an existing major client helping a new foreign rival to enter their market must have made unwelcome news.

It’s also a slightly odd decision, according to some. Chinese buses have tended to be a less sophisticated than their European counterparts, they say, and while the Chinese seem to use all the right bits, they somehow still manage to produce vehicles which are a shade less than the sum of their parts.

Mind you, they said exactly the same about the Japanese back in the early 1970’s, and about Skoda a lot more recently than that. And look where they are now.

So what’s in it for Arriva? Well, their explanation is that while most of their fleet currently comes from British and European manufacturers, they are keen to evaluate the potential of King Long in other markets. The company seems anxious not to alienate British and European manufacturers – but the sub-text is clearly that Arriva is looking for cheaper buses and they might not be averse to going all the way to China to get them.

King Long have clearly spotted an opportunity, too. This is a massive bus manufacturer but one that is well aware of its limitations. They understand that to support any expansion into the European market, they would need to improve both build quality and mechanical reliability to meet European expectations. A working relationship with Arriva would give King Long some valuable insights into what a European bus operator was looking for and, potentially, enable them to substantially raise their game.

So will we see Chinese buses bearing the Arriva livery on British roads anytime soon, as they already do in Malta? Well, probably not - not unless King Long find a way of producing Euro-quality buses cheaper than the Europeans.

But whose to say that, in time, they won’t…

Only Two British Bus Builders Left – So What?

2012-01-11T12:59:00.000-08:00

When Leeds-based bus manufacturer Optare handed over the reins of their own company to the Indian manufacturer Ashok Leyland, there were some who were ready to see this as further evidence of Britain's apparent inability to invest in British industry.

You can see their point. The past thirty years have seen the extinction of a host of familiar bus marques - AEC, Bristol, Daimler, Duple, MCW, Leyland to name but six. Commer has gone, so has Foden, in fact Britain's motor industry as a whole is a mere shadow of its former self. All the Leyland brands – Morris, Austin, Riley, Wolseley, Vandan Plas and the rest - have vanished, and those that remain are either in the hands of the Germans (the Mini), the Chinese (MG Rover) or the Indians (Jaguar and Land Rover). Honda, Toyota, Peugeot and Nissan all build cars in Britain, but Ford doesn’t anymore.

So this latest off-shoring of British industry thanks to Ashok Leyland's canny acquisition last week of a further 50% to add to its existing 25% stake in Optare means that there are now only two major wholly-British bus manufacturers left – Wrightbus and Alexander Dennis.

But is this a bad thing?

Well, not for the Optare workers it's not. After months and months of uncertainty, the executives and the workers on the shop floor can both now see some semblance of financial stability and, blessed with owners who have clear international ambitions, the Optare team are probably expecting new orders, and plenty of them, to shortly follow.

For its part, Ashok Leyland have said they will be seeking to help Optare to improve its productivity by sourcing materials on a global basis – something which comes as second nature to a global company like Ashok Leyland - and through investment in new models.

And Indian investment in the UK automotive sector is certainly nothing new. Take Tata, for example, who have been quietly and efficiently running Jaguar and Land Rover for some time now. There's been not the slightest hint of the asset-stripping, only good and careful business, confirming the view that Indian investors are generally content to take a longer term view of their investments. And hurrah for that.

For the moment, the Optare website is snugly nestled on the home page of the Ashok Leyland website. They seem proud of their acquisition. I don't expect that to change any time soon.

All told, I have the distinct impression that Yorkshire-built Optare buses are going to be around for quite a bit longer...

No Desire for StreetCars in York

2012-01-10T15:26:00.000-08:00

With bendy buses now expunged from the capital by its Conservative mayor, it seems that a Labour-controlled city a little further north is now seeking to do the same with its bendy buses – only this time, its operator may be fighting back.

York City Council voted last May not to renew its five-year contract with First for the Number 4 service, which operates between the University and Acomb using the articulated and slightly space-age Wright StreetBus vehicles – and referred to in York as ftr's. Instead, the Labour administration - who only came to power last May – stated that they will seek alternatives for the cross-city service, the implication being that the ftr's will suffer the same fate as London's unloved Citaro artics.

Not necessarily, says First. Their regional managing director Dave Alexander insists that First and the council have been privately discussing a range of possible alternative uses for ftr in York, and that nothing has been agreed yet. The company is aware of the Council's lack of enthusiasm for the bulky vehicles, but points out that First does not require permission to operate them in the city and any decision to do so (or not) will be there's and there's alone. So there.

The company also warns that removing the ftr from York could only be done at the cost of 60 local jobs – all of them voters, presumably - before finally taking a bit of a swipe at the council for blabbing about discussions that First considered to be private.

Now, few people would argue that the undeniably-glamorous ftr is not exactly purpose-made for medieval York. The ftr is meant to be a sleek high-volume rapid transit vehicle but the city's tight and twisty streets put a serious crimp in that. In fact, evening and Sunday services are generally operated by conventional buses with better fuel economy than the heavier ftr's.

But is the end in sight for York's bendies? Well, probably not. First's other fleet of bendies – including Citaros - continue to give good service on the city's park and ride services and its possible that if nothing else then the ftr's might in time find work there.

Whatever happens, though, it seems First certainly won't be giving in without a fight.

Bus Plus Car - But Without the Car

2012-01-09T14:02:00.000-08:00

Bus operator Go North East's latest initiative seems to resurrect the whole concept of integrated transport - but in a wholly new and unexpected way.

No, they are not through-ticketing with the Tyne and Wear Metro or timetabling to complement Stagecoach or Arriva services. Instead, they are giving their passengers the chance to experience life without a car - but without actually having to be without a car.

Go Ahead's Key Lifestyle promotion offers a useful 15 per cent discount on all bus fares and, in addition, includes free membership to Commonwheels, a vehicle hire firm with cars that can be hired for as little as 30 minutes at a time. This means if you really have to use a car then you can get one - but you only have to pay for the time you actually drive it.

Free membership is worth £25, plus you get another £25 worth of driving credit on top. With typical hire rates being about £4 an hour, that should give you enough for a couple of free hires.

And if you don't fancy driving, Go Ahead will give you free membership of Newcastle’s self-service bike hire system Scratch Bikes instead. This is similar to London's public bike sharing scheme and again is worth £25. In addition, Key Lifestyle members also receive a discounted rate on the two-hour rental fee, which means it would cost just 20p to complete your journey by bike.

This is a neat and imaginative scheme which seems to be pressing all the right environomental buttons. What the take-up will be is anyone's guess, but it seems to offer the best of three worlds. I like it.

Will it be enough to persuade the petrol heads to abandon their Type-R's and their four-by-fours? Perhaps not. But it clearly offers normal people a few more options – and it might even persuade some that they don't need to own a car all.

Putting You On Hold

2012-01-09T04:04:00.000-08:00

Well, the book of the trip - tentatively called 'Bus Stop Britain' -is written, but unlike the bus journey on which the whole thing is based, its much too long. So, we are now into a period of re-writes and edits and I’m now intending - well, hoping anyway - to have the whole thing completed by the summer.

But that’s the easy bit. Actually getting it published is an altogether different proposition. Children’s author Terry Deary reckons that only 2% of all the manuscripts submitted to publishers ever see the light of day, so the chances of ‘Bus Stop Britain’ being accepted by a publisher seem no better than 50 to one.

However, I know from your comments that many of you are straining at the leash to read the story of my bus journey from Land’s End to John O’Groats, so I can only hope that I can happen upon a publisher who is equally keen to see it in print.

In the meantime, I’ve decided to update my blog with some of the many bus-related news stories that come my way. When I first decided to write my book, I began sourcing bus-related news stories from all around the world, with the result that my email inbox is now habitually full of them.

So I’m going to start picking out some of the more interesting ones, the odd ones and the downright bizarre and posting them to this blog. I hope you enjoy reading them.

Well, at least it will give you something else to read whilst I try to finish this darned book…!

On Reflection...

2010-06-23T02:32:00.000-07:00

I have just re-read my last blog entry and I feel I owe you all an apology.

Perhaps it was the beer. Maybe it was just exhaustion from the trip finally catching up with me. Or possibly that final post-prandial glass of malt whisky… Anyway, I’ve just re-read it and it all seems a bit… well, emotional. Sorry.

But it was pretty emotional at the time and that, I think, was one of the biggest surprises of the trip. Honestly, I really thought it would be a case of ‘right, job done, now let’s go home’ but it so wasn’t. It felt much, much better than that. OK, so it’s not like making a first ascent of Annapurna without shoes, or breaking the world land speed record on a unicycle or something, but it felt like I’d actually achieved something.

However, that sense of achievement was slammed into sharper focus the following morning as I caught my bus to Thurso railway station. The driver and I got chatting (as you do) and he asked me what I was doing in John O’Groats. So I told him.

“Oh, yeh,” he said knowingly. “ You’re my third one this year…”

Now, I suppose I could have felt crushed by this nonchalant dismissal of all the hardships I had endured on my long 29-day journey from one End to the other (if there’d actually been any, that is). But I didn’t. Instead, I just felt slightly encouraged, like I’d joined some select band of fellow idiots, and that what I had just spent the last month doing might not be quite as mad as I’d thought.

Of course, it could just be a ‘Caithness thing’ – after all, it’s a slightly strange place, this. It’s barren and windswept and a little bit ‘other worldly’ and it really doesn’t feel like anywhere else in the UK. The landscape leaves you in little doubt that you’re absolutely on the edge of everything and that the normal rules don’t apply. I rather like that.

Now that I’m back at home I can begin trying to make sense of the whole thing, which means reviewing my whole journey. I’ve written pages and pages of scribbled notes – with the complexity of the scribble relating directly to the smoothness both of the bus and the road (some of the Isle of Wight stuff is virtually unreadable) – so at least I’ve got something to jog my memory. But what really stands out is the sheer variety of the forms of transport I have used.

During my 29-day journey, I travelled on no less than 79 different buses of various shapes and sizes, as well as four coaches, three trams and one restored historic tram (in Birkenhead). In addition, I enjoyed rides on 3 preserved buses, about half a dozen London Underground trains, a London Overground service, a 1938 Underground train which now provides the Isle of Wight’s main railway service and one of the last British Rail slam-door commuter trains. I also used a taxi-bus, a funicular cliff railway, Europe’s longest escalator and a hovercraft.

When you look back on a journey like this, its tempting to start listing the best and the worst of things I’ve encountered on my travels - the ‘Best Bus Service’, ‘The Worst Ticket’ and “The Best Use of an Inspectors Cap in a Passenger Emergency’, that kind of thing. That would be slightly crass, of course. So here goes.

The newest, smartest and most comfortable bus I travelled on was probably Stagecoach’s 700 Coastliner service from Southsea to Hove. I think it was a Wright Enviro 400. Anyway, it was really smooth and comfortable and it had a pair of funny little seats right in the front by the door where the luggage should go. I also travelled on one of these from Manchester to Hyde. Brilliant

The worst bus is a little more difficult. One of the Western Greyhound minibuses I travelled in rattled so much that I thought it was going to shake itself (and everybody’s fillings) to bits, and there were a few others that we pretty scruffy. But I think the least attractive bus I travelled on was, coincidently, also a Stagecoach bus – their 500 service from Carlisle to Stranraer which was possibly also the oldest without being actually historic.

For some reason, I had expected a flash double-decker for this long distance service, but what we actually got was an elderly high-floor single decker with about 3 steps up into it, with no concession for anyone with mobility problems or with a pushchair. It had no area for luggage and it smelt musty, as though it had been sitting unused at the back of a garage for a couple years.

It seemed odd that the company should be running buses this antiquated when the rest of its fleet was generally so modern. Perhaps it was exactly what it felt like – a spare vehicle which was being pressed into service as an emergency replacement for a bus that had failed to start. I hope so.

The best journey is a tricky one, too. There were literally dozens that could qualify – Dumfries to Stranraer (despite the bus), Swanage to Bournemouth, Snake Pass in the mist, Northern Skye, Glen Shiel. Or perhaps over the Pennines in that 1959 Bristol Lodekka, or the hovercraft from Ryde to Southsea.

Overall, though, there were few moments on the journey that I didn’t find something to enjoy. And my final impression is one which has probably surprised me the most. I have discovered just how beautiful a country we are lucky to live in, and what a huge amount of the most varied and tremendous countryside we are blessed with.

And, finally – by simply catching a bus, what a brilliant way it is to see it all.

The End

2010-06-21T08:53:00.001-07:00

Day 29:

I'd half expected at the very end of this trip to feel a bit deflated, a little sad that it was all over. In the event, I felt exuberant.

Arriving in John O'Groats today was the culmination of an idea I had a couple of years ago and months and months of careful planning, and you know what? It felt great!

I'd left Inverness at 10.15 this morning for what was always going to be one of the simplest journeys of the whole trip – bus from Inverness to Wick, then bus from Wick to John O'Groats. Throughout the 29 days of travelling that this crazy venture of mine has entailed, I've always enjoyed the actual process of travelling, especially the opportunity to just look out of the window and see what was there, and today was no exception.

As soon as we had crossed Inverness' elegant suspension bridge which carries the A9 over the salt waters of the Beauly Firth, you could sense that things were a little different. The landscape was changed, lower and grassier, with wide acres of cereals and tall stands of pines. This is the Black Isle, which is not an island at all but a blunt, rounded peninsula and the people who live there appear to grow most of the food stuffs for which Scotland is famous – oats for porridge, barley for whisky, potatoes, lamb, prime steak.

We cross the Black Isle and arrive at bridge over the Cromarty Firth, offering wide views down the firth where a couple of oil drilling platforms are sitting just off-shore, suggesting a different, less rural kind of local industry but one equally important to this area's economy.

And then we round a corner and, suddenly, the countryside becomes mountainous with hillsides thickly sown with gentle silver birch and wizened oaks, bright flowering gorse and purple heather, and rounded hills running to the sea with the road carved into their sides.

We pass a number of distilleries – Invergordon, where the whisky fumes have blackened the roofs of nearby houses with the curious black mould that feeds on what they call 'The Angel's Share', Glenmorangie at Tain, Clynelish at Brora – and the road becomes narrower, steeper, and, perched on the top of huge unseen cliffs, more precipitous. One minute it feels like the bus I took to The Needles (that seems like months ago), another turn in the road and it's like the road between Newquay and Padstow in Cornwall, we turn another corner and we could easily be on Dartmoor, or in the Peak District, or on the tops of the Pennines.

After three hours of travel, our entry into Wick brings me quickly and unexpectedly back to urban reality. Despite being so very, very far away – more than 100 miles north east of Inverness, in fact – the very first thing I see as we pass the obligatory 'Welcome to Wick' sign is, for me, that most dreaded of sights, an out-of-town retail park featuring most of the usual suspects.

Interestingly, it is faced across the main road by what appears to be the largest and most densely-populated grave yard I have seen since I visited Glasgow's Necropolis. There's a witty comment in there somewhere...

There is a certain irony in the fact that I have arrived in Wick on a Sunday, and on a Sunday there are no buses to John O'Groats . However, instead of my journey being brought to a shuddering anti-climactic halt, I was carried to John O'Groats using a service operated by Caithness Rural Transport, a largely publicly-funded organisation which picks up where commercial bus services leave off and provide essential transport for people who would otherwise be trapped at home. Their taxi-like service relies on volunteer drivers to ensure that local people, especially those with limited mobility or who have a genuine transport need, have a means of getting to where they need to be.

It is a public transport service, though a rather different one to those offered by companies like Stagecoach and Arriva, and it is an appropriate way of me to complete my End-to-End journey. I have enjoyed hundreds of miles of rural bus journey on my travels and I have encountered missing buses, irregular timetables and sometimes no buses at all. Few places are as resolutely rural or as remote (gloriously so) as Caithness, and what Caithness Rural Transport demonstrates is the kind of innovative solutions that are being employed to tackle the problems of rural public transport – or, indeed, the lack of it.

I could have taken a taxi, of course. After all, it was the monopoly enjoyed by the hackney carriages in London in the 1820's, as well as the expense of using them and their resultant exclusivity, which prompted the invention of the Omnibus, which was in effect a multi-person hackney carriage in which each passenger helped share the cost of the journey depending on how far they were travelling. But the opportunity to experience an innovative new form of public transport was too much to resist, and Caithness Rural Transport it was.

I did all the usual things I expect other people do when they complete their End-to-End's – go and have their photo taken by the John O'Groats fingerpost, buy a couple of postcards, chat to the steady trickle of other End-to-Enders, stare reflectively out to sea – and I have treated myself to a good meal, a couple of bottles of beer from the Skye Brewery and a glass of one of my favourite malt whiskies (it was a Talisker, since you're asking). Tomorrow I have one more bus journey to make, to Thurso where I will catch my train home.

I now face the huge task of trying to make sense of my journey, of picking out the interesting and important bits and making a start on the long labour of writing it all down and creating a story out of it. Tomorrow's long train ride to Tyneside will give me time, for the first time, to sit and begin to reflect on this mad 29 day journey of mine which has transported me from one end of this amazing country of ours to the other.

But, hey. Reflection is for tomorrow. I'm told that this hotel has no less than 130 different whiskies in its bar.

And so far, I've only sampled one....

A ‘Ness’-essary Evil

2010-06-19T13:57:00.001-07:00

Day 28:

I have deliberately tried to avoid express services and long distance coaches on this journey of mine because the whole idea was to test out local public transport and see if it was possible to cross from one local network to another all the way from one end of the country to the other.

However, when it came to the Highlands of Scotland, it was obvious right from the start that there would be very few local bus services to use. And those that there were looked to be, on the whole, very, very local – connecting outlying hamlets and villages to towns where there are important local services such as ferries, High Schools or clinics. Very few of them seemed to connect with neighbouring towns.

So, having put myself of the Isle of Skye the day before, I was already resigned to the fact that my only realistic way of getting off the island and onto the road to Inverness was to take a City Link bus – an express coach , effectively – all the way there.

I therefore turned up at the Market Square in Portree this morning for the 913 service to Inverness, which allowed me to quickly retraced my tracks past the Cuillins to Broadford and then onwards to Kyleakin.

Kyleakin used to have an important place in island culture as it was the Skye end of the crucially-important and therefore heavily-used ferry crossing from the mainland.

However, one of the conditions for the building of the privately-built Skye Bridge in the 1980's was that this ferry be forcibly discontinued to remove any potential competition for the bridge and allow its owners to levy a significant charge on anyone using it – as people would have to, as there are few practical alternatives.

Shutting the ferry effectively deprived Kyleakin of its sole purpose, but it carries on valiantly ibn a quieter way ably catering to the needs of the island's many visitors. The hustle and bustle of a busy little ferry terminal has gone, though, and I personally think the village is a little poorer because of it.

Many people regarded the building of the bridge as an essential, because it would provide a lifeline with the mainland that was not weather dependant. Others thought it ugly and intrusive and would lead to an explosion in crime. And at £5 a crossing, many thought it a rip-off. This last complaint was effectively dealt with by the newly-devolved Scottish Parliament in one of their very first acts - they abolished the toll completely. There was probably dancing on the streets of Portree that night!

We take a quick five minute stop in Kyle of Lochalsh, the other end of the former Skye ferry, near the now largely disused ferry ramp. Then we were off again, along the shores of Loch Duich which leads us past what is probably the most photographed castle in the whole of the UK, the improbably attractive Eilean Donan Castle.

Everyone in the UK knows what this castle looks like, even if they have never been there and don't know its name – it's on every postcard, every tin of shortbread, every website about Scotland, in every leaflet, in every film about Scotland, it's on the cover of thousands of different books; it is, in short, the ultimate Scottish icon. It's more famous than Sean Connery, for goodness sake.

It's easy to see why. The castle itself is quite small, but it is dark and craggy and so very, very Scottish. It is also absolutely perfectly formed, to a design that could easily have come from the crayon of a four year old child. It is so recognisably a castle, but what really gilds the lily is its setting. This trim little castle sits on its own rocky little island with a tiny stone bridge connecting it ever so picturesquely to the mainland. On three sides there is open loch and fabulous views to distant mountains. It is perfect. In fact, it is so perfect it looks like a film set. No wonder tens of thousands of people stop to take its picture each year. I'm surprised that Kodak haven't approached the castle's owners to sponsor it...

Our road takes us further along the road to the end of the loch at Sheil Bridge, sitting at the foot of Glen Sheil. This is a fabulous glen overshadowed by the towering peaks of the Five Sisters of Kintail, five huge mountains that seem to be trying their best to trip us up and block our way. In fact it's not at all clear for a while that there is a road up the glen, but we eventually find a way up what I believe is one of the wildest and most attractive glens in the Highlands.

The road eventually levels off and runs alongside the huge Loch Cluanie through what appears to be a barren, empty wilderness with no habitation of any kind for miles around – apart from the Cluanie Inn, that is, which suddenly appears as if out of nowhere. Then the road heads into Glen Moriston and the long descent to the Great Glen begins.

The Great Glen is the result of a huge primordial crack in the earth which runs from one side of Scotland to the other, much of it filled by the dark waters of Loch Ness. Those bits that aren't filled with water were eventually connected by canal, and then lock gates built at each end – Fort William in the west and Inverness in the east – to create the Caledonian Canal. This canal effectively provides a short cut for shipping wishing to travel from the North Sea to the Atlantic but without the faff of having to go all the way round the top of Scotland. This can sometimes though up the bizarre site of an ocean going trawler chugging purposefully along the clearly land-locked Loch Ness!

The road along Loch Ness is narrow and quick, and in a very short while we arrived in Inverness, the most northerly city in the United Kingdom – and my home for the night. It's been a long, three-hour journey through some of the best scenery Scotland can offer. And, from my position high up in a coach, I could scarcely have had a better view. It's been a brilliant day, relaxing and, thanks to the ever-changing scenery, endlessly interesting.

Tomorrow I get back on City Link coach for the final day of my journey which will, after 29 days on the road, take me to Britain's most distant and most northerly village, John O'Groats.

Then again, it will be a Sunday so who knows what will happen...

Over The Sea To Skye

2010-06-19T06:35:00.001-07:00

Day 27: (Published Day 28 due to lack of mobile internet connection)

After the chaos of yesterday, I was looking forward to some plain sailing today, and that's exactly what I got.

Admittedly, there were a few chewed fingernails first thing when the taxi I'd booked to take me the mile and a half to the bus station didn't arrive, but it proved only to be delayed and we were soon on our way.

My Shiel Buses service to Mallaig left on time... well, nearly on time as the driver had to pop into Morrison's for bottles of water. Anyway, it was a comfortable midi-sized coach and we were soon barrelling effortlessly along the 47-mile long Road to the Isles.

It was a clear day so the views from nearby Corpach back towards Fort William afforded some spectacular views of Ben Nevis on one of those rare days when you can actually see the summit. Despite being the middle of June there was still plenty of snow in evidence but it wasn't the snow fields that made the sight so impressive – it was the sheer scale of the mountain as viewed from almost sea level.

We were soon running along the picturesque shores of Loch Eil before climbing up and over into Glen Finnan and one of the most photographed views in all Scotland, the Glenfinnan Monument at the head of Loch Sheil . The monument commemorates the moment when Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard to formally rally the clans to his cause, effectively firing the starting pistol to the whole Jacobite Rebellion.

Up and over once again, past lochs speckled with tiny islands, down deep and empty glens, through a gorgeous landscape which looks for all the world like a film set on a remake of 'Rob Roy'. A little further on and we pass Morar with its beaches fringed with astonishingly white sand. By now we are beginning to get distant views of the Hebrides, with the mountains of Rhum and Skye beginning to show.

The bus pulls into Mallaig, a busy little port complete with boatyards, an ice works and a Fisherman's Mission. There's not much that is pretty in the conventional sense here, but it has energy and purpose and by the time I've worked around the seafront my ferry is about due to leave.

It's a short 35 minute crossing to Armadale on the Isle of Skye and I'm reassured to see a bus waiting in the car park. I bought a day rider ticket with the intention of changing at Broadford and visiting Kyleakin before doubling back and heading on to Portree. However, a careful inspection of a timetable picked up on the ferry showed that this wouldn't be possible, so instead I made straight for Portree and dropped off my rucksack at the guest house.

I had a bit of time to spare, so I spent an hour or so exploring Portree before catching a bus which would take me north past the mighty Storr Ridge, across the island to Uig and then back again. That that this was also a school bus gave it a little added spice!

The bus duly left the Market Place and then queued with some eight other buses in the grounds of Portree High School, slowly filling with a group of remarkably well-behaved and polite teenagers. Then we set off up the eastern coast of Skye where the roads runs between the sea and a dramatic wall of charred rock called the Storr Ridge. This is a daunting and extraordinary natural rock formation which bears testament to the island's violent and volcanic past. Layer upon layer of black twisted lava are piled up into huge cliffs hundreds of feet high, watched over initially by a single bizarre spike of rock called The Old Man of Storr. If a flight of Pterodactyls were to sail into view over the ridge I doubt if anyone would be surprised, as this looks for all the world like a primeval landscape. But the ridge goes on and on and never really peters out until the island itself starts to disappear into the sea.

The bus driver begins dropping off youngsters at the ends of roads, at farm gates and at the ends of their drives. He seems to know where everyone lives and invariably pulls up without anyone having to ring the bell. The bus is almost empty by the time we leave Staffin, which is 17 miles from Portree, showing just how far some kids have to travel to and from school every day.

We continue up the evermore deserted coast of Skye then cross over the tops to the dropdown into the tiny port of Uig. Its principal claim to fame is its regular ferry service to the Outer Hebrides, a relatively short crossing which seems popular with lorry drivers.

The run back to Portree is relatively short but passes through yet more deserted mountain and moorland scenery dotted with crofts and cottages. It's been a two hour journey which has brought us round in a complete circle – and I can safely say that, although it never actually got me anywhere but back to square one, it has been probably the finest and most stimulating bus journey of the entire trip so far.

Tomorrow is my penultimate day on the road and will see me cross from the West Coast of Scotland to the east, by way of some more incredible mountain scenery.

Chaos in The Glens

2010-06-17T09:19:00.001-07:00

DAY 26:

For the first time on the whole trip, things started to go badly wrong and they just kept getting worse. To be honest, I was wondering when I was going to get a day like this!

To begin with, I had to drive my kind and gentle hosts at The Crags Hotel in Callendar from their beds a little earlier than usual to cook my breakfast so I could make an early bus. This they did with not the least complaint and with no little culinary skill, for which I regret I didn't have time to properly thank them as I was rushing out to catch that early bus (top people, though, and I'd recommend their hotel unreservedly).

That bus was the C60 service run by Kinghouse Coaches from Callendar to Killin, which I caught at the bus stand near the Dreadnought Hotel. It took me on a spectacular journey along the shores of Loch Lubnaig and up over the tops to Lochearnhead which sits at the head of Loch Earn (obviously), at which point the views just got better.

More climbing, this time up the appropriately-named Glen Ogle (I couldn't keep my eyes off it) and more descents through pine forests, then we were turning off the main road and down to Killin, a rather pretty village more or less at the head of Loch Tay. The Falls of Dochart tumble picturesquely under the village's stone bridge making this a great place to get out and have a cup of tea (judging by the number of tea shops and cafes thereabouts).

Now, the only real reason I decided to visit Killin was so that I could travel on a form of public transport I hadn't yet encountered, namely the Post Bus. These are glorified post office vans but with a few seats for passengers and are restricted to intensely rural areas (so Killin clearly qualifies). I was intending to catch the Post Bus to Crianlarich and pick up the onward bus to Fort William from there, so I popped into the post office at Killin to double-check the time (it was at 12.30, I knew, but it's always worth checking).

What the postmaster told me was that there was no Post Bus, that it had been discontinued a month or two ago, and would I like to buy a post card?

This came as something of a blow. I was effectively stranded in Killin, though frankly I can think of worse places to be stranded in – Telford, for example. Still, I had a room booked in my name in Fort William and I simply had to get there - not least because I'd already bleedin' paid for it!

The post master, after selling me a postcard, a book of stamps and a dog license, told me about a taxi firm which runs taxis at certain times of the day for the same price as a bus ticket, so I thanked him, wrote down the number and left the post office (clutching the tartan kilt-shaped air freshener he'd also managed to sell me). But before I phoned and put Plan B into immediate effect, I checked the bus stop outside and discovered that the City Link bus to Oban was due in half an hour and that would also take me to Crianlarich. Right, then.

The Oban bus was late, and the elderly Dutch couple who were also waiting for it and I assumed it was simply not coming. Much fretting ensued. However, it eventually arrived some 20 minutes late and on we clambered.

The driver, it seemed, had not been trained to use the particular type of ticket machine he'd been issued with at the depot, so some delay was incurred whilst he tried to issue return tickets to Oban from my new Dutch friends. However, whilst he was trying to make sense from his single page ticket machine instruction manual, a coach driver popped his head round the door and one of those "have you heard the Police have closed the Crianlarich road for 4 hours" conversations ensued.

It was clear we were going nowhere.

The bus did eventually leave some 45 minutes late, but without me – it had decided to take a different route to Oban and I had decided to cut my losses and instead wait for the Fort William bus which was due in about 15 minutes (it actually arrived 35 minutes later). I might still get stuck at Crianlarich but at least I'd have a comfy seat.

In the event, the Police were just on the point of re-opening the road as we arrived in Crianlarich so we were soon on our way through some the most spectacular mountain scenery on the British mainland. The road to Tyndrum is crowded by big, muscular hillsides but it's when you get beyond Bridge of Orchy that the landscape becomes truly impressive.

The long climb up to Rannoch Moor, and the view back down the road to Bridge of Orchy, is good by most people's standard but when you get to the top and the moor just opens out in front of you... well, I ran out of superlatives almost immediately.

It's an extravagant view of huge rocky mountains, mist-filled glens, hanging valleys and bright reflecting water, with the lily-dotted lochans and the wiry heather disappearing off into a distance contained by sheer walls of mountain. We are soon across the moor and beginning our descent of Glen Coe, surely one of the most beautiful and picturesque glens in Scotland, and the most tragic, with its powerful, leering mountain tops seeming to crowd in and threaten the traffic on the road below.

Then we were down to the sea again at the village of Glencoe and along the shore to Ballachulish and the coast road to Fort William, my home for tonight.

Fort William, home to Britain's highest mountain, is a busy not-so-little town, but it looks much better since they pedestrianised and cobbled the High Street. It's still a clumsy mix of Scottish vernacular and 60's concrete blandness (from the time when Fort William really began to hit its stride) but it seems to have a little more time for people now.

Its seafront is effectively a dual carriageway, which is a shame. I brazened it out amongst the lorries and the caravans whilst I ate my sandwich, but it wasn't much fun (though the view was pretty good).

Speaking of which, the view from my guest house is even better - so I'm thinking about not going out tonight and just watching the sun sink behind the mountains whilst the gulls flap lazily down the loch. And not visit one of the three Indian restaurants I discovered in Fort William (yes, I counted them).

On the other hand, I am quite peckish now....

All Aboard the Clockwork Orange

2010-06-16T13:37:00.001-07:00

DAY 25:

With the Transport Museum being closed, I found myself with a whole morning to fill and nothing much to fill it with. I was, in short, at a bit of a loose end. But not for long.

Glasgow's Buchanan Street bus station, where I arrived from Ayr yesterday, is absolutely enormous, with stands – or stances, as they seem call them here - for no less than 57 buses. It's no wonder they have to employ men with hi-vis tabards and whistles to carefully guide drives as they attempt to reverse their buses out of their stands and prevent them from driving into each other. With buses and coaches seeming to arrive or depart every few seconds, it's like watching someone trying to choreograph elephants. Great fun!

But they don't like being photographed, as I soon discovered. In fact, this was the first time on the trip so far that I have been shouted at for photographing buses. Well, after all, I could be a terrorist or anything....

The bus station also has information centres, ticket offices, a newsagent and, I'm delighted to say, proper left luggage facilities. So after leaving my Travelodge and with much time on my hands, my very first port of call was to be the bus station so I could drop off my heavy rucksack (in exchange for a fairly hefty £5) and hit the streets unencumbered.

I spent part of the morning wandering around Glasgow Cathedral, which is the only double-decker church that I can ever remember visiting, then climbed up to the Necropolis, a huge Victorian graveyard with some of the biggest and most extravagant (and therefore expensive) gravestones and monuments imaginable. All manner of worthy souls found their final resting place here, including one William Miller, the author of the well-known children's poem 'Wee Willie Winky'. It's an astonishing place which demonstrates just how affluent and industrious Glasgow must have been during Victorian times. Not for nothing was it referred to as the Empire's Second City.

I then made my way back into the city centre and climbed aboard Glasgow's diminutive underground railway, affectionately called 'The Clockwork Orange' on account of the fact that its trains are painted orange (mostly) and it looks like a clockwork toy. The carriages are tiny, much smaller than those on the London Underground -
I even managed to bounce my head off the roof of the carriage just by sitting down too quickly. Glasgow's subway also has the distinction of being the only underground system in the UK which is wholly underground.

In all other respects, it is as quick and as comfortable as it's bigger London brother, though a few of its stations, like Shields Road where I got off to visit the fascinating and beautiful Mackintosh-designed Scotland Street School – are little more than raised platforms between two sets of electrified track. It's a bit unnerving, that!

You can travel the whole circular route in about half an hour so that's just what I did, travelling from Buchanan Street in one direction and getting back on the same train for the journey back. That brought me back to the mighty Buchanan Street Bus Station in time to collect my rucksack and make the 13.02 bus to Balfron.

Now, I have to confess that I had never heard of Balfron before I decided to travel there, nor is there any good reason why I should have. It's only importance to me lay in its position, which is just to the north of the scenically-gifted Campsie Fells (which overlook Glasgow's northern suburbs) and therefore on the scenic route to Stirling which was where I was actually heading.

Having clambered out of Glasgow's dense northern suburbs (and at least I now know where Partick Thistle FC play) we were quickly out among the green fields and beneath the impressive slopes of the Campsies. These are the soft, rounded hills I saw tucked behind Glasgow's tower blocks yesterday from the top of my luxury double-decker coach. But they also have a hard edge, with the village of Strathblane seeming to be almost peppered with scree from the rocky westerly-facing crags towering above it.

We bowl along the Blane Valley, an intensely rich and conventionally-attractive glen with steep, thickly-wooded slopes that quickly mellow into wide flower-strewn meadows. No wonder the cows and sheep look so relaxed and contented. It's a lovely place and, to be honest, more than I had hoped for.

The bus makes a quick stop at the Glengoyne Distillery, which is well worth a visit, before carrying on to Balfron where it unexpectedly morphs into a bus going to Stirling Bus Station. On reflection, the driver probably told me it was going on to Stirling when I got on and asked for a through ticket, but then his accent was so, er... authentically Scottish, shall we say, that he probably said quite a lot of things that I didn't pick up. Like, two out of every three words....

Anyway, I stay on board and we are soon positively barrelling down the Forth Valley towards the fair city of Stirling, with its Wallace Monument and the aggressive-looking Stirling Castle clearly visible long before we get to the city.

I really like Stirling. I don't like its huge shopping mall (under which is built the bus station – wouldn't you just know it?) because it could be absolutely anywhere is the UK or America, but I love its streets, and its steep road up to the castle, and the old Stirling Gaol which has been brilliantly restored, and its youth hostel, and the tang of heather and ice in the air, its sheer unvarnished Scottishness. Yes, this is probably the last bit of level ground in Scotland –everything north of here is big, hairy and mountainous (and that's just the kids! No, sorry, only joking...)

Technically, the border between the Highlands and the Lowlands is defined by the geological fault line that runs sort of south-west to north-east directly through The Trossachs, where I am staying for the night (in Callander, in fact). Tomorrow, if I have not already crossed it, I will be crossing the divide into the Highlands properly, travelling deep into the Perthshire glens, catching a post bus to a place I can barely spell, passing the scene of a notorious massacre, before ending my day down by the sea again, only this time in the shadow of the biggest Ben of them all.

Taking The Ayr

2010-06-15T12:17:00.001-07:00

DAY 24:

Today dawned bright and sunny and, frankly, it just kept getting better.

I'd been really looking forward to today's journey through Galloway, which I and many others think of as the forgotten Scotland, and thanks to clear blue skies and bright sun it was everything I'd hoped for.

I'd hoped that the service 500 to Stranraer would be a modern bus, and preferably a double decker to maximise on the scenic views. So I was slightly disappointed to see a rather venerable old single decker shamble up the bus stop at Dumfries. It was so old, in fact, that it had two steps up inside the door – no modern lo-floor kneeling bus, this – and no luggage rack or space for wheelchairs or buggies. It even smelt as if it had been lying at the back of a garage for a couple of years.

No matter. With my rucksac on the seat beside me, we were soon barrelling through the Galloway hills. It's strange and deeply attractive countryside, both soft and rugged at the same time, with heather-topped gorse-flecked hills overlooking lush fields filled with lounging Friesians and occasionally with the local breed of cattle, the delightful Belted Galloway cattle.

The towns and villages we pass through – Castle Douglas, Gatehouse of Fleet, Creetown, Newton Stewart - share the same simple style, with low granite or white-washed buildings topped with steeply sloping roofs strung along a single street, with strings of cottages behind. You see the same type of village and town all over Scotland and if nothing else it means you can seldom get lost popping out to the shops!

From Gatehouse of Fleet we begin to see the Solway Firth once more, with acres of sand flats and still blue water offering views right across Wigton Bay. We climb up onto the tops of unseen cliffs and the views become yet grander and more extensive. The hills become bigger, more heathery, then the landscape changes yet again to look a little more maritime, more sandy and windblown, with huge stands of oak giving way to more mottled woodland of birch, rowan and hazel.

Then we are into Stranraer with its busy little streets and its ship's funnels sticking up over the roof tops. It's a quick change here to the No. 60 service to Ayr which heads up the Ayrshire coast by means of the steeply wooded and achingly attractive Glen App (which sounds like something which turns your iPhone tartan). It's a spectacular run up the coast, much of it only inches above the rocky volcanic beach, with jaw-dropping views across the sea to the Mull of Kintyre (and I'll still never forgive Paul McCartney for that song), the remote mountains of Arran and the strange, breast-like rocky island Ailsa Craig.

This area was a real surprise to me. It's a fantastic road to travel along especially when you have the time to gaze into the distance. I'll be coming back here.

From Ayr I was going to catch a bus further up the coast and eventually into Glasgow. However, I spotted that Stagecoach were running an express service to Glasgow via Prestwick Airport using those extravagantly streamlined, triple-axle Skyliner double-decker coaches I used to travel to London on in the 1980's. They are such unusual and eccentric vehicles that it seemed an opportunity too good to miss so I took my place at the back of long queue at Ayr bus station.

I'd forgotten how huge these vehicles are, and despite being one of the last people on the bus there was still plenty of room. Better than that, because most of the other passengers were pensioners returning home from a spree to Ayr, it was the downstairs seats that filled up first, which meant that I could still bag myself a front seat upstairs! Bliss!

What followed was a smooth, almost silent, air-cushioned romp all the way to Glasgow through countryside which suddenly gave way to the Big City. Glasgow felt big and brash and noisy after the stillness of the Galloway countryside, but I love its vitality and it was a pleasure to be out on its streets.

In fact, I felt so generally happy and contented that I decided I deserved a curry tonight. So I popped into a miniscule little restaurant I'd heard of just around the corner from my Travelodge entitled, appropriately enough, the Wee Curry House. It was brilliant and I recommend it unreservedly.

Tomorrow I had decided to visit the Transport Museum, which is excellent but is also, I have discovered, currently closed. Apparently they are moving the whole collection to a brand new museum down on the riverside. So I will have a little time to kill, not that there's any shortage of things to see and do in Glasgow.

And the Wee Curry House does open for lunch...

Going To The Wall

2010-06-14T10:48:00.001-07:00

DAY 23:

Ahhh, it feels good to be back on the road again for what will be the final phase of my epic Land's End to John O'Groats bus trip.

I've spent the last couple of days at home getting cleaned up after a long two and a half week trek all the way from London. Now, with a bag full of clean T-shirts and socks, I feel almost ready for anything!

Today's section of the journey took me from Newcastle city centre firstly to Hexham, which is half way up the Tyne Valley. I could have used a number of buses to get there, but I deliberately chose the rather bizarrely-numbered AD 122 service – bizarre, that is, until you realise that the year AD 122 was when the Emperor Hadrian ordered work to start on what was to become known as Hadrian's Wall.

The AD 122 runs right along the length of Hadrian's Wall – indeed, on some stretches right along the top of it – from Newcastle city centre to Carlisle, calling in at each and every important Roman site along the way, such as the spectacular Housesteads Fort, Vindolanda and Birdoswald. Just as important, however, the route takes in some of the wildest and most beautiful scenery the north of England can offer running as it does along the northern ridge of the Tyne Valley and offering views across to the Scottish borders, the northern Pennines and the Lake District.

I stopped off in Hexham for a while, then got back on the AD 122 for the run along what is possibly the finest part of the route – from the Chollerford river crossing near Chester's Roman Fort to the ruins of Birdoswald, which are so close to the road that they practically brush the side of the bus.

After a pause for lunch in Carlisle, and a peruse around this surprisingly attractive red stone city, it was back on the bus, this time Stagecoach's 79 service to Dumfries, though an area which for all it is flat and somewhat featureless still manages to form part of the Tourist Route to Edinburgh, the Solway Coast Heritage Trail and the Burns Heritage Trail. Not bad for flat farmland!

We eventually breach the border at Gretna and I begin Scot Spotting. Sure enough, scarcely a mile into Scotland I spot my first pub car park sign imploring customers to 'Haste Ye Back!' I was expecting red-headed locals wearing kilts, playing bagpipes and brandishing tins of shortbread to appear at any moment, but fortunately they didn't, which suggests that people outside of the licensed trade probably have a little more self respect.

However, tHpweverhey still have a cheesy, out-of-town designer retail park thing surrounded by car parks and called the Gretna Gateway Outlet Village, which frankly I think is unforgivable.

At least Gretna gives you your first clear view of the mighty Solway Firth, and it's a cracker, with the mountains of the Lake District piled up behind like some kind of improbable film set. It's a stunning view of dark mountains viewed over sparkling sea, but the scenery keeps getting better. A little further on the Galloway Hills start to make their presence felt on the horizon, whilst to the north east the Scottish borders hove mistily into view. This is a great place to be, yet comparatively few visitors come here. Which is great if you like a bit of peace and quiet, but not so good if you manufacture tartan wigs or shortbread for tourists.

I'm staying in Dumfries, the so-called Queen of the South (according to the local council's marketing and shortbread distribution department) and it betrays that look of slightly impoverished greatness that are the hallmark of many Scottish towns which have been built on Victorian money. It has, however, one major saving grace – a deeply attractive river which courses through the heart of the town and is crossed by a couple of spirited stone bridges. It's an animated and tumbling force which helps to bring the whole town to life, so much so that you can forgive it it's many (too many) take-aways and it's grey streets of boarded -up shops.

Tomorrow I head deeper into Galloway, the forgotten Scotland that so few people know about, before launching myself up the coast and into Scotland's premier city, Glasgow.

Shake, Rattle and Splash

2010-06-10T04:04:00.000-07:00

DAY TWENTY TWO:

It seems I’m fated not to be given the chance to enjoy some of Britain’s finest scenery. Day 22 dawned in monochrome, with heavy skies that seemed barely able to raise themselves above the slate rooftops of Kirkby Stephen.

And today was the day I was intending to cross the high Pennines by classic bus. Oh, well.

I took my place in the queue for the once-a-week service from Kirkby Stephen to Barnard Castle, which lies at the foot of Teesdale. The service is operated by Cumbria Classic Coaches who use a variety of splendid old vehicles to run this and other weekly services in the area.

I was surprised to find a growing gaggle of elderly ladies with shopping baskets queuing at the bus stop. It was soon clear that they weren’t here simply to take a trip down Memory Lane, though. Wednesday is market day in Barnard Castle and they were all off for a day’s shopping, using their concessionary travel cards to get there.

Eventually, a rather stately 1959 Bristol Lodekka pulled up and a very jolly and attentive conductor – who seemed to know everyone by their first names – helped us aboard. Off we set into the thick penetrating drizzle and soon we are heading resolutely upwards towards the Pennine escarpment above us.

Despite being more than 50 years old, our rattly old Bristol – affectionately known as Harvey – made a pretty fair fist of the long upwards slog. Our driver was clearly an expert with the old-fashioned crash gearbox and his gear changes were pretty slick.

We were quickly into proper upland scenery – wide, barren moorland, dry stone walls, a scattering of sheep and lambs sharing nodding heads with the wind-blown bog cotton. Here was the North Pennines in all its grandeur and despite the limitations of the low cloud - which reduced visibility down to just a few metres in parts – it was a impressive and inspiring sight, especially from the top of double-decker bus.

Over a cattle grid and into County Durham and we began the long gentle decent to Middleton-in-Teesdale where we took a 10 minute break for ice cream (now, that’s what I call a bus service!). Then we had the steady run into busy Barnard Castle, me to say goodbye to Harvey and head onwards to Darlington, the others to accompany each other for a day of tea-drinking and gentle shopping at the market.

My Arriva service 76 got me into Darlington a lot more quickly than Harvey might have done, but to be frank our rather elderly L-reg single decker seemed a lot noisier and a lot more rattly than Harvey. Still, it was short trip over ever-broadening farmland which brought me swiftly to the centre of Darlington. From here I was heading via the X66 to Middlesbrough – another elderly bus, this time a double decker - for the sole purpose of riding that amazing and almost unique conveyance, the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge.

The bridge is a kind of moving platform slung from cables which dangles over the River Tees. The land hereabouts is too low, and the ships that regularly plied the river too big, to have enabled a proper bridge to be built here – it would have to be around 100 feet high simply to allow ships to pass under it, so the ramparts on either side would have had to be vast just to get the traffic up to bridge level.

The solution, therefore, was to build a short section of platform which shuttled across and above the river suspended on cables, with the cables attached to electrically-driven bogies on a sort of aerial railway above.

It’s brilliant and, after my rain-soaked 10 minute walk through Middlesbrough, I was less-than-delighted to find it was closed for maintenance. What? Rats! Quite apart from the fact that I now had wet socks, that really screwed up my route for the day.

I had intended to cross the river, find a bus to Hartlepool, then Sunderland and eventually South Shields, where I was intending to cross that other great Northern river, the Tyne. But now I was stuck in Middlesbrough.

I made my way back to Middlesbrough’s dismal bus station (I say dismal, though that may be something to do with a) my mood, b) my socks – they really were quite soggy now, and c) the appalling weather) to review my options. Plan B was to catch a bus to Hartlepool and pick up my journey from there. However, that seemed to be a very slow and meandering service which would take hours.

So, I then came up with Plan C which was to take a bus to Peterlee and Sunderland and pick up the treads of my journey there. So I found my queue and joined it.

Of course, as luck would have it, the bus simply didn’t turn up, but then my luck changed for the better. I spotted an extremely smart X9 service to Newcastle pulling in so I raced across the station to catch it. This service – operated by Go North East – calls in at Gateshead en route so I figured I could pick up my journey from there. Besides, I’d had enough of being bounced around in rattly old buses and so when the opportunity to travel on one of Go North East’s very smart new double deckers presented itself, it was an easy decision to make!

We were soon hurtling up the A19 through sheets of rain and clouds that were barely above tree top height. Fortunately, we had a skilful and enthusiastic driver who really kept the speed up throughout the journey (incidentally, she was also the most personable and attractive driver I have yet had by a country mile, but obviously I can’t say that because this might be construed as sexist).

From Gateshead, I caught the Tyne and Wear Metro to South Shields and then took a five minute walk through the town centre to the ferry landing, where I joined a large group of commuters for the short five minute journey to North Shields. I then hopped on the waiting 333 for the journey up the hill to North Shields Metro station and my Metro home.

So, I am now at home busily washing my socks and generally re-acquainting myself with the children and the dog (all of whom growled when I stepped through the door – I haven’t been away that long, have I?). I’m having the week-end at home, then I’m off on the final week-long leg of my journey to John O’Groats.

Bizarrely, although I have now completed three-quarters of my journey, I still haven’t passed through the exact centre of Great Britain yet!

But I’ll be doing that on Monday.

Into The Hills... Again!

2010-06-09T09:05:00.001-07:00

DAY TWENTY ONE:

This was a long day, but one that was filled with variety... in a public transport sense, that is.

The day was to have started with a tram ride all the way from Blackpool Tower to the northern terminus of Fleetwood. Unfortunately, because the whole infrastructure of Blackpool's tram network is so decrepit the entire northern section was closed for repairs. Actually, they said the closure was due to vandalism, and there may have been some, but the scale of the repairs and refurbishment they are currently engaged in suggests something far more major.

So, I could only get as far as Cleveleys by tram and that is what I did, in a dull, modern-looking single-decker which looked like a Leyland National on second-hand bogies and with possibly the most miserable and unhelpful driver in the Western world. Isn't it strange how in places where people have loads of fun the staff are universally miserable old gits?

Anyway, the driver declined to tell me if there was a connecting bus from Cleverleys to Fleetwood, despite me asking him directly twice, but when we got there a tram replacement bus was duly waiting so I hopped aboard for the short onward trip to Fleetwood.

Fleetwood is a busy little port, with its own fishing fleet and regular ferry services to Northern Ireland. It also has the shortest, podgiest little passenger ferry in the world plying the River Wyre from Fleetwood to the oddly-titled Knott's End, which sounds like it should be the setting for Tom Sharpe novel.

My reason for travelling to Knott's End was the catch a bus to Lancaster, but on arrival I discovered that the service only runs once every two hours, and that the last one left about half an hour ago. So, the good news was that I had a whole 90 minutes to explore Knott's End. The bad news was that I had finished inside nine.

What did I do? Well, I wandered around its spookily silent and empty streets believing that I had somehow arrived in the middle of a Hammer House of Horror film from the early 1970's. Then I discovered the village shops, which were eerily perfect – neat little bakers, proper greengrocer, a family butcher's, a post office – and I began to wonder if I had stumbled across a British village equivalent to the Stepford Wives. It's a very odd place

Anyway, after wandering out into the middle of Morcambe Bay for a while – and that really was scary -and then carefully vandalising a bus shelter (OK, I made that last one up) my bus eventually arrived and I scurried out of the rain into the warmth of the 89 Stagecoach service to Lancaster.

The first bit of the journey was through acres of bungalows and miles of bleak, flat and tatty farmland but the countryside had livened up a bit by the time we reached the outskirts of Lancaster and overall it was quite a pleasant trip.

Lancaster was where I was going to pick up the Daddy of them all, the bus service which Stagecoach claim to be the most scenic in Britain, namely the 555 to Keswick. His bus goes right through the heart of the Lake District and, being it was a double decker, I was keen to grab my seat at the front to get the maximum exposure to the view.

The landscape starts to rise and roll in anticipation of the mountains to come, almost like it is limbering up. The road quickly bounds into Carnforth, where Noel Coward shot the iconic railway station scenes for his great romantic film 'Brief Encounter'. Looks like they've cleaned the place up a bit, too, and not before time – the last time I visited the station looked practically derelict, but now I'm making a mental note to go back for a closer inspection.

The countryside gradually gets bigger and more boisterous and we soon enter Kendal, the southern gateway to Lakeland. This is where the mountains really begin to dominate but they are about to get a lot bigger and by the time we get to Windermere, and we get our first glimpse of the lake, we are well and truly in middle of the Lake District.

The scenery just keeps getting better and better as we pass through Ambleside and then Rydal. We are high up now and it feels like the mountains are crowding in on both sides, squeezing the scenery into compact little glimpses between the trees and over the lakes.

Finally, we make a rapid descent into the lovely town of Keswick, but I can't look around because my onward connection pulls in just as we do and I leap aboard. This is the X5 to Penrith and it's a coach, the first one of my whole journey so far. Somewhat bizarrely it has a chair lift fitted just inside the door, I suppose so that wheelchair users can get up into it – though how they then squeeze between the seats in what is a very narrow gangway I can't imagine. Still, they'd be company for the driver I suppose.

We are soon out on the A66 and romping towards Penrith, pausing occasionally to slip off the road into the numerous small villages that are just off this major highway. Here, the massive bulk of the mountain Blencathra dominates the northern skyline (it actually blots it out at Threlkeld) with the Helvellyn massif to the south.

By the time we get to Penrith, we have technically left the Lake District and now we are in the Eden Valley. Penrith is it's largest market town and it's got a sizable population with, amongst other things, a major office for the Environment Agency. And it is here that I get my last bus of the day, the 363 to Kirkby Stephen, which happens to be a mini-coach (another first) and the first vehicle I have travelled on since I started which has a manual gearbox!

We have a lovely run down the Eden Valley through scenery at one moment lush and green, and at another wild and lonely. It's not unlike Pendle and I only wish it wasn't raining so I could enjoy more the view.

It's been a long day, and one which has seen me travelling on seven different types of transport, and that's probably a record so far! But is hasn't been expensive. I bought a Stagecoach North Western Explorer Ticket from the driver of the Knott's End bus and I thought the price – it was £9.85 – was a bit steep. However, it has brought me all the way from Knott's End to Kirkby Stephen and it is the only ticket I have needed – and bearing in mind I've been travelling for around 8 hours, that's pretty good value.

And is the bus a good way, and a practical way, to see the Lake District and enjoy it's scenery? Oh, yes.....

Going Down To The Sea Again

2010-06-07T23:29:00.001-07:00

DAY TWENTY:

I've stayed in all kinds of accommodation on my journey so far, but few can have been quite as scuzzy as the hotel I stayed in last night in Bradford. It was dark, it was gloomy, and I was the only person staying there, which probably says it all.

It was like stepping back into the 1970's (my room had brown wallpaper...I mean, brown wallpaper) but I think that it was the heavy smell of 40 years of engrained cigarette smoke that was the most memorable feature. Unless you count the cooked breakfast, that is, which resembled a road accident and had my arteries actually howling in protest.

Now, this distressing preamble (distressing to me, that is.... I mean, just thinking about it...) serves to explain why I was at Bradford's new bus interchange quite a lot earlier than I expected to be. But no matter, I had a long way to go today so an early start was all to the good.

My 662 Keighley and District bus to, er... Keighley (where else) was waiting for me on the stand as I arrived so I leapt aboard. To my surprise, this relatively modest single decker actually had leather coach seats and a funky name – The Shuttle. There must some intense competition from other operators on this route for K&D to go to this expense to win or hold on to customers.

Bradford has 'Northern Greatness' in spades – you know, big Victorian theatres and town halls, palatial railway stations and the like. But move even a few feet out of the city centre and you'll see it all painfully mouldering away. There are empty shops everywhere, buildings with trees growing out of the stonework, abandoned houses, and dozens and dozens of take-away's (which I think is often a barometer of a neighbourhood's poverty).

Once out of the city – and through the more affluent outer suburbs – the road passes the superb planned community of Saltaire, with its mill just below it in the dale. This is a similar set-up to the model community set up by old man Cadbury at Bourneville in the Midlands , which only goes to show what money can really achieve when it is put to good use.

The roads runs up the south side of Airedale to Keighley, a busy, sooty little town lodged in a cleft in the dale with its houses scattered over the valley floor and the surrounding hills. Here I transfer to another K&D bus which will take me on to Skipton, which is much higher up the dale. The scenery is becoming much greener now, with broad buttercup meadows filling the valley floor, the sky becoming huge as the road leaves the deep tree-lined dale and the country starts to broaden out. Skipton sits against a backdrop of grey hills giving us our first clear sight of the Pennines.

I switch to another bus at Skipton's modest little bus station – this time it's the Ribble Valley Express, which sounds like it's been taken straight from a cowboy film (albeit one based in Lancashire). This will take me all the way to Preston over the Yorkshire-Lancashire border through Pendle, a part of the country I'd ever before visited.

From Skipton, our single decker (shame) is soon rolling along through big, grassy uplands with just the occasional mill chimney sticking up over the trees to remind us that we are still in a land once more famous for its industrial prowess than its farming. We go sweeping down the A56 at speed, admiring the fantastic moorland skyline of farms huddled under trees long lashed by the wind and miles of dry stone walls snaking over the horizon.

We enter Pendle – and Lancashire – at Barnoldswick, which from the road looks a small town filled with purple slate-roofed terraces swirling around a huge mill chimney, with the massive bulk of Pendle Hill just beyond the rooftops.

I'd somehow always assumed Clitheroe, the next town on our route, to be a place of smoke and industry, so I was genuinely surprised to find an attractive little town of narrow winding streets and a romantically ruined castle above it, with the ever-present moors and uplands at its shoulder. It's a smashing little place, and the whole area is a complete revelation. So many views, so many trees and meadows, so many hills and uplands, and I had no idea that any of this was here.

At Whalley Bridge the countryside begins to broaden out and slacken pace, even though the village itself appears to be sheltering under a hill which rises up almost vertically from the end of the High Street. The meadows are soon even broader, there are sheep and cattle to fill them, and you feel that you are at last coming out of the dale. All of a sudden you can see for miles and miles, and the fast level run into Preston has begun.

Wherever I go I always try to find something to like, be it the architecture, the scenery, the people, or even just the beer (just?). In Preston, I had to work very, very hard to find something I liked. And even now I'm not convinced.

Preston has the look of a town that was very badly bombed in the 1950's and then suffered the ultimate indignity of becoming some kind of practical examination for weird and challenging 1960's trainee architects and town planners. The words 'breakfast' and 'dog's' sprang to mind as I wandered around, which is a pity as it has a truly grand town hall and an amazing covered market (even if the actual market stalls themselves are slightly less than amazing).

And then, of course, we have the bus station...

The fact that it is lodged under a car park should give you some idea of its awfulness. It's sheer scale – it can handle over 70 buses all loading and unloading at the same time – gives it's awfulness a sort of heroic and monumental stature. It's cavernous, its filthy and unwashed, none of the information screens work, not even the clock worked, and finding the right stand for my bus was as much down to luck as personal persistence. As for the underpass used to reach it... sorry, I really can't talk about that, it's just too awful...

How can people let buildings like this - important public facilities, for heaven's sake - get into this state? Why don't they try to make it better, easier to use, more human?

I know there are many who would tear it down, and I can understand why. But actually that would be a pity. As a major transport interchange, it could be one of the best. And the car park above it doesn't look half as bad as some I know of (the infamous Get Carter car park in Gateshead, for example), so there's plenty to build on.

But is there the will?

I organised a sharp exit from Preston aboard the 68 to Blackpool, but this proved a tiresome affair. The roads out of the town were completely clogged by traffic lights and parked cars, and the bus driver had to repeatedly stop to allow oncoming traffic through. We therefore inched our way, in jerks and lurches, out of Preston and onto the flat, featureless coastal plain leading to tonight's overnight halt, Blackpool .

I'm not really a Blackpool person. It's all a bit daft and noisy for my tastes, but I'm here as part of my researches to sample a Blackpool guest house and to ride on the oldest tram system in Britain. And to buy a stick of rock. And eat fish and chips on the beach, and wear a 'my wife went to Blackpool and all I got was this crappy t-shirt' t-shirt, and a 'Kiss Me Quick – Squeeze Me Slowly' hat.

Well, you have to, don't you...

High Hills and Deep Dales

2010-06-06T13:45:00.001-07:00

DAY NINETEEN:

Today almost didn't happen, or at least not in the way I intended.

The whole idea of being in Glossop on a Sunday morning was so that I could catch the one bus per week that goes up the breathtakingly exposed Snake Pass on its way into the Peak District. I'd heard it was one of the best bus journeys in the UK and I needed to know it that was true.

The bus was due at 10.07. By 10.20, I was reluctantly making plans for an alternative route to Bradford and had completely given up on the Snake Pass bus arriving. I was so disappointed, but everything I have heard suggests that rural bus services are a bit like that.

Just then, the bus trundled into view and, with not so much as a word of apology from the driver, we set off up the Snake Pass. I was annoyed but delighted – the journey as I imagined it was back on.

The Snake Pass is one of the highest passes in England and our bus seemed to be labouring uphill for ages. Finally it levelled off on top of a huge moor with amazing views for tens of miles around. This was what I had come to see – there can be few more spectacular views to be had from a bus anywhere in Britain. Tremendous!

The scenery kept getting better, though. Once off the wind-swept moors we were plunging down into deep tree-lined dales beneath the brooding bulk of Kinder Scout – which played such a major role in the mass campaign to secure free access to the mountains and moors for walkers in the 1930's. Every other passenger on the bus is a walker and we chat happily about the day ahead. The driver happily drops them off exactly where their footpaths leave the road – no bus stops on the high moors!

We were soon running alongside the sinewy Ladybower Reservoir before dropping into Bamford for my 272 service to Sheffield. It's a double-decker, the first I have ridden on since Birmingham, and I quickly re-acquaint myself with the view from the front seat on top!

The wild beauty of the Peak District slowly gives way to the busy streets of Sheffield and it's a rapid transition – open fields one minute, housing estates the next. We pull into the Sheffield Bus Interchange which is tucked away almost in embarrassment behind some truly appalling 60's and 70's concrete boxes, which leer over the bus station in a positively threatening manner. It (and the rain) discourages further exploration so I'll have to leave Sheffield for another time. Pity, really, as according to the inspector on duty my connecting bus to Holmfirth has broken down, so I have time to kill.

Eventually, onwards to Holmfirth past all manner of ugliness – steel-shuttered shops, factory units, bland new apartment blocks - along a valley lined with terraces of stone workers cottages until we get to Stockbridge. Here is evidence I had been looking for of Sheffield's former steel industry. The Corus works in Stockbridge is everything you expect a busy steel mill to look like, and they are truly vast, seeming to dominate the whole of the valley. That they are still working is cause for some celebration.

And then we are suddenly out into open country again, over moorland tinted green and brown by bilberry and bracken, with more impressive views to the north and east. The road falls away and we are soon running into Holmfirth, setting for the long-running BBC comedy series Last of the Summer Wine. Every corner we turn looks familiar, either because it has appeared in the show or because it looks like it could! One of them was definitely familiar – Sid's Cafe in the town centre – at which I pop in for a cuppa. Well, you have to, don't you...

Yet another bus, this time the 313 to Huddersfield and another double decker. When we arrived in Huddersfield it was love at first sight. It's a great little town, full of those huge, decorative and 'don't mess with us'-type buildings you associate with Victorian civic pride. It also has probably the most impressive railway station in the country, even though the forecourt is a kind of bizarre obstacle course of random fountains which seem to shoot up from between the cracks in the pavement when you least expect them. Fun, though.

The bus station was built under a multi-storey car park and is everything you'd expect from a piece of dull, featureless 1970's architecture. The waiting area itself is pretty comfortable, though, and there's loads of travel information to hand, and the car park is only 3 storeys high so it doesn't dominate the skyline. For this, it is forgiven.

The last bus of the day takes me to Bradford. Another double-decker, but this time I notice a supermarket trolley-type wheel just by the bus's front wheel. As we arrived into Bradford, it all became clear as we squeeze into a bus-only lane bordered by high concrete kerbs down the middle of the road. The high kerbs connect with the little trolley wheels on each side of the bus and effectively take control of the steering from the driver (who no doubt nips off for a fag). On a Sunday evening when there is very little traffic, I can't really see the point. But I suppose in the rush hour the fact that the bus is using its own road gives it a clear advantage over the queuing traffic. And because it is a guided bus way, no other vehicles can get in the way (unlike bus lanes), and it only takes up the minimum of space required for a bus.

So here I am in Bradford. Once the rain stops (for it is raining once more), I'll pop out and explore some of Bradford's rightly-famous curry houses in preparation for another long day - back to the seaside once more, only this time at Blackpool.

I suppose that mean's fish and chips, then... and trams!

Mersey Mission

2010-06-06T11:04:00.001-07:00

DAY SIXTEEN:

SORRY ALL - this post didn't publish on Thursday evening for some technical reason or other, so this one is now out of sequence! I'll try to fix it later!

Wrexham has the look of a town that has having a hard time before the recession struck, and has faltered since. The main shopping street – ironically entitled Regent Street – looks anything but like its London namesake. Empty shops festooned with' To Let' signs stand out like lost teeth, with pound shops and even 99pence shops suggesting widespread consumer hardship.

There are other clues, too. There seems to be a great number of loud youngsters around, many driving soop-ed up and revved-up saloon cars with loudspeakers blaring out rap and hip-hop. There are lots of nightclubs, hot food take-away's and taxi offices suggesting a boisterous and noisy night life. Everything feels a bit aggressive, a bit out of control. To be honest, it feels like the frontier town I had expected Oswestry to be.

As we leave Wrexham on the bus to Chester, we pass through some lush and prosperous suburbs, so clearly it's not just poverty that is bringing Wrexham down. But where do the people who live here go to spend their money? Not Wrexham, it seems.

We are soon into broad and well-cultivated farmland, but then we suddenly beginning dropping into a wide plain with fields and poplars as far as the eye can see. It's strange because I had no sense that Wrexham was other than close to sea level, but it clearly wasn't – it's somewhat higher than the surrounding countryside which we are now quickly dropping into.

We cross the border between Wales and England somewhere between the villages of Rosset on the Welsh side and Pulford on the English – even the name sounds more English than Welsh. The flatness of the plain means we are now speeding into Chester.

Chester is stunning, and it's immediately easy to see why people would want to come and shop here. It's gorgeous – Elizabethan timber-framed buildings everywhere, medieval city walls, The Rows, which are raised walkways lined with shops but at first floor level, with more shops below att street level. It's a joy to walk around and reminiscent of that great medieval city of the north, York.

I took the First service 1 out of Chester for Birkenhead. This was a very different journey into a very different area. First we pass acres of business park, then through a vast and appallingly anonymous retail city called Cheshire Oaks which looked as though it had come straight out of the USA. Then into vast areas of council housing, a monument not only to the slum clearances carried out by local authorities straight after the Second World War, but is also evidence of the post-war imperative to create new homes after the damage wrought by bombing.

All the time, the tall stacks and massive fuel storage tanks of Ellesmere Port and beyond are visible over the rooftops.

I made a mistake when we got to busy Birkenhead. I knew I had to go to one of the Mersey ferry terminals but I for the life of me I couldn't remember which one. So, obviously, I chose the wrong one and ended up catching the bus to Seacombe when in fact I needed to go to Woodside.

Having arrived in Seacombe,I decided to catch the ferry up river to Woodside. It was a plan and a good plan, or would have been if I hadn't just missed the ferry. I therefore had to wait 45 minutes for the next one, which arrived late and when it did arrive promptly went out of service with engine trouble. Eventually, we got underway in the spare ferry and Woodside came up on starboard bow within minutes.

Leaving the ferry terminal, was I soon happily seated on a beautifully-preserved Wallasey tram of a type commonly seen in these parts during the 1920's, with open verandas at each end of the top deck. I tram took me in the time-honoured rattle-and-clang way to the Wirral Transport Museum where this particular tram, along with several others, was lovingly restored.

The museum also boasts a small collection of buses, motorcycles and other vehicles, with model railway displays and a recreation of a motor garage from the 1930's. It was free to look around, though there was every opportunity for people to donate to the museum. And, with all the money raised being spent on preserving some of the less roadworthy vehicles in the collection, it's obviously money well spent.

A tram back to Woodside, then, and the Mersey Ferry across the river to Liverpool. This must count as one of the most spectacular river crossings in the UK, especially as the Mersey is never less than choppy. The view across the river at the Liver Building, the Albert Docks and the cathedrals beyond can truly be described as iconic and it's a view I never tire of.

I'm lucky enough to be staying in the Albert Dock tonight at the slightly swanky Holiday Inn Express. The view across the dock at the Cunard and Liver Buildings at sunset is sensational. But then at these prices it ought to be.

I say farewell to Liverpool tomorrow as I move inland via St Helens and Warrington and Eccles (home of the cakes) to Manchester, in readiness for my multiple assault by bus of the mighty Pennines.

Can't wait.

Heading for the Hills

2010-06-05T12:49:00.001-07:00

DAY EIGHTEEN:

I didn't have very far to go today so, as I was in Manchester, I thought I'd take the opportunity to renew my acquaintance with the Manchester Museum of Transport.

I remembered how big this museum is (really quite big) and I remembered it was housed in one end of an existing bus depot, although independent of the working part of the building. But I had completely forgotten just how big the whole thing was, depot and museum together.

I was reflecting on this mild mental failure as I slogged my way up Boyle Street along the huge, huge brick side wall of the depot which just seems to go on and on and on. It really is an astonishingly big structure - I don't know how many buses the operational bit can hold but it must be several hundred.

This used to be a Manchester Corporation bus depot, of course, from the days when almost everyone went by bus or tram and the local transport fleet was so numerous it needed an undercover garage of truly heroic proportions. It now provides workshop and storage facilities for bus operator First, who run a lot of the services in the city and who clearly must have an awful lot of vehicles.

I've been here before, of course, but this a transport museum I never tire of. There are dozens of buses and coaches to look at and the extensive collection also includes trams, trolleybuses and recovery vehicles. The museum's volunteers have also cleverly recreated some of the back offices of a transport company, and there are loads of other transport-related items too numerous to mention. Their cafe has a highly authentic 'works canteen' feel, too, and they make a cracking cup of tea. And there's a well-stocked shop, too.

As ever, it is the volunteers who are the backbone of the organisation and, in common with their counterparts in other transport museums, they are friendly, extremely knowledgeable and more than happy to answer questions.

I short, this is a great place to visit and it was hard work dragging myself away. But the call of the road was sounding in my ears, so it was back onto Cheetham Hill Road for the bendy bus into the city centre.

London's Mayor is famous for his unreasoning and unreasonable hatred for these prodigious machines – he has pledged to outlaw them in London and is commissioning a Routemaster for the 21^st Century to replace them with. Personally, I rather like them, not least for the fact that they carry their engine in the trailer. I mean, how does that work? I just can't get my head around it. It's like building a car to tow a caravan and then putting the engine in the caravan! Now that's clever...

I then transferred onto a swish new Stagecoach double decker – it feels like months since I last rode on one of these – for the short journey to Hyde. I was slightly surprised to find that our driver was Polish, but even more surprised to see him using his mobile phone whilst driving. And at one point he even got out of his driving seat to take a photograph out of the door of a passing canal boat (though admittedly the bus was stationary at the time!) All very bizarre and not the kind of behaviour I have ever witnessed on any of my travels. I shall be speaking to Stagecoach...

At Hyde I changed for a service run by a local bus company, Speedwellbus. This was the 397 which was to take me on the final part of today's journey from Hyde to Glossop. I was enthralled to find that the route took us through some lovely North Country-sounding place names like Hattersley and Broadbottom (an affliction I personally expect to suffer from by the end of my journey).

It was amazed at how quickly we seemed to be surrounded by hill and moor. They seemed to appear out of nowhere – one minute we were pootling along quite merrily through Manchester's suburbs, and the next we seemed to in the middle of a TV production of Wuthering Heights.

I hadn't realised just how much I'd missed the hills after all the miles of travelling though the Cheshire Plain and through West Lancashire. Now they were rising up all around me and I was as happy as if I had a glass of beer in my hand (which I was making plans to have a little later on). It was an exhilarating ride, with the road running steeply down into a dale one minute, then steeply up the other side a minute later, then down again, then up once more, and so on.

At one point, I could swear that I recognised the village we were passing through, although I knew I had never been there before. But the sense of recognition persisted and it was all very odd. Then it came to me – I had seen it before! It looked just like the village in the TV comedy series 'The League of Gentlemen'. And then we passed a statue on a corner and it dawned on me that this village (called Hadfield) was in fact the very village where they did all the filming.

Fortunately, nobody asked me if I was local...

And so we arrived in Glossop, down a hill and past a sign next to a duck pond which said 'Glossop Swimming Pool'. Well, it was a pool, I suppose, of sorts, and the ducks were definitely swimming on it. Maybe this Royston Vasey thing is spreading...

I have a big day tomorrow, so I'm treating myself to an early night. Tomorrow I cross the Peak District by taking a bus up the mighty Snake Pass, before going on to Sheffield, Holmfirth (more TV comedy associations there), Huddersfield and eventually Bradford.

Hmm. I suppose I might have a curry tomorrow night...

Across the North West

2010-06-04T14:35:00.001-07:00

DAY SEVENTEEN:

This was always going to be one of the most unremittingly urban sections of the whole trip, so I was prepared for a lack of countryside. Instead, I had a museum to look forward to and another ride on a tram to take me into my other favourite city, Manchester.

The day started rather badly, however. I'd visited the new and rather swish Liverpool One Bus Station the evening before and it appeared that my bus to St Helens – the Arriva No. 10a - left from there. Not so, however. When I got there this morning and checked on the departure screens there was no mention of it, and when I checked at the Information Desk I was told that it left from the other bus station is James Street.

But then I had the first of a whole series of pieces of good luck. As I arrived at James Street, my bus was just rounding the corner and pulling in, and a short spell of jogging brought me to the door of the bus just before it left. Result! I was even able to get a day ticket explorer thingy which would take me onward to Warrington and save me money. Double result!

We ground through Liverpool's suburbs, making our way through the city's dense web of terraced streets. Liverpool seems entirely ringed with densely-packed streets of red brick terraces, but things are slowly changing; many of those terraced streets are now making way for new, brighter and more varied housing. The days of having a choice between three up and two down or nothing at all seem to be passing at last, though not everyone is happy with the changes.

This is a very different Liverpool to the one seen from the Mersey Ferry yesterday. Here there are no shining glass apartments, no broad stone-paved streets, no fountains playing or carefully-nurtured trees casting their dappled shade on well-groomed passers-by. This is an altogether grittier Liverpool, and you wonder – and worry - whether anything of this brave new world has so far benefited the people who live out here, just a mile or two out from the city's increasingly fabulous city centre.

We soon run into Knowsley and you immediately sense a distinct 'village' feel. There's the Knowsley Museum with is proud sign, there's a rather nice church, and a registry officer. There is also a Family Martial Arts Centre... a what?. I mean, Family Martial Arts?

Perhaps it's just me, but I thought the whole idea of being a parent was to intimidate your kids to keep them from annoying you and everyone else. Training them to be 3^rd Dan Karate black belts seems rather counter-productive – I mean, how can a parent be expected to discipline their kids if, at any minute, little 10 year old Darren could have you in a headlock?

I spotted another sign on the road out of Knowsley all across the front of a pub, which proudly (and in letters at least half a metre high) boasted that their kitchen had received a hygiene rating of four stars out of five.

Now, excuse me if I appear a tad picky here, but only four out of five? Think about it - if you order a burger and fries somewhere, do you want to find out that the kitchens preparing your meal are fairly clean but they're not brilliant? Well, do you? I mean, you can't help but wonder why they didn't they get that all-important fifth star - what exactly was it that the Environmental Health Officer saw on their inspection which led them to say, "Well, it's generally quite good but...,

'But' what? But for that fungus growing on the ceiling? But for the open drain in the middle of the floor? But for the army of mice which, although they always carefully wipe their feet before entering, really shouldn't be running around the food store like that? Does four out of five mean 'hardly any cockroaches'?

In football parlance, and it's practically a second language around here, I think that's what they call an own goal.

My next stop was St Helens and the North West Transport Museum (my fourth transport museum, no less), which is conveniently just around the corner from the bus station. It was closed, but in today's third piece of good luck (I hope you're keeping count), one of the museum's knowledgeable volunteers was in the museum building and spotted me with my nose pressed glumly against the window and agreed to let me in for a look around.

It's an impressive place. You can see that it used to be a bus depot, but it was a tram depot before that, and a horse tram depot before that, so this place has certainly got context. It also has a superb glass roof which absolutely floods the main exhibition area with light. It's vast and airy interior has dozens of buses and numerous other vehicles. There's also a lecture theatre and a mini museum all about tickets and ticketing. And it also has a huge workshop area which the public don't normally see but which gives you a fascinating insight into the huge amount of work that goes into the conservation of large commercial vehicles like buses (C'mon, guys, there must be a way of letting visitors peer through the door like I did?)

In short, it's well worth a visit and it's really easy to get to by bus (obviously). It doesn't look like its run by unpaid volunteers at all, it all looks pretty professional. However, because it is run solely by volunteers, the museum can only open at week-ends and bank holidays because that's when they can always guarantee to have people available to supervise the place. Which is a shame. It needs more volunteers – spread the word!

Onwards, then, to Warrington past more rows of terraced housing, many of them trying desperately not to look like their next door neighbour– some are stone-clad, others rendered, still more painted, and all of them trying to look a little smarter and a little less humble than they are. We pass a semi-reclaimed colliery spoil heap hinting at a long-gone mining industry – and perhaps explaining the large numbers of brick-built terraced homes nearby.

It's a strange mix, this area. It is densely populated but there's the occasional farm, too. Refinery chimneys poke over the rooftops one minute, then just down the road there is a roadside sign advertising fresh new Cheshire Cheeses for sale. Cereal crops, motorways, parks, spoil heaps – it' all here but little of it is pretty in the conventional sense.

We swing into Warrington, which probably doesn't look its best in...well, in any weather. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just a bit of a jumble. And it seems like there are roads everywhere. Not a bad bus station, though...

Out of Warrington, then, on the 100 First bus service to Manchester. Overall it's a fairly unexceptional journey through an unexceptional landscape, except we keep ducking and diving under and over motorways, first the M6 then later the M56, and we even cross the Manchester Ship canal a couple of times over what seemed to be rather dilapidated swing bridges – don't suppose there's much demand for shipping this far inland these days. I think we also passed over the West Coast Mainline, which I hadn't seen since Coventry.

I tried to keep my eyes closed when we got to Trafford Park, the humongous out-of-town shopping city on the edge of Manchester. I don't react well to such places. I absolutely don't subscribe to the 'retail as a leisure activity' philosophy and if I did I think I'd exercise my retail proclivities in proper towns and cities, not on pointless wind-blown film sets such as this.

In its favour (just), it does have a cutesy little bus station which shares some of the architectural features of the centre it serves, but ultimately it just looks faintly ridiculous.

Sorry. I don't do retail.

Anyway, after my fit of the vapours at Trafford Park we duly arrived at Eccles Interchange. I was struck, and not a little disappointed, by the clear lack of Eccles cake sellers loitering around the bus stands and the apparent shortage of cakes stalls. I thought about popping into the nearby supermarket to buy a couple of the local delicacies, but of course there is no certainty that supermarket Eccles cakes were made anywhere near Eccles. After all, earlier in my journey I passed what looked like the biggest Carlsberg brewery in the world – and that wasn't Denmark, it was Northampton.

I therefore high-tailed it over to the tram platform so I could complete my journey into Manchester by Metrolink. Those of you who have read my previous ramblings will be aware of my growing fondness for trams. They are smooth, swift, comfortable, cosmopolitan in a small way, and entertainingly scary (will we crash into that refuse truck? Will that taxi get out of the way in time? Will that guy in the suit suddenly realise there's a tram breathing down his neck? Ooh, lovely!)

I therefore arrived at my hotel in Manchester refreshed and stimulated and ready for dinner.

And would you believe it? Manchester has a Curry Mile!

Over The Border

2010-06-02T14:13:00.001-07:00

DAY FIFTEEN:

I was so taken by the beauty of Shrewsbury last night that I was roaming the streets till late, and when I did make my way back to the guest house it was via a rather lovely old pub called The Three Fish and a rather fetching little restaurant just under the castle walls (as was the guest house, incidentally) called the Castle Thai.

Yes, I know, it was curry again... I'm a man, I'm weak. What else did you expect?

I was out before breakfast taking more photographs, then left for the Arriva service 70 to Oswestry. This bus had no less than 6 CCTV cameras inside, though interestingly no escape hatch in the roof. Anyone care to explain the logic?

Out of Shrewsbury and onto the A5 (I'm beginning to think its following me). This is lush, fertile agricultural land with fields of nodding cereals disappearing off into the distance in every direction. Large bulbous hills start to appear on the horizon - could this be Wales?

As we get closer to Oswestry (the local's I heard on the bus pronounced it 'Oztry'), the hills become a lot clearer and they seem to be standing right across our path. Except for the huge hill we passed under at Nesscliffe, which I didn't even notice until we were below it. How could I almost miss something that big? I think perhaps they're creeping up on us...

The landscape is definitely getting lumpier as we roll into Oswestry. The town is steeped in history but somehow doesn't show it, apart from the huge hill fort clearly visible on the road into town. I even missed the Transport Museum (blast!) though I suspect this had more to do with the Cambrian Railway than anything else (I'll have to check).

The whole town seems... well, a little bit run-down, somehow. It's lively enough, and the pedestrian streets in the town centre are sheltered and tending to quaintness (which is good), but the market somehow seemed a little half-hearted, and it's all just a bit knocked about. Pity. I was expecting more of a feel of a frontier town, but it was just another High Street.

Onwards via the pithily-entitled 2a to Crick, and this time we really were going over the border (the 'Welcome to Wales' signs in two languages on the outskirts were a bit of a giveaway). Crick is a fairly ordinary little village with a cobbled (though cobbled in the European flat brick sense) High Street and a pleasant park. But its real glory lies just behind the village.

Thomas Telford, builder of bridges and canals and improver of what is now the A5, was given the difficult task of constructing a canal across some of the deepest valleys in the Welsh borders, a job which, at Chirk, saw him create a massive 10 span aqueduct across the 700 foot-wide valley of the River Ceriog. It's a stunning piece of construction, but no less stunning is the 420m tunnel which immediately follows it (and which I walked through along its tiny towpath, in near total darkness – quite an experience!).

Of course, when the railway arrived in Chirk it made the canal look pretty slow and unfashionable and so last-century, fact the railway's engineers maliciously rubbed in by making their railway viaduct, which runs alongside the aqueduct, deliberately and unnecessarily higher. Showing off, in other words.

After lolling around under an oak tree in the park for a little while, I took the 64a Bryn Melyn minibus to Llangollen. This led us ever deeper into the hills and back along the A5, which seems at this point to be carved out of the hillside, with tier and tier of trees above us and the deep valley floor below. Thomas Telford, who built this road to ease the journey from London to Holyhead, certainly knew what he was doing, though I doubt he had tourists like me in mind when he built it. Nonetheless, the views across the valley are breathtaking.

This is big, muscular countryside. It has the ruggedness and roughness you'd expect of wild, mountainous places, yet it's leavened by the soft, sloping meadows and the flower-strewn hedgerows. The green counterpoises the purple of the heather above and it's a strange and beguiling mix, both tough and attractive, a bit like a rugby player in a Laura Ashley frock... but a little easier on the eye.

Llangollen caters very well to the millions of visitors it receives every year. There are shops dispensing all manner of tourist tat – postcards, toys, cheap ornaments, more postcards – and there are whole rows of cafes serving tea and scones and 'something with chips' for the kids. It's a profoundly attractive little town, lodged as it is in a deep tree-backed cleft in the River Dee so it's easy to see why people come here. Good heavens, it even has its own splashing falls under its bridge, and there's even a steam railway, whilst a little up the hill there's the canal again with the chance of a horse-drawn canal boat trip.

This is, I suppose, the Llangollen that most visitors will see. But look beyond the obvious, ignore the shop fronts and the ice cream sellers, and you will see a perfect little Welsh town with churches and chapels and steep, blue slate roofs. With the steep valley sides offering a lush and verdant backdrop, this really is a very pretty place and well worth a look. It's just a pity that millions of other people feel the same...

The short ride into Wrexham gave me the chance to try the other side of the valley, which seemed less hilly somehow, so either Telford really didn't know what he was doing or we have become a lot better at building roads since his day. Out of the Dee valley the road becomes more level and the landscape broadens out and we roll into Wrexham with the Welsh hills seemingly far behind.

Llangollen was certainly busy, but Wrexham seems infinitely noisier. Is it all a lot brasher and aggressive, or is it just that I've lost the knack of large towns and cities? Whatever it is, I'd better get used to it because tomorrow I'm going on a ferry across the Mersey to one my favourite cities, Liverpool. And that won't be quiet!

Of Trams and Prams

2010-06-01T13:04:00.001-07:00

DAY FOURTEEN:

It's great to be on the move again after a day spent trundling around Birmingham on old buses. The fact that it's raining heavily for the first time in months puts a bit of a crimp in my enthusiasm, but I'm damp rather than downhearted.

First stop of the day was Snow Hill Station in Birmingham's city centre to catch a tram to Wolverhampton. Last time I visited Birmingham the tram hadn't even been thought of, so I was keen to take a closer look. It's everything you'd expect from a modern tram – smooth, comfortable and very, very quick. Much of the line appears to be along the track bed of disused railway lines, so with no traffic or pedestrians to get in the way, the drivers can really put their foot down.

Quite a lot of the line has a smooth, tarmac-ed cycle way running right alongside it, which I must say seems like a very good idea. Extra sustainability Brownie points for someone, clearly.

Having looked around Snow Hill for a ticket machine a la Tyne and Wear Metro, a fellow passenger helpfully informed me that you actually buy your ticket on the tram. Like, from a conductor. Remember them? No, me neither...

Only when our tram reached Wolverhampton city centre did we leave the sheltered confines of the disused railway lines and took to the road, but there didn't seem to be any slackening in our pace until we drew up at the terminus in the city centre.

I rather like Wolverhampton, though I confess that I only had 10 minutes or so to look around. Its busy centre is graced by a range of architectural styles (apart from 1960's Brutalist, I'm relieved to say), it feels comfortable and there is little that is overbearing to jars the eye. I'd liked to have explored it further but had to be content to looking at its art gallery and other fine civic buildings from the window of the 890 to Bridgnorth.

The bus quickly filled with elderly, white-haired ladies all chatting amicably – little did they realise the apparent mortal danger we were all facing. I mean, why else would you fit a glass escape hatch (with a hammer in a glass case to smash it with) into the roof of the bus (yes, the roof) if you didn't expect it to topple over and crash at splinteringly high speed onto its side. I mean, exactly what kind of ride was this to be, for heaven's sake?

I also noticed that there were no less than 4 separate CCTV cameras fitted to the inside of what was a fairly modest single decker bus, which seemed a little excessive, if not downright paranoid. Still, it meant that if one of the old ladies was to launch a brutal and unprovoked attack on me, we'd have the whole incident covered on video from every angle.

Within minutes we were out on the Bridgnorth Road gobbling up the miles at a rate which began to explain the presence of the emergency exit in the roof. The countryside was veiled in mist which was coloured golden by the fields of flowering rape across the landscape.

I got off just as the bus was about the cross the River Severn and begin its long pull up the hill into Bridgnorth. I had decided to take a more direct route straight up the near-vertical cliffs of the Severn Gorge by means of the Bridgnorth Cliff Railway. Two ancient-looking carriages – resembling a cross between a vintage bus and an old Silver Cross pram from the 1950's - pendulum-ed up and down the 45 degree slope connecting the main town centre with its riverside.

Technically, it's a funicular railway and one of about 14 currently operating in the UK. However, this is the only one as far as I can discover which is not there purely for tourists or holiday-makers – it's a proper piece e of public transport and therefore worth including in my journey.

Bridgnorth probably doesn't look its best in the rain... but it still looks pretty damned gorgeous. Elizabethan, Georgian, Victorian, it's all here but it's become blended in a way that is impressively easy on the eye.

I left Bridgnorth at speed on the 99 to Telford. This is big countryside, with great expanses of steep pasture dotted with giant oaks, rolling tree-topped hills and winding roads. We were soon dropping back down into the Severn Valley to Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge, the very crucible of the industrial revolution and an area with a fascinating history. I'd liked to have stopped to visit its many museums but I had to get to Telford for my bus to tonight's overnight stop-over, Shrewsbury.

Telford probably doesn't look its best in the rain. Unfortunately, it wasn't raining and it looked, if anything, worse. Telford is a new town, with all that implies. Its town centre is a shopping mall. I looked. I then took the first bus out of there.

The bus to Shrewsbury gave me another look at Ironbridge before clambering out of the valley further up stream hard by the distressing ugly Ironbridge Power Station. Why, oh why do they do these things?

Because, power stations apart, the views just keeps getting better. Our road takes us past flat meadows strewn with buttercups, with green hills rising all around us, their tops crusted with trees. One minute we are diving through deep woodland, the next we are breaking out into high upland fields, with tremendous views and bright sudden glimpses of hills in the distance – is it the Welsh Border?

We arrive in Shrewsbury over the English Bridge, and everything looks perfectly English – Elizabethan timber-framed buildings, cobbled winding streets, elegant Georgian terraces, the romantically-ruined castle above the river, Greggs the Bakers – but I have a feeling it's going to be a lot less English tomorrow.

For tomorrow I venture over the brooder into Wales to try out what appear to be agonisingly infrequent rural buses. Wish me luck...

Er... Actually, I’m More Of A Leg Man Myself...

2010-05-31T12:37:00.001-07:00

DAY THIRTEEN:

Today – which is Bank Holiday Monday – offered the chance to visit Birmingham's two transport museums and to travel between the two of them on buses you would normally expect to see in a bus museum. This one event was the sole reason for my being here today. Let me explain.

Now, I'm a real sucker for museums and transport museums are a particular favourite, so the opportunity to visit two of them in one day was probably a good enough reason to be here. And the possibility of a curry, of course – this is, after all, the home of the balti (I may have mentioned this already).

But the opportunity to travel on real museum pieces was a huge bonus and an experience that doesn't come along every day. Plus I was keen to see and meet bus enthusiasts up close and chat to them about transport and stuff.

Oh. Big mistake.

I arrived at Aston Manor nice and early (in fact, it was before they'd even opened, but they still let me in... easy-going bunch, these bus enthusiasts). I soon got chatting to one of the museum helpers, but as soon as he realised that I hail from the North East of England, he immediately launched into an extremely technical and detailed conversation about Bristol REMH's, after first admitting to me that "...he'd always been a Bristol man" and had even lived there once.

This was all slightly disconcerting. I hadn't a clue what he was talking about, yet he clearly thought that I was just as knowlegeable as him. However, before I had a chance to commit a major faux pas by telling him that Bristol's are all well and good but I was personally more a leg man, it slowly began to dawn on me that we were actually talking about buses. So I quickly slipped into MRM (Male Recovery Mode) by starting to nod, smile and generally "ah, yes... ah-ha, well now..." in a non-committal sort of way in a bid to keep him going whilst I figured out what the hell we were talking about.

Incidently, and I probably shouldn't be giving this away, but this is a technique practised by most men, usually on their womanfolk. Blokes can find the "ah, yes... ah-ha, well now..." technique very useful for covering up the fact that whilst their wife was explaining something terribly important about, say, next door's washing machine, they were in fact thinking about what that weathergirl off the telly would look like in just her underwear and a pink duffle coat. So when said wife then proceeds to seek the husband's perspective on, say, next door's washing machine, he can use this technique to flannel about convincingly for a bit whilst he picks up enough clues from his wife to make a reasonable stab at an answer.

Anyway, I finally figured out that this gentleman was referring to the long-distance coaches that I used to travel on to London as a child, so after exchanging a few personal anecdotes we eventually parted on good terms. But it was a close-run thing.

And it illustrates an important lesson on the dangers of speaking to any kind of enthusiast – unless you really, really know your stuff, I mean right down to chassis numbers and engine specifications and moquette variations, you can quickly get out of your depth.

In fact, the same thing happened to me again later in the day when I shared a picnic table with a father and his teenage son. It was a simple enough conversation, but I was totally floundering within seconds. Thank God they didn't ask me any questions...

Whilst Aston Manor Transport Museum was fairly big – it has previously been a corporation tram depot - the museum at Wythall was a lot bigger and rather well laid out. The main exhibition hall was carefully arranged by period – the 30's, the 40's, that sort of thing – with loads of well-written and helpful information panels for idiots like me. Outside, there were two other hangars full of buses, some preserved, some less so. And some a lot less so!

There was also a collection of electric milk floats and other vehicles to look at, plus there was an exhibition of model buses from a local modelling group. There was even a little steam railway in the grounds.

What was common to both museums, however, were the trade stands selling all manner of model buses and other vehicles, books and videos about buses, photographs of buses and bus jumble – cap badges, mechanical items, bus tickets, that sort of thing. These all seemed very popular.

Eventually, I caught an elderly Daimler double decker back into Birmingham and even though the bus was more than 50 years old it was a pretty smooth ride – at least as smooth as some of the more modern buses I have used on this trip – though a little slow on the hills.

So, it was an enjoyable day even if I was afraid to speak to anyone. It's been a pleasant enough day off, but the journey to John O'Groats starts again tomorrow and, if I'm honest, I'm itching to get going again.

And tomorrow starts with a tram ride...

Excuse Me, Haven’t you Got Any Change...?

2010-05-30T14:43:00.001-07:00

Day 12, and it's probably been the shortest day to date.

All I had to do today was to travel from Coventry, where I stayed last night, to Birmingham which was little more than an hour away. So, with a whole day ahead of me and only an hour of travelling to fill it with, I decided to take another look at Coventry's cathedral.

It being a Sunday, it seemed like a good idea to attend a service so that I could really see this amazing building in use. But in the event, it was even better than I could have hoped. I'd arrived in Coventry in the middle of their International Church Music Festival, so Sunday's Eucharist Service was to be against the background of Schubert's Mass in G delivered with the help of a 100-strong professional choir, a couple of fine soloists and the full might of the BBC Chamber Orchestra.

It was an amazing, spine-tingling experience and one I'll not easily forget.

I made my way to Coventry's Meadow Pool Bus Station, which probably the most palatial bus station I have yet encountered – shops, information screens, seating, even picnic tables, and it was wholly lit my natural daylight. Why can't they all be this way?

Unfortunately, things went disastrously wrong when the Stagecoach 900 service pulled up. I asked the driver for a ticket to Birmingham and handed him a £10, but he turned me away saying that he could only accept the right change. I rummaged through my pockets for loose change to drop into the slot device on the driver's door and managed to scrape together exactly £1.69p. The ticket to Birmingham cost £1.70p

So off I got to find a shop so that I could buy a packet of Polo mints with my £10 note. Barmy! It seems the drivers are not given the chance to handle any money at all as all the change falls into a sealed cash box via a sort of trapdoor with window so the driver can check you've put the right amount in. If any I'd known beforehand – but there were no signs, no warnings, no nothing.

The actual journey to Birmingham was quick and uneventful. The scenery was pretty uneventful, too, though we did pass through Meriden which used to be the home of the British motorbike industry (for a little while) and which also holds claim to the title of the absolute centre of England. Apparently nowhere else in England is as far from the sea as Meriden. Not the centre of Britain, however – I'll be passing through there much later in my trip.

Anyone getting off an airplane at Birmingham International Airport is able to catch a bus into town very easily – the bus stops are right outside the terminal. There is also, somewhat bizarrely, a fully-functioning Job Centre Plus in a set of Portacabins right next to the terminal. Crikey, things in the airline business must be bad!

I have not visited Birmingham in 25 years and the city as changed markedly in that time. It looks a lot more busy and prosperous. Shiny new office blocks, pedestrianised streets where once there were streets of dense traffic, it was all rather disorientating.

Birmingham being the home of the balti, you can probably guess what I had for tea tonight. Well, I had to, didn't I?

Tomorrow is Bank Holiday Monday and, more importantly, it's the day when the two local bus museums - at Aston Manor and at Wythall - get their exhibits out onto the road and use them to run visitors from one museum to the other. That's the whole reason for being here tomorrow – and I have to say I'm rather looking forward to it.

Sending Myself to Coventry

2010-05-29T13:12:00.001-07:00

DAY TWELVE:

I have done Northampton bus station a slight injustice.

I admit that I was highly critical of it when I arrived last night, but I have subsequently discovered as I waited this morning for my bus to Rugby that it is, in fact, remarkably well equipped. There are abundant wooden benches to sit on, there is travel information in abundance, it is logically laid out, and is generally clean and litter free. Underneath, there are toilets and a cafe with escalators linking them to the platform waiting areas. I mean, it even has a bus wash.

It's just a pity it looks like the kind of alien abattoir that would be summoned from the imagination of Ridley Scott in one of his darker moods, and is accessed via an underground sewer.

Sorry, Northampton, that's as close to an apology you are going to get. Now, on with the journey!

This morning's driver on the 9.45 Stagecoach service to Rugby helpfully pointed me in the direction of a mega gold saver day thingy which saved me a couple pounds (i.e., at least a pint!), so clutching my ticket and having embraced my new found friend, we set off together into the rain.

Once through the sprawling suburbs of Northampton we were quickly into pleasant, open countryside. This appears to be landed gentry country, too, as the huge sandstone walls and the achingly attractive estate cottages which we kept passing seemed to testify. I thought this bit of the journey might be flat and boring, but it's proving to be anything but.

Picking up where we left off yesterday, we were once more crossing and re-crossing the M1 motorway and the West Coast mainline and the Grand Union and even, at one point, the A5. The whole purpose of the road we now call the A5 when it was built was to link parliament and the Crown with its troublesome colony over there in Ireland. That heroic road builder Thomas Telford did much to improve it and I hope to be catching up with some more of his works a little later in my journey.

Most of the older buildings around here seem to be made from a very bright and friable yellow sandstone which looks scarcely strong enough to bear its own weight. There's quite a bit of thatch, too, and lovely aged Victorian brick and tile, and the lanes joining these hugely attractive hamlets gently roll through the countryside along strips of smooth road fringed with cow parsley and flowering hawthorn. Smashing, despite the rain!

Daventry International Rail Port is passed on the road into Rugby. It's giant white sheds – and I mean absolutely flipping enormous airship-sized sheds – provide a distribution base for dozens of high street stores and supermarkets and I suspect that almost everything you buy in a chain store these days has probably passed through this place at one time or another.

As for Rugby, at which we arrive a few minutes later, well... I don't think it looks its best in the rain. I think we'll leave it there.

The run into Coventry aboard the 86 was every bit as pleasant as the trip up from Northampton, through astonishingly pretty villages of mixed and varied architectural styles. Most of these, I suspect, provide homes not for farm workers and village postmasters but for well-heeled commuters from Coventry, but frankly who could blame them.

Into Coventry, out into the rain and straight into the Coventry Motor Museum, which to my amazement is right in the heart of the city and is absolutely free.

And it's brilliant. I was in there for three hours all told (and, yes, they did have a display of locally-made buses – mainly Maudsleys and Daimlers, as you're asking) and the only reason I wasn't in there longer was because my wife wasn't there to keep holding me back saying "Hey, have you seen this". She'll do this, oh... 80 or 90 times in any one visit, and to be quite honest I've absolutely come to rely on it. So instead, I just went round twice. Well, it's free, isn't it...?

The rain had stopped by the time I visited the stunning Coventry Cathedral which was built almost amidst the ruins of the former cathedral which was destroyed in the appalling blitz of 14 November, 1940. It's a highly atmospheric and moving place which I intend visiting again before I leave.

As for the rest of Coventry city centre... well, it probably doesn't look its best in the rain.

Tomorrow I pass through the centre of England en route to Britain's second city, Birmingham. And I may possibly take a ride on the longest bus route in Britain. Or not!

The Well-Trodden Path to the North

2010-05-29T01:11:00.001-07:00

DAY ELEVEN:

Day 11 was always going to be something of a break-out, a determined effort to get away from London's cloying crowds and get myself up-country towards the next bit of the journey which begins in the West Midlands.

However, it was all so much more than I was expecting.

Watford had seemed pretty dismal when I arrived last night – poor-looking terraces, pizza take-away's and massage parlours – but the town centre I discovered this morning had a much more optimistic and brighter air and I rather liked it.

Onto the bus to Aylesbury then, and we were soon heading towards London's outer boundary, the M25, then under it and out the other side. As if to confirm that we had indeed left London behind, the first thing I spotted was a herd of Jersey cows resting in a roadside meadow. Red-tiled villages soon followed and it was clear that we were definitely out the other side.

We arrived in Hemel Hempstead via one of the most unnecessarily complicated roundabouts I had ever seen, which was negotiated in both directions of travel with the help of additional mini-roundabouts at each of the five junctions. Absolutely mad!

Despite its tall modern buildings close to the infamous roundabout – located there, one assumes, to give office staff a good view of the carnage and mayhem below – the centre of Hemel Hempstead has a late 50's feel about it with some rather fine post-war public buildings. Its architecture tells Hemel Hempstead's story, in that the town was developed almost from scratch just after the Second World War to provide new homes for London's bombed-out masses.

The road out of Hemel Hempstead takes us across water meadows and over a canal which I assume is the Grand Union Canal connecting the Thames with the industrial Midlands. We then dip under the West Coast mainline and the impression that this is a countryside often travelled through grows yet stronger. It's all very different to the counties bordering London's southern border. It's just as green and tree-lined and just as busily farmed, but its more spacious somehow, the sky seems bigger and the roads wider. It's almost like this is a countryside designed to be travelled through, which I suppose it probably is.

We visit a number of pleasing Chiltern towns and villages – Berkhamsted, Tring – before arriving at Aylesbury's subterranean bus station, an underground horror roofed with sewerage pipes and air conditioning ducts, dimly lit and hidden from sight beneath a sprawling and unnecessary shopping mall. It's truly horrible.

Venture outside and you'll immediately find a beautiful market place with a clock tower and a busy market, bustling and attractive streets and you wonder why on earth such a foul, windowless shopping mall could have been dropped into such a place.

I couldn't get out of Aylesbury – or, at least, its underground fume-filled bus station - quick enough and luckily I didn't have long to wait. My bus to Milton Keynes had leather seats, which was a luxurious touch in what was in all honesty a fairly ordinary and elderly single decker.

Through field after field of rape, bean and wheat we head towards Milton Keynes through gently rolling countryside with the tree-top Chilterns never far away. We cross and re-cross the West Coast mainline and the canal before arriving at Bletchley, which is busy and bustling and has the simplest and least stimulating bus station I have ever seen. It's a car park around the back of some tall building and nothing more. No attempt at design has been made, no imagination or creativity deployed. Well, it's only a bus station...

Let me tell you what it is like to find yourself in the middle of Milton Keynes.

Being in Minton Keynes is like being trapped on a vast business park, with islands of tall anonymous buildings set in a sea of tarmac and shrubbery. It's like a set for an episode of Doctor Who, but scarier. Despite the trees which optimistically line the broad boulevards, trying for all their might to lend a European and cosmopolitan air to the place, the effect is to distance people still further from the world around them – or at least one mad vision of the world.

I mean, separating people from traffic is logical enough, but the degree of separation is so extreme that it banishes pedestrians to the edges of the undergrowth which actually feels quite threatening. Reducing people to walking beneath roads in dank, graffiti-scarred underpasses whilst motorists above bask in the full blaze of the sun is difficult enough to justify during the hours of daylight, but at night...

For these reasons, and many more, Milton Keynes feels fragmented, furtive, abandoned. And this is on a bright sunny day in May. What it must feel like on a cold January morning can scarcely be imagined.

Eventually, I am out on Milton Keynes along its many, many shrub-lined dual carriageways, vainly looking for a view that may or may not be there, and on the road to Northampton. More lovely farmland and rough stone cottages, the road tracing ancient field boundaries on its journey from village to village.

Eventually, we arrive in Northampton - to an underground bus station of such a vast scale and of such mind-boggling awfulness that I'm genuinely surprised to see anyone waiting for buses there. It's enormous. You get to it by crawling all what feels like a drain to a flight of sick-spattered concrete stairs. It saps the will, it is a Dementor of a bus station, and I've got to go back there is the morning. Oh, God.

Time for a curry, I think...

On The Town

2010-05-27T15:36:00.001-07:00

This was to be the day that I finally, at the second attempt, nailed London. It was also to be a day of history and exploration, and I was really rather looking forward to it.

The day started with a visit to King's Cross railway station so that I could leave my rucksack at the Left Luggage office there – an experience which left me pondering on the way railway left luggage offices have changed over the years.

Once upon a time, which is approximately from around the dawn of time to I'd say roughly 1979, such places were generally tucked somewhere around the back of a station where they were overseen by a kind of superannuated porter in a waistcoat and cap. He (and it must have been a trade union diktat that it had to be a bloke, because it always was) would scribble your name with the stub of a pencil onto a khaki label, sprinkle fag ash on it from the butt that was permanently wedged in the corner of his mouth, and charge you fourpence for privilege. He would then absent-mindedly fling your bag or case into the farthest, unlit and cobweb-ridden corner of the office, ensuring that your return visit to reclaim your luggage would take at least 20 minutes and you'd probably miss your train.

Then in the 1980's, after the Thatcher Government had began helping British Railways to become leaner and meaner and had offered all its porters, left luggage attendants and other workers the amazing opportunity to embrace capitalism and seize the chance to become Aston Martin-owning entrepreneurs themselves by sacking them, we had irritating metal boxes to cope with, huge lockers of the kind you normally see in gyms and sports centre changing rooms, and which somehow never seemed quite big enough.

Then we had the London bombings, and that effectively was the end of Left Luggage.

But it's back, and thank goodness, only this time its run by a private company. It's got a shop front right on the concourse at King's Cross and it uses one of those luggage x-ray machines you normally see at airports. Well, you can see their point. And it probably helps to explain the cost - £8 for 24 hours – which is clearly calculated to turn a profit.

Anyway, having dropped off my bag, I headed for the Northern Line and the Angel underground station. For a long while, this station had the longest escalator in the world – now it's just the longest in Europe. And its long, I mean really, really long. In fact, it's so long that one wag decided to put on a pair of skis and do a Franz Klammer down it on the basis that it's probably the only decent ski-able slope in central London (it's certainly the longest, but I think we've established that). This mad fool also thought it would be a good idea to strap a video camcorder to the side of his head (as you do) before making the descent – and indeed it was a good idea, as the resulting video makes the phrase 'white knuckle ride' seem very, very inadequate. It's well worth watching - you'll find it on YouTube somewhere.

From there, I had a spot of lunch in an old Routemaster which has been converted into a vegan restaurant and parked up in the yard of the old Truman's brewery in Spittalfields. It's called the Root-Master (its vegan - get it?) and the food is quite brilliant, as is the whole atmosphere on the top deck, which has been rather stylishly laid out as a dining room. It's a must-do.

I then took a ride on the newly-reopened East London line through the first tunnel ever to be dug under the River Thames, by no less a person than Isambard Kingdom Brunel's son, Marc. This was also the first tunnel to be dug using a shield. Teams of diggers gradually moved this great circular digging platform forward inch by inch and once they had dug out sufficient clay and sand a huge cast iron ring was inserted. This clever system ensured that there was never more than a few feet of unsupported earthworks at any time. Then the shield was moved forward and process begun again and it kept going foot by foot and ring by ring until the whole tunnel had been dug. The same process is still in use today.

I then got lost in Rotherhithe for a bit, but I eventually found my way to Tower Bridge Road and caught a bus over the eponymous Tower Bridge. One of the bridge's many claims to fame is that it was once jumped by a double-decker bus whilst in the process of opening. This bizarre event happened during the 1950's (1951, I think) and was widely reported in the press at the time. The driver was happily driving across Tower Bridge when it inexplicably began to rise, presenting him with something of a dilemma – attempt to brake and risk ending up in the river, or just put your foot down and go for. Well, he went for it, breaking a leaf spring in the process but successfully making it to the other side. In truth, the gap was probably only a couple of inches but I'm quite prepared to believe that it seemed like a great deal more at the time! The driver, needless to say, was feted by the public for his undoubtedly quick thinking - and rightly so!

Then it was off at Tower Hill and onto one of the few Routemaster buses still running. Though withdrawn from service around the turn of the century, a small fleet of these most recognisable and iconic of London buses have been retained for so-called' heritage services' and I was able to catch one which ran past the Tower of London, St Paul's Cathedral, Fleet Street and The Strand. It's a hugely enjoyable experience which I'd recommend to anyone visiting London and to my mind there can be few finer or more atmospheric ways of seeing the sights.

The day ended with a journey by Metropolitan Line – the first underground railway in the world, no less – to Watford. This showed the other side to travelling in London –the sheer frustration of it.

Things began to go wrong when an Underground train broke down at Liverpool Street resulting in huge delays on the Circle, Hammersmith & City and Metropolitan Lines. Minor chaos and long delays ensured. Then there was a train breakdown on the Jubilee Line at Waterloo bringing that to a standstill. And as if that wasn't bad enough, there were no less than two separate signal failures at different stations on the District Line which brought that to a virtual standstill, too. And all this during the rush hour!

Hopefully, I'm now well out of it – though Watford doesn't really feel that far, or that different, from London. Nice Underground station, though, even if it is miles from the town centre.

We'll see what Watford really looks like in the morning...

A Journey Through The Smoke

2010-05-27T02:29:00.001-07:00

DAY NINE:

I'm back in London for the start of Bus Stop Britain part two – and, boy, am I going to be busy!

With all socks and t-shirts duly washed and ironed (the t-shirts, that is, not the socks...), I have completed my all-too-brief sojourn at home and made the long journey down from Tyneside to London for the start of the second phase of my journey through Britain by bus.

This phase of my travels will basically see me travelling back home again, albeit by way of the West Midlands, Wales, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Lancashire again and the Lake District. They don't call me Iain 'Scenic Route' Lynn for nothing! Actually, they don't call me Iain 'Scenic Route' Lynn at all because that would be rather silly... still, the scenic route home is the one I'll be taking and over the coming two weeks I'm looking forward to having you along with me- by Twitter and blog - on the way.

Today, which is actually Day 9 in my great Land's End to John O'Groats odyssey, will be spent doing two things – firstly, finishing off my aborted journey by bus into Central London that I attempted last week only to be thwarted by traffic and very, very,v-e-r-y slow buses, and secondly exploring some interesting public transport-related 'hey-wow's' that can be found within our nation's crowded capital.

As ever, if you know where to look you can come up with all kinds of surprises – but I'll leave that for tonight's blog.

In fact, I have already started, as you will see from the slightly bizarre photograph that accompanies this blog entry. You probably weren't expecting a churchyard but there's a good reason why I've been headstone-spotting and here it is.

I decided to begin this stage of my journey by paying my respects to the man who basically invented the omnibus as we know it, George Shillibeer. It was he who first launched the very first regular horse-drawn carriage service in London which, unlike private carriages or hackney cabs, was so inexpensive that almost everyone could use it. It revolutionised London, allowing people living some distance from their places of work – which most people did – to travel to work more quickly and in some comfort, and for the cost of just a few pennies. George gave his first public carriage – which was little more than a van fitted with bench seats, really – the rather grand name of Omnibus, and the name stuck.

It was soon apparent that George's idea was a good one and a highly lucrative one, too. Within a few short years, many more such omnibuses appeared on the streets of London and poor George, the progenitor of the whole public omnibus idea, found that in he couldn't compete against such overwhelming competition, and he was forced to sell up and move on.

George made a new life for himself in the east of London, in Chigwell, where it is thought his former omnibuses were adapted by him for his new life as an undertaker, which at least ensured that he continued to use his revolutionary vehicles to ferry people around – albeit dead people!

Actually, it is believed that he converted one of his now unused omnibuses into a revolutionary hearse-omnibus hybrid which allowed both the living and the recently-departed to share a vehicle for a cosy journey to the graveyard, but I understand they were not a great success (largely on the grounds of taste, I should think). George was himself to make that final journey in 1865 and he now lies, largely uncelebrated, in modest plot in the graveyard of St Mary's Church in Chigwell.

Well, having paid my respects to George Shillibeer, I'll be putting his invention, which first turned a wheel some 185 years ago, to excellent use over the coming two weeks as I make my way north from London. Much of the estimated 450 mile criss-crossing journey to Tyneside will be undertaken by bus, with the odd tram or ferry thrown in for added spice, so it should be possible by the end of all that to see whether George's invention has stood the test of time.

The question is.... will I?

Thwarted at Last

2010-05-21T10:24:00.001-07:00

DAY EIGHT:

It was never going to be easy, it was never meant to be pleasant. But in the event, it was all much, much worse than I expected.

My simple aim was to find a way into and across London by bus, but calling in at Croydon en route to take a ride on one of their trams. I've given myself a head start by pitching my tent (metaphorically, that is, I was actually staying in a Travelodge) in Leatherhead last night, still technically in Surrey but very near to where London really starts.

The first part of the journey was fine, with me back on the 479 only this time I was going all the way through to Epsom. The change over to the 470 in Epsom was pretty smooth, too, albeit after a 25 minute wait. But that's where things began to unravel.

I was travelling to Sutton so I could pick up the 407 to Croydon. Having arrived in Sutton, I spotted that my bus was pulling into a bus stop that also catered for the 407, so I quickly jumped off. Then I realised that the 407 I would be catching from that stop would be going in the wrong direction so I needed to cross the road. Fine, I thought. It was a warm sunny day. So be it.

Waiting as I was for a gap in the traffic, it slowly dawned on me that the road I was attempting to cross was, in fact, one-way – so there was no bus stop on the other side. Somewhat irritated, I began to wander around looking for the right bus stop, but there appeared to be one-way roads going off in all directions and none of them seemed to have bus stops for the 407. It was maddening, not to mention hot and tiring (did I mention it was a warm sunny day?).

So after walking for what seemed like eighteen or nineteen miles, I eventually made my way back to where I had first got off and – quite cunningly, I thought - caught the 407 going the wrong way so that I could catch the bus at the terminus. Except there wasn't really a terminus at all – the driver just shoved everyone off and then parked up to have a fag and a sleep somewhere. At least he told me where to go to catch the 407 which was going in the right direction (more bloody walking).

Anyway, the 407 turns up and off we go to Croydon where I pick up a swish tram at the exotically-titled Centrale. Oh, this is the way to travel – smooth, silent, you feel like you are being wafted on a carpet of air. It runs partly on its own tracks along what I assume are disused railway lines, and partly down the middle of the street – very European!

I get off at Beckenham Junction and look for the 54 bus to Woolwich. This, too, arrives pretty quickly and we are soon underway but the traffic is really building now and its taking ages to get there. Eventually we arrive in Woolwich and I spend another 10 minutes looking for the bus stop for the 53 to the Old Kent Road (more walking – did I mention it was a warm day? Well, by then it was hot).

The 53 takes so long getting through the traffic, it actually seems to be going backwards. So instead of getting off at the Old Kent Road for a bus over Tower Bridge that would connect me with a Routemaster to Trafalgar Square and an Underground train to Kings Cross and thus home to change my socks, I decided to stay on until we got to Westminster and proceed directly to Kings Cross passing neither jail nor Go!

I was looking forward to the Routemaster and the crossing of Tower Bridge, so I'll have complete this part of the journey next week. I'm aiming to spend at least a day looking at transport in the capital anyway but at present I am speeding home to Tyneside by rail so I can spend the week-end washing my socks and generally being cosseted by my family (if they still remember me).

I may blog a few reflections over the week-end, of course, but the journey re-starts in earnest next Wednesday (27 May 2010).

See you then....

The Road Turns North

2010-05-20T13:15:00.001-07:00

DAY SEVEN:

Today was always meant to be a travelling day to get me from the South Coast of England, which has been pretty much the basis of my journey so far, to the outskirts of London where a whole new story about public transport starts to unfold. But, of course, it wasn't as simple as that.

Today's travels started outside of Brighton's joyously insane Royal Pavilion where I caught the bus to Tunbridge Wells, after waiting in the sun at one of a number of what appeared to be art deco-style bus shelters dating from the 1930's. They are amazing and strangley uplifting structures, which only goes to show that in Brighton there are surprises around every corner!

I had already decided that I wanted to visit Tunbridge Wells, which in cultural terms is the very acme of conservatism (with a small 'c') and the home of that newspaper letter's page cliché, "Angry of Tunbridge Wells". And the reason I wanted to visit was because of the town's erstwhile stage coach and a certain delicious irony attached to its name.

During the 1700's, most large towns had their own stage coach which would take passengers – usually well-heeled passengers – up to London. In turn, the coaches brought news from the Capital and thereby almost by accident became responsible for disseminating the news of the day from the city, from government and the Crown, to the rest of the country. It wasn't long before the stage coach operators started to give themselves imposing names like 'Telegraph' and 'Herald' and 'Star', names which they felt reflected their new-found importance and which helped to give their services a certain style.

Later, when the publication of newspapers became more widespread and people developed the habit of taking a paper, their editors and publishers looked around for titles which would give them the necessary gravitas - and most looked no further than their nearest coaching inn, where stage coach names had already become synonymous with delivering the latest news. Hence the profusion of Argus's and Telegraphs's and Herald's and the like.

Now back to Tunbridge Wells. Given its undoubted conservatism, it's as unlikely a place you can imagine to have an association with the Communist Party of Great Britain, yet I've discovered one and it's all thanks to the name of its former stage coach to London. This coach was called The Morning Star, which is also the name with the Communist Party's own newspaper. I suspect this might have been the only occasion on which The Morning Star was actually welcomed into Tunbridge Wells!

From Tunbridge Wells I journeyed across an area of South East England called The Weald, which was somewhere I knew little about. I was genuinely astonished by the beauty not just of the landscape – mature trees and well-tended farmland as far as the eye could see – but of the towns and villages we passed through.

This is archetypal English country landscape which I assumed was little more than a rose-tinted myth but, as a result of today's travels, I'm now going to have to completely reappraise my opinion of those flag-waving, stiff upper lip war films of the 1940's and 1950's which I had thought painted an idealised picture of Britain - cricket on the green, ivy-covered pubs, roses around the cottage windows, that kind of thing. Now I find they clearly didn't - they simply painted a picture of The Weald. And its still there...

My journey brought me to Crawley and thence to Horsham and Guildford before I made the final leg of today's journey to Leatherhead. All told, it's been a lot more interesting and much more enjoyable than I had been expecting, so it wasn't just a matter of putting the miles in, today was definitely a bonus.

Tomorrow will see me looking for a way into London (this part of the trip is mostly unplanned) where I hope to have an appointment with a tram, travel over one of London's iconic landmarks in the wheel tracks of a bus driver-cum-Evel Kenevil, and travel on London's favourite bus, the Routemaster.

Floating On Air... and Definitely In The Pink

2010-05-19T10:55:00.001-07:00

DAY SIX:

I'd popped out last night to check out my means of leaving the Isle of Wight in the morning – at the hovercraft terminal just next to the pier at Ryde.

I can't tell you how excited I was at the prospect of a trip on a hovercraft. I'd assumed that these amazing machines had been consigned to history until I began researching possible routes for my end to end trip. All of the cross channel services had disappeared in the 1970's and whilst I knew that the armed forces still use a military version, I'd assumed that was it.

But no – here they were, still providing a regular ferry services across the Solent between Ryde and Southsea. I simply had to try one...

Boarding a hovercraft is a little like boarding an aircraft. They even talk about hovercraft 'flights' rather than crossings, there is a departure lounge procedure to go through with bar-coded boarding passes though fortunately no security, and the interior of a hovercraft looks very much like a wide-bodied aircraft – right down to the aircraft-style seats (but no seat belts).

Feeling the craft physically rise up of the concrete apron as the engines revved, and then gradually start to disappear backwards and sideways onto the beach was a bizarre experience. And then we were off, gathering speed over the beach until we were absolutely hurtling towards the sea.

In no time at all (well, about ten minutes actually) we were in Southsea under bright sun and clear powder blue skies, and my first ever journey on what must be one of the most unusual and unique forms of public transport was over. I was so moved by the experience, however, that I sat on the beach in the warm morning sun next to the terminal and watched the 'Solent Express' disappear back over the Solent with more passengers. It was such a startling sight that just couldn't tear myself away, so I watched it come back again, too!

Fortunately, it was but a short step from the hovercraft terminal to the bus stop for the 700 Coastliner service. This service runs all the way from Southsea, into Portsmouth and Chichester and along the coast to Brighton. The first stretch to Chichester was through lush open farmland fringed with elms and poplars and with clear views of the Downs beyond – a classic English landscape.

I got off at Chichester to find a bit of lunch and have a walk around this attractive little town (or is it a city? Certainly, it has a cathedral). In fact it has a lot more than a cathedral as there is a whole complex of religious buildings around it – Deanery, Treasurers House, a row of priests' houses and much else besides. The shopping centre around the cathedral has a delicious country town feel to it which I rather enjoyed and I could have spent much longer there. But the road, as they say, goes ever on...

I'd hoped to be able to see the sea on much of journey to Brighton, but in fact I had to wait until the bus reached Worthing for my first glimpse of the English Channel. The beach here runs close to the road and frequently is only divided from it by shingle bars, lines of fishing boats and neat rows of beach huts.

Past Shoreham and its busy harbour and docks then on to Hove, another picturesque seaside town and one which appears to morph seamlessly into Brighton, where my journey ended.

The whole journey by Coastliner takes around three and a half hours, and with a Day Rover ticket you can get off and on as many times as you choose, which for only £7.30 seems to me rather good value.

Brighton is bright, busy and brash and there's clearly something here for everyone. Last time I visited I'd just completed the London to Brighton Cycle Ride, so I'm looking forward to being able to take a look around whilst not being absolutely fagged out!

Brighton, of course, has a flourishing gay scene which certainly accounts for some of its liveliness. It has a Gay Quarter where most of the city's gay pubs, gay nightclubs and hotels are based. And where my hotel is based - right slap in the middle of it.

Of course, their website said nothing about it being bang in the middle of the pink quarter, did it..!

So Far, So Good...

2010-05-19T00:28:00.001-07:00

It's now Wednesday 19^th May and I am just about to undertake the sixth day of my journey. And with five days of travel behind me, I've been reflecting on my journey and consider how it has gone and what I have learnt so far.

In five days I have travelled all the way from Land's End to Ryde on the Isle of Wight. I have made a total of 17 bus journeys, two of them open-top, four by minibus and another four by fairly elderly double decker. I have travelled on two ferries (one of them whilst still sitting on a bus), on a former commuter train which I thought had been scrapped long ago – and which by the end of this week will be - and on a refurbished London Underground train.

And all things considered ,it's a case of so far, so good. All the buses I have taken have turned up pretty much on time – except one which didn't turn up at all, forcing me to wait more than an hour for the next one. Generally, I haven't had to wait for ages at bus stops and that's a lot better than I expected.

Bus drivers have, on the whole, been friendly and genuinely helpful, and from my vantage point at the top deck of a bus – open top or not – I have privileged to witness some tremendous views and a lot of truly stunning scenery that I would never have encountered behind the wheel of a car.

I feel rested and relaxed and I'm beginning to wonder why more people don't do this.

However, having now passed through four counties, and having just passed the night on the Isle of Wight, I'm preparing to make the short voyage back to the mainland in some trepidation.

I'm heading for Portsmouth now and then travelling onwards to Brighton and things, I suspect, are going to change because I am starting to travel through much more heavily-populated areas. More people means more cars, more congestion, more out-of-town shopping centres. More importantly, more cars could mean more delays caused by traffic congestion, and therefore longer waits at the bus stop.

So, will it all become a lot more difficult from now on?

Well, we'll see....

I've Got A Ticket to Ryde

2010-05-18T13:22:00.001-07:00

DAY FIVE:

I stayed in a rather lovely – and, apparently, famously haunted – 17^th century coaching inn in Lymington last night. But before turning in, and after easing down a rather fine curry, I thought it would be a good idea to walk to the Isle of Wight ferry landing to see how long a walk I would have in the morning.

I eventually arrived at the pier and it was already apparent that the walk would take a good 20 minutes which, with a heavy backpack, would be no small undertaking. Fortunately, it was at this point that a train pulled into the hitherto unspotted railway platform alongside the ferry terminal. I'd passed the main Lymington town station on my way from the restaurant but assumed it was a terminus – but it patently wasn't, the pier was the real end of the line.

What really caught my eye, though, was the type of train that pulled in – it was one of those old slam-door types I myself (along with millions of South East commuters) had used in the 1970's when travelling between Waterloo and Godalming in Surrey. As these trains were now more than 50 years old, I'd assumed they had all been scrapped long ago, but here they were. And when I looked properly, I noticed a poster on the platform saying that this was they're last week in service.

Well, could I resist one last ride on a train loved and loathed in equal measure by millions of City gents? What do you think...

So, yes, I caught the train for the 60 second journey from Lymington to Lymington Quay where I embarked (that's naval term, apparently) for the short crossing to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight. Fantastic. I love ferry journeys. They're such an event, people throwing ropes, ringing bells, it's all so theatrical. And the fresh air is good, too.

After arriving, it was quickly onwards to The Needles by open-top bus where I spent hours just lounging in the sun and admiring the views. Then it was back to Yarmouth and on to Newport to the Isle of Wight bus museum - my first such museum of the trip.

In my experience, which admittedly is not extensive, I find you can always rely on bus museum folk to be friendly and aproachable, and this museum is definitely no exception. Though small, it has an interesting collection of vehicles with many more to call on for open days and the like.

It's future is uncertain, however. Leased from the local council, the building – it's a shed, really - is in a prime quayside redevelopment area and the museum believes its only a question of time before the Council decides to decline to renew it's lease. However, finding somewhere else, with a purpose-built structure close to the island's preserved steam railway being the favoured option, is not without its problems, not least from the planning point of view.

These are good people and I hope they are successful and that everything eventually works out. In the meantime, pay them a visit and swell their coffers a bit – I have a feeling they are going to need every last penny.

Back on the bus, this time to Shanklin on the souh coast of the island. I wasn't going for a paddle, though.

I was always going to include the Island Line in my journey because it is local public transport and not part of a national network and therefore fair game. But more importantly, I wanted to ride the Island Line because it is a piece of living history.

To those who don't know, the island's regular railway system which runs from Shanklin to Ryde Pier is operated using former Underground trains dating from 1938. That's right, since before the war.

Think of all those black and white photos of people sheltering from the Blitz, sleeping on the platforms of Underground stations whilst the trains passed by a few inches from their heads. Well, these were the trains that were doing the passing. In the blackout. With Nazi bombs going off overhead. And it was one of those very trains that carried me to tonight's overnight stay in Ryde, in perfect comfort and without breaking down.

To my reckoning, these lovely old trains have been in almost continual service for more than 70 years – now, that's got to be some kind of record.

The only buses hereabouts that are anywhere near that age are probably in the Isle of Wight Bus Museum...

Blue Skies, Blue Waves, Blue Rinses

2010-05-17T13:25:00.001-07:00

DAY FOUR:

The weather in Weymouth was so beautiful this morning that I should have expected to see a few more people on the bus. In the event, I was lucky simply to get on.

When I got to my bus stand after a swift look around the harbour and backstreets of Weymouth, I was greeted with a lengthy crocodile of pensioners all along the pavement and across the seafront - and they were all heading my way. Still, I managed to squeeze onto the X53 and found a seat on the top deck (those steps really sorted the youthful from the not-so-youthful) and, in a gentle haze of camphorated oil and lily-of-the-valley, we set off.

I was bound for the historic town of Wareham, but I didn't have time to check it out because I had an onward connection to Swanage to make. This route – service no. 40 – was stunning. We sped out of Wareham and soon found ourselves staring that the gaunt ruins of Corfe Castle. Impressive stuff, but what was even more impressive was the village which appeared from behind it. Each building was crafted out of honey-colour stone, with Yorkshire Dales-like stone roofs, giving the effect of the village being some kind of idealistic to-good-to-be-true film set. You know, the kind of place Hollywood executives think we all live in. But this was for real and, yet again, I found myself quickly running out of superlatives.

The steep climb out of Corfe Castle offered stunning views back at the but I'd already run out of superlatives by this time so I just moaned gently. Didn't half give the old lady sitting next to me a fright...

Then we were down into Swanage, a bustling seaside town with its own preserved railway and, of course, its own preserved railway station (how lucky can some towns get). I changed to the service 50 – the so-called Purbeck Flyer – and we climbed out of Swanage and down to the open healthland of Studland and onto the narrow neck of Poole Harbour and the Sandbacks Ferry which plies it.

The ferry works in quite a smart way. It doesn't have propellers or anything, it simply drags itself through the water on chains which are attached to each bank, but that's not the weird thing about it. What is really weird is sitting in a double decker bus and watching powerboats and sailing dingys floating past the windscreen. Couldn't get used to that...

We were soon in Bournemouth, which at first I hated but then I discovered that it is possible to nip down away from all the shops into the bourne, or chine... you know, the grassy bit with the steam that runs through the centre of Bournemouth, and walk a few minutes past neat flower beds and blossom-laden trees and find yourself suddenly and unexpectedly on Bournemouth Pier, with miles of golden beach disappearing to left and right. Neat!

I resisted the urge to paddle (just) but had a quick play on the beach for old time's sake.

The X12 took me to Lymington at the foot of the New Forest and it turned out to be a pretty dismal journey, past cruelly expensive beachside villas looking for all the world like beached ocean liners, and street after street of wannabe detached homes which you just knew were expensive but which I couldn't find anything in them to like. It was all so competitive, so conservative, characterless, complacent. I tell you, if I ever upset the Big Guy and he decides to send me to hell to punish me, I reckon this is where he'll send me.

Lymington is... (sorry, had another superlative failure there) and what made it even better was the fact that the bus station was right opposite my hotel, which is an 18th century inn. I was so pleased, I marched straight up to reception and promptly ordered a pint of Ringwood Bitter and applied it orally. Well, what better way to end a day.

Actually, there is a better way. Sorry, I didn't mean to, honest, but somehow I found myself in an Indian restaurant. So I had a curry. Oh, bliss...

Coast and Moorland

2010-05-16T23:23:00.001-07:00

DAY THREE:

I only made two bus journeys today, but they were both long ones – from Plymouth over Dartmoor to Exeter, and from Exeter to Weymouth along the Jurassic Coast of Dorset - so in fact they took up most of the day.

The day started badly, however – as, frankly, any day would if it started at Bretonside bus station in Plymouth. This subterranean drain, which some architectural basket case decided to build underneath the main road into Plymouth's joyous central shopping area, must rank as one of the most unpleasant, dank, and downright awful bus interchanges in the UK. Grotesque just doesn't do it. It is elaborately and mysteriously fluid-stained, it feels positively dangerous even in daylight and I just couldn't wait to leave.

Unfortunately, I had to wait because the bus, despite actually starting at Bretonside and not being delayed by previous passengers and traffic en route – and this was early on a Sunday morning, after all - was late in arriving. No reason was given and I assumed the driver was just as reluctant to be there as his passengers - and frankly who could blame him.

We made excellent time, however, and were soon up on the slopes of Dartmoor in wide open moorland (apparently, as we were actually in a heavy fog at the time). The fog began to clear the higher we climbed onto Dartmoor, however, eventually revealing that classic landscape of rocky tors and wiry moorland grass interspersed with groups of damp Dartmoor ponies.

Overall, the views from the bus were just stupendous – and if it had been a double decker they would have been even better (First Bus, please note). There was a lot of scenery to enjoy before we left the moorland heights and began the long, woody decent into Exeter.

I could happily live in Exeter. It's a fine, clean, attractive and well-ordered city which I found difficult not to like. I kept coming across ruined churches in the city centre, however, so perhaps it's a little more dark and boisterous than it seems...

The X53 from Exeter Bus Station (which is definitely not a drain) took me on the long run along the Jurassic Coast of East Devon and Dorset - so called because of the wealth of seriously big and important fossils this coastline has produced over the last 150 years or so.

You don't have to be a transport enthusiast to enjoy this journey. Freed of the responsibility of driving (or navigating) I was free to just take it all in, and it was just as well. Every single village we passed through today – Lyne Regis, Seaton, Bridport, Abbotsbury – was insanely and elaborately picturesque. I mean, real jaw-dropping, gasp out loud gorgeous, chocolate box stuff,with a picture post card around every single corner. It's incredible. How can one area of the country get to have so much obvious beauty in such a small area? Doesn't seem fair, somehow.

As a result, today's journey on the X53 was an absolute treat, despite the misty grey weather. What must it be like on a sunny day? Pretty amazing, I'd think.

But if it's amazing you want, then that first view of the extraordinary seven-mile long Chesil Beach from high, high above Abbotsbury could leave you utterly speechless. It's stunning, viewed from such a height it's just like an aerial photograph - and I think this view alone is probably worth the price of the bus ticket.

Eventually, more than three hours and no less than three driver changes later, the bus pulls onto Weymouth's elegant Georgian seafront. It's been a breath-taking trip today, but the West Country is disappearing behind me now and frankly I'm sad to see it go.

Tomorrow I set sail across Poole Harbour on an open-top bus... and I think I forgot to pack my wellies. Oh, well....

A Tale of Two Cities

2010-05-15T12:44:00.001-07:00

DAY TWO:

Almost anywhere looks better on a bright sunny morning, but I don't thinh it was simply today's weather that made Truro look so pretty. This is in every sense a perfect little city of cobbled streets and fine old buildings dressed in pale warm granite. There's a host of crooked ways and its easy – and rewarding - to get lost among them. I did, and I loved it.

There's a fine old Brunel railway station up the hill, of course, but for me the architectural top dog has to be the cathedral, which manages to look both cool and simple and exquisitely decorative at the same time. Worth a peek inside, too.

But I didn't have time to wait around – I had a bus to catch and I was all too soon on the road to Newquay, which is on Cornwall's Atlantic coast. The journey there, by double decker (guess where I was sitting – that's right, on top at the front), was along Cornwall's by now familiar narrow country lanes, but this time the landscape had more of a downland feel to it with soft rounded hills and huge airy skies. There were very few trees and those that were had that withered wind-blown look that spoke of Atlantic gales that blew for 12 months of the year.

Newquay must have been quite grand during Victorian and Edwardian times but like many such seaside resorts along Britain's coast has fallen on harder times since. It's still a-buzz with activity, though, thanks to a youthful surfer crowd who now swarm over this coastline and who are catered for by the dozens of brash and noisy bars which have recently sprung up. That this youthful influx is not always a happy state of affairs for local residents - despite the much-needed income they clearly bring to the town - is evidenced by signs in some shop doorways informing people that "this is not a toilet" and that CCTV cameras are being trained on them.

Newquay was followed by a spectacular run up the coast to the once-pretty village of Padstow – a place now so full of tourists that it difficult to see much pretty in it any more. The setting is wonderful, of course, a cluster of shops and bars around an old harbour with a warren of pictureseque narrow streets behind.

But there are two centres to Padstow now – the harbour, and the renowned TV chef Rick Stein's own fish and chip shop which is based in a strikingly modern building a little further along the quay. On a bright and sunny day like today, the crowds are split equally between those who are in and around Rick's chippie and are eating fish and chips as if the cod is about to become extinct (which, of course, it is), and those who have already eaten their fish and chips and are now strolling contentedly around the harbour. Leaving Padstow was something of a relief, I'm afraid to say.

Onwards then to Bodmin where I take yet another of my now customary strolls around the town whilst waiting for a connection. Here were all the features of a fine Cornish town – higgledy piggledy narrow streets, stately granite buildings, cunning little back lanes – but the presence of empty shops and numerous 'To Let' signs (which I'd seen very few of so far) suggested that Bodmin was feeling the wearing effects of the recession rather more than other towns, and was showing them.

I got off in the centre of Plymouth, the second city of my travels today, and I immediately felling love with the place. Personally, I blame the Germans.

Even by wartime standards, Plymouth had a hard war. Thanks to the proximity of the Devonport naval dockyards, the city took a right old clobbering from the Nazis during World War Two, with the result that there wasn't much of the city centre that was still standing by 1945 (apart from the medieval Barbican area which miraculously survived and which is a joy to behold). So after the war the city fathers set about re-building the city centre in the mode of the modern-thinking but essentially pre-war trained 1950's, with the result that Plymouth now boasts a grand and elegant central shopping centre joyfully crafted from that most dignified of building material, pale Portland stone. It is a joy. And it's clearly commercially successful.

It will be difficult to leave tomorrow, but the road leads me ever onwards - to Dartmoor and the Jurassic Coast of Dorset. Unfortunately, it will rain - but at least it might lend yet more character to Dartmoor's misty wastes!

Here We Go....

2010-05-14T23:45:00.001-07:00

DAY ONE:

At last, after all the months of planning, the trip is underway. And appropriately enough, the first bus journey of the whole End to End thing, indeed the first leg of the trip, was carried out in a bus operated by First (see picture). Well, who else!

I strongly suspect I tasted what will prove to be the two major aspects of rural bus travel in Britain today. One of them, the other less good.

The good bit was my enjoyment of the spectacular journey from Land's End to Penzance at the capable hands of Jason, our fearless driver. The scenery was superb – soft, lush and wind-blown - but it was made doubly so by the fact that it wasn't me who was driving so I was free to take in the view. And, just as importantly, I was on the top deck of a double decker which meant that unlike someone in the passenger seat of a car I could easily see over Cornwall's customary high hedges.

At the front of the top deck I was also in roughly the same airspace occupied by birds such as swallows and finches, so I sometimes felt that I was flying along not only with them but actually amongst them, which was rather nice. They seemed to be enjoying it as much as I was!

Equally splendid airy ride from Penzance to Helston, but then the downside of rural bus services became painfully apparent.

I was aiming to take a bus from Helston to The Lizard and had planned accordingly. Unfortunately, and unknown to me, the bus companies had in the past few weeks changed, which meant that the service I was looking for no longer ran. Fortunately, a competitor (Western Greyhound) had taken over the route but left later so I ended up with a longer wait at the bus stop than I bargained on. And when the bus came, of course, I couldn't use my previously purchased First day rover ticket and had to buy another.

But it was the journey back to Helston that proved to be the real nightmare. Despite bursting several blood vessels and tearing muscles and ligaments a-plenty ensuring I was back at the bus shelter in time for the return leg, I found myself waiting for an hour and a quarter anyway because the bus simply didn't turn up. All of which made me an hour and a bit late for my onward connection to Truro where I am presently staying.

Still, I find that the minor frustrations of the day can be effectively cured with curry, so proceeded to apply said remedy the help of a rather splendid Nepalese curry at one of Truro's numerous restaurants, the Kathmandu Palace.

So, what have I learnt? Well, it seems that buses cannot always be relied upon (which I suspected all along but didn't expect to fall victim of such so quickly!)

I have a feeling that I'm going to have to get used to this sort of thing...

The End

2010-05-13T13:00:00.001-07:00

Well, it's taken the best part of a day to get here, but at last I am at the start – Land's End.

Actually ,it was a pretty easy journey. The flight from Newcastle to Exeter was smooth and without incident, though nobody can make the whole process of flying anything less than ghastly. Getting through security, even for an internal flight, is excruciatingly stressful though at least I did not have to take my shoes off to prove that I wasn't carrying gelignite in my socks.

Airports themselves are pretty chilling, soul-less places at the best of times – with all that waiting around, the constant warnings over the PA about unattended baggage and the crazy security, its no surpriose there's a tangible unseen terror pervading everything. Frankly, airports often seem to be a bit like a shopping mall crossed with an operating theatre.

Compared to the stresses of flying, catching the bus into Exeter was a piece of cake. As was catching the train to Penzance – a much more pleasant way to travel. Stunning views as the track clings to cliff before plunging deep into the low rolling hills of Cornwall.

Penzance is an attractive little town set against an enviable ocean backdrop. It is a town of small shops, and all the richer for it. Yes, the big High Street chains are here, but they are constricted by the generally small size of the buildings themselves and therefore there is plenty of room left for smaller shops to succeed. And succeed they do, it seems.

The bus station is on the harbour side and passengers wait beneath white tented canopies which look appropriately like sails. Nice touch, I thought. One slightly worrying feature, however, was the length of time I had to wait for my bus to Land's End – about an hour and a half! When it came, though, I was delighted to find it was an open-topper so everyone trooped upstairs and we all enjoyed an exhilarating, sun-blest and wind-blown ride to Land's End.

Land's End itself is in every sense a visitor centre (ker-ching...) with amusements (ker-ching...), Ye Olde Pasty Shoppes (ker-ching) and about a dozen other ways for you pointlessly spend your money. It's a sort of smaller, less fun-packed Blackpool but with fewer lights.

I'm staying at the Land's End Hotel, which is rather smart and has a fabulous dining room looking out over the cliffs. I bathed during my meal in a rather wonderful sunset with finished the day off better than a malt whisky (though only just).

Tomorrow, I'm going home... though it may take a little while!

Look, You Don't Know Me But...

2010-05-10T06:46:00.000-07:00

I'm one of millions of people who travel to work each day on a crowded bus or train. I then spend most of my working day in a busy office filled with ringing phones and with people, lots of people, most of whom I know quite well and quite a number I'd count as friends. At lunchtime, I'll usually go shopping, dipping in and out of the crowds to buy food or a paper, or take yet another roll of my son's colour film in for processing.

And, when the working day is done, I clamber back onto my crowded bus or train and head for home, which for me is a modest house filled (in no particular order) with young adults, their friends, a particularly waggity-tailed dog who adores me, a wife who used to adore me and probably still does providing I don't forget to put my shoes away or leave my jacket over the back of the sofa, and with sundry rabbits and guinea pigs who don't adore anyone but are content to be treated as pets by anyone who is happy to feed them.

You see, there's always something going on. Questions to be answered, homework to be checked, issues of the day to be discussed and, inevitably, new 'things' to be costed and payments to be agreed. Tickets to order, bills to be paid, diaries to be coordinated. Frankly, there's hardly time to sleep...

But then this slightly mad end-to-end trip of mine comes along (in 4 days time, actually) and it all changes. Home will be the same, of course - a little quieter, perhaps, fewer shoes in the middle of the room - but I won't be. I'll be completely on my own, going where I want to go, eating what I want when I want, making my own decisions, and almost all of them decisions which will effect nobody else but me.

So I'll be alone. Independent, probably for the first time since I was a student. Utterly free. Free as a bird.

That's good, then...

Except - what happens when I see something truly amazing, a fabulously beautiful view perhaps, or an especially mad garden filled with fluorescent concrete gnomes and stuff, and I find myself turning around and involuntarily uttering those four little words "Cor, look at that!"... and there's nobody there to share it with?

When you are around people a lot (and in my house, that's pretty much a given) you can't help but get used to sharing things. Not just the customary viral infections and socks and under garments and stuff, but real things like thoughts and reactions, opinions and ideas, the sort of thing which can make even the simplest concept - like, exactly who's turn is it to clear the table - the subject of a long, explorative, detailed and frequently heated debate.

But its more than that. It's interaction, its chat, its contact and ultimately its the glue that holds us as a family together. It's mostly good-natured, and entirely natural.

Once I leave the family behind, though, and I head off alone for the furthest bus stops of Britain, it's all going to be very, very different.

To begin with, I doubt I will ever have spent so long without seeing someone I know. It occurred to me a while ago that I'm extremely unlikely to encounter anyone during my 29 day trip that I am presently or previously acquainted with, and that's just a little bit unsettling. Being constantly surrounded by strangers instead of friends will be a bizarre experience, and its not one I am especially looking forward to.

So, as a defence against that, I'm having to develop the skills - and quickly - of initiating conversation with complete strangers without alarming them or they immediately assuming that I am a dangerous sociopath. I think I'm basically fairly affable and approachable, and as a journalist I'm used to asking questions, so perhaps I'm making more of this than is strictly necessary. But its all ever-so-slightly outside of my comfort zone. I just hope I never have to ask a stranger where I can buy a sharp knife, or weed killer...

Will I tire of my own company? Well, possibly. Generally, I consider myself to be sufficiently eccentric to keep myself amused most of the time, so I can only hope that other people will find me equally amusing and I therefore don't have too much of my own company to tire of.

Or I could just listen to my iPod, of course.

A Childhood Dream Re-Lived

2010-04-30T11:56:00.001-07:00

It used to be considered the ultimate children's travel accessory, the one thing that would make the longest and most boring journey bearable, and it was the gift which kept on giving long after a holiday was over.

I am alluding, of course, to the I-Spy books.

It was a few years ago now, but at one time no family holiday was complete without one of these tiny paperbacks to thumb through in the back of the car. Train journeys, ferry trips, visits to town or country, there was a book for almost every occasion, each one of them sufficient to turn any bored youngster into a rapt sharp-eyed observer.

And with points at stake, along with the promise of a commendation from Big Chief I-Spy himself if I managed to complete the book (which if memory serves used to be a gaudily-coloured goose feather), eyes were alert at all times in the hope of spotting that rare Victorian signpost, or bin lorry, or pub sign, or traffic cone, or Honey Buzzard...

Now, I have a confession to make. I've been worrying slightly about my ability to sustain my fullest attention on the journey in hand over 29 long days of travelling. Will I really find that much to look at, to think about and, ultimately, to write about? What if my attention begins to drift? What if, by the time I am taking my 40th or 50th bus journey, the hypnotic whine of the engine and the rythymic thud of the tyres begins to lull me to sleep? What if I miss something genuinely interesting?

I found what I think is the answer on Ebay of all places, after a fellow bus traveller used an illustration from an old copy of 'I-Spy Buses and Coaches' on his blog to illustrate some point about bus design. Suddenly it was clear. There's the answer, I thought. Buy a copy of 'I-Spy Buses' and not only relive a rather delightful bit of my childhood but also use the book as a kind of manual of bus travel, and let it ensure that my attention stays firmly rooted on modes of public transport at all times.

I had hoped for a vintage early 60's edition, but these are becoming quite collectible so they are not easy to get hold of, even on Ebay. However, I managed to find a 1992 edition of 'I-Spy Buses and Taxis' so that will have to do.

I have to admit to a certain frission of excitement when it dropped through the Lynn family letterbox. In fact, I've had to stop myself from immediately rushing out into the street in search of a Dennis Dominant with Alexander coachwork, or a Plaxton Supreme on a Leyland chassis...

Oh, happy days. And to think, I'll have a whole month to fill it in.

Hope I don't miss the scenery, though...

Join The Club!

2010-04-27T10:34:00.000-07:00

Heavens, it’s now only 17 days to blast off. So to celebrate I’ve decided to apply to join a rather exclusive club.

Now, I’m not really the kind of person who joins things, exclusive or not. All that cod official-ness, elections and minutes and chairmen and secretaries and things. I’m afraid I tend to side with that great American film comedian Groucho Marx who famously observed that he really didn’t want to belong to any club that would have him as a member.

But when I happened upon the 'Land’s End to John O’Groats Club', well I mean… how could I not?

The club is aimed squarely at that select band of travellers (me, in other words) who undertake to complete the journey between Britain’s two most distant destinations, to help them to broadcast and celebrate their achievement, to stimulate them a little, give them a little encouragement along the way. And, hopefully, to sell them the odd suitably logo-ed polo shirt or two.

Because whilst the LEJOG club sets out to celebrate the ‘whole end-to-end ethos’, which their website somewhat grandly contends is a part of our cultural history, and I have no reason to doubt it, the club’s officials are not beyond a little bit of harmless merchandising. Polo shirts, baseball caps, T shirts and fleeces, real stripped-down travelling togs, all proudly bearing the club logo, are available at prices to suit all pockets. Clothes to be worn with a certain amount of pride, and with the added bonus that everyone you encounter en route will immediately know that your are involved in that great undertaking, doing Britain’s longest journey.

But this is no scam. For just a £15 membership fee, you get a signed certificate fulsomely detailing your achievement, a year’s membership of the club, a privilege card entitling you and your immediate family to free parking and entry to all the exhibitions on the Land's End and John O'Groats’ sites, and an annual club newsletter. You also receive invitations to 2 club social events in June and November at the Land’s End Hotel, each offering the opportunity to catch up with, brag to and generally irritate fellow end to enders.

But it is their website which is the real glory. It's full of tales of daring-do on the high roads and by-roads, by bike, barrow and boot, with stories of real endeavour and stubborn endurance. All of which make my particular journey seem a bit, well… a bit nancy.

But do I care? Hell, no, not a jot. I know I'm only riding a bus (well, quite a lot of buses, actually) but I have few illusions about the geniune hardships I'm facing. Yes, its going to be buttock-aching, yes it will be mind-numbing at times, and yes, quite possibly totally infuriating. In the ranks of the end-to-enders, I believe I'll be able to hold my head up high, fix them with my steely gaze and utter those three little words - 'twenty nine days'.

Because most of the stories on their website are all about timed journeys - six days on a tractor, 32 hours on a bike, seven hours strapped to the under-carriage of a Tiger Moth, two weeks in a pram - but few will be as long, as painfully long perhaps, as mine. And that has to count for something.

To stand at litter-strewn, rain-lashed bus stops for hours on end waiting for buses that don't arrive, to sit on grubby buses for 29 whole days, to live on bus station pasties for a month ... hey, that's endurance, mush.

Who knows? Perhaps one day my own journey might rank among the tales of septuagenarian hang-gliders, fancy dress joggers and Formation "I'm Cycling Backwards for Charity" teams. Or even among those more humble end-to-enders whose own personal journeys are detailed on their website, all of whom I have no doubt have achieved their goal more quickly and, frankly, far more impressively than I ever could. I'd be happy to be part of that, which is what this club is really all about - sharing experiences, meeting new people, and enjoying a sense of fellowship.

Anyway, I’ve sent off my application, I’ve printed off a form which I’ll be asking the people I meet on the road to sign so that I can prove that I’ve actually made the journey, and I’m ready to go.

Might not bother with the polo shirt, though.

An Inconvenient Truth

2010-04-26T12:13:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s now only 18 days before I set off, and today I fulfilled a modest ambition.

Anyone who has read my previous blog entries will have seen what I had to say about Barnsley and the fact that it has long been a bus’s final – indeed, terminal - destination. Well, today I visited two of Barnsley’s finest scrap yards to see just what becomes of a bus when it’s reached the end of the road.

It was a fascinating experience. Poking about in a scrap yard is always fun, but I also got to meet a couple of people who make a living out of obliterating Olympians, trashing Titans and rendering Routemasters (they’re all names of buses, by the way). I’ll probably write about my experiences today more fully in the book I’m intending to write, but here’s a few of the headlines.

To begin with, I hadn’t realised that the engines and gearboxes of many of the buses sent for scrapping were removed and sold for refurbishment and, ultimately, export. These newly-refurbished power units used to be exported to Hong Kong, but now it’s more likely that they’ll see a few more years of service in Africa before they finally throw the towel in.

I hadn’t expected to see so many obviously very old buses in the yard, neither. Alongside the fairly modern double and single deckers were the occasional Bristol Lodekka, the remains of a couple of half-cab Leyland’s and about a dozen London Routemasters, many of them dating from the 50's and 60’s. Most had been scavenged to within an inch of their lives, but the yard owner hung on to the carcasses so that the steady stream of bus preservationists - well, trickle, really – could hunt out long obsolete, and therefore valuable, parts for their own vehicles.

I even got to meet someone who was doing just that, though in his case he wasn’t an amateur preservationist but a coach operator with his own fleet of vehicles. He’d found a couple of interior blinds which he was intending to use to replace damaged blinds in one of his 10 coaches – at a fraction of the cost of new off-the-shelf units from the manufacturer.

However, the most interesting, and in some respects the most disturbing, discovery of the day was in relation to my bladder. Or, more accurately, its endurance potential. Or lack of it.

It was all a bit unexpected. I dropped off my wife at work then, before setting off on the road to Barnsley, paid a much-needed visit to a nearby petrol station. But not for petrol, if you get my drift… the second of the day, as it happens (I hope you are keeping count).

Duly refreshed, I pressed on down the A1(M) but only got as far as Wetherby before nature called out loud and clearly once more. Quite nice services at Wetherby, I thought….

Onwards then to Barnsley, a couple of hours of visits, then back up the road to Durham to collect my wife at the end of her working day, calling in at Costa Coffee at Wetherby (did I mention how nice the services were..?) en route. However, by the time I got to Stanley, it was obvious that my bladder was once more demanding immediate attention and it wasn’t in a mood to be ignored. So I was forced to make a slightly surreptitious call to an Asda supermarket for Call No. 4.

All of which got me thinking about public toilets - or rather the lack of them.

It occurred to me that it’s probably quite feasible that I could spend a whole day, right from leaving my hotel in the morning to arriving at my destination that evening, without once being anywhere near a public toilet. No, really. Think about it – if someone was to ask you where the public conveniences are in your town, could you direct them? No? See what I mean?

I didn’t used to be this way, of course. There used to be loads of them. But then it all got a bit grubby, and in the end the people making most use of them appeared to be the sort of people you wouldn’t want anywhere near you when you yourself were actually using one. If you found one that wasn't trashed, or worse. Eventually, it dawned on local authorities that they don’t actually have a statutory duty to provide public toilets, so as a result most of them decided they had far better things to do with their money (a.k.a., our money) than repair unsavoury, murky and constantly-vandalised public urinals.

So, getting back to today’s unexpected bladder predicament, and here’s the really disturbing bit, if this kind of thing happens when I’m out on the road and find I need to go from A to B via several P’s, what on earth an I going to do?

Suddenly, this trip of mine doesn’t sound quite so simple….

As One Door Closes, Another One Slams in Your Face

2010-04-25T12:35:00.000-07:00

Only 19 days to go, and my efforts to get a well-rounded, all-embracing view of the public transport sector before I set off has hit a bit of a problem.

I thought it would be a good idea to take a closer look at today’s transport industry by taking a peek around a bus factory. I wanted to see how buses are actually built and get a better understanding of how manufacturers cater for the needs of the public transport industry. I had assumed, in all innocence, that manufacturers would relish the chance of a bit of free publicity but that patently hasn’t been the case.

The first manufacturer I asked – I’ll do them the courtesy of not naming them – refused me point blank, saying it was the not a good time for such a visit given that their workforce were a little restless and concerned about the future (and therefore, one, assumes their jobs).

The second manufacturer I called was even less encouraging, as the company’s Director of Communications declined even to take my call (actually, it was his slightly tweedy PA who informed me, after I informed her that he didn’t actually know me but that I'd hoped to correct that imminently, that ‘I’m sorry, he’s not taking calls at the moment’. Sniff.)

(Have you noticed how some people find it second nature to say sorry whilst sounding not in the least bit sorry? What would you call that, do you think - practiced insincerity?)

Anyway, Miss Jean Brodie-knickers helpfully offered me an email address as an alternative t and I duly sent off a polite and exploratory email. Since when, nothing. Zilch. Silence (or at least the email equivalent).

It's disappointing, but I suppose it’s understandable. All manufacturing industry practically without exception has been having a tough time since the banks decided to set fire to the economy. Yes, things didn’t get quite as bad as they did in the US and, yes, the resulting recession is probably over now, but it’s a long road back and its full of troublesome potholes (as indeed are the roads, but that’s another story).

The bus manufacturing industry is in a difficult position, and it was ever thus. People who build buses rely on bus operators to buy the buses they build - but if those operators are having a tough time financially, and in a recession they would be, then they will almost certainly be looking to make economies. And what more obvious way to economise than to hold off buying that new fleet of vehicles for a few months more just to see how things pan out?

The result is obvious - fewer new buses ordered, therefore quieter production lines and therefore growing disquiet in the factory canteen. The government has been trying to help to some extent by offering grants and inducements to encourage operators to invest in new, greener buses. But this alone won't solve the general industry-wide problem of lack of demand.

Buses are rarely available from stock. Size, make of engine, gearbox, seat configuration, colour - a bus is much too specific a product and too specialised to expect to be able to buy off-the-shelf. So if nobody is buying, then manufacturers aren't building.

In recent months, the local press in the areas where these companies have their factories have been full of stories about possible future job cuts, and one of organisations representing the motor industry, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, which tracks the ups and downs of the bus market, has been highlighting a cooling in customer demand for some time now, especially for the larger types of bus.

So perhaps it was the sight of near-silent assembly lines that the two manufacturers I approached didn’t want me to see. I hope not.

Buses Plural

2010-04-13T11:56:00.001-07:00

So what is the collective pronoun for a group of bus enthusiasts?

It's a serious question, and one that was prompted by a visit I made this week-end to the tree-lined lanes of Surrey.

I'd come down from Tyneside specifically to see the London Bus Preservation Trust's annual Spring Gathering, a popular event in the trust's calendar and one that usually sees a great many old London buses spruced up, rolled out and fired up for the day.

But this is more than just a rally for bus owners. Visitors (and there appeared to be many thousands of them) have the chance to actually ride on a wide range of vehicles to and from the trust's museum at Cobham, and they'll even collect you from the nearest railway station. Some of the vehicles were quite modern-ish and clearly recently 'in preservation', whereas others, and needless to say the ones that proved to be the most popular, were much, much older.

The show field itself was the former Wisley airfield and it was a veritable explosion of colour, though admittedly mostly red (these are London buses, after all) albeit with a fair sprinkling of green as befits the theme of this year's rally, the 80^th anniversary of the inauguration of Green Line buses.

I don't think I'd seen so many red Routemaster buses gathered together in one place at one time, an amazing sight which prompted the thought that that every aged and time-expired Routemaster withdrawn from service must have been immediately snapped up by enthusiastic private owners - with the result that there' was probably as many of them on the road now as there ever was!

There were many much older buses, too, and more recent ones. There were splendid old taxis and coaches, fire engines, motor bikes and lorries, plus a rather magnificent horse bus complete with proud team of horses and a top-hatted driver and groom. But I still couldn't help feeling there was something missing.

Eventually, it dawned on me what it was. It was information. If you didn't know what it was you were looking at and you couldn't interpret the fleet numbers and license plates, then you were stuck. Few of the owners had brought information boards telling the story of their vehicles, though a couple had helpfully sellotaped a sheet of descriptive type to the inside of a window but not nearly enough. And with almost 90% of the buses on show being red, and all of them being roughly the same size and shape, telling one from the other was not easy, and without the necessary knowledge to distinguish one from the other I was surprised to find myself becoming (dare I say it) slightly bored.

As Elvis Presley might have said, 'a little more interpretation, a little less traction...'.

Was I alone? Well.. yes, I think I was. The vast majority of people present appeared tooclearly know their stuff, so lack of information on the various exhibits was clearly not a problem. Demand for the items on sale in the sales area of the show – spare parts, books, videos and photographs, for the most part – was also vigorous, with a throng of eager and knowledgeable enthusiasts.

Knowledgeable - that pretty much sums it up. And that's why I confess I felt just a teeny bit out of it. All of which I think is a bit of a shame because the spectacle of so many fabulous old buses, and the chance to ride on them, indeed the whole organisation of what was a truly major event (which, by the way, was flawless) could have made this a grand day out for the whole family.

So - a Garage of Bus Enthusiasts? Or should it be a Knowledge of Bus Enthusiasts? Possibly.

However, with a little work and a little more focus, it could so easily be a Family of Bus Enthusiasts.

A Trip to the Cemetery

2010-04-08T12:56:00.001-07:00

Ask anyone with an avowed affection for old buses if the name 'Barnsley' has any particular meaning to them, and don't be surprised if they involuntarily shudder. If such is their reaction, then be gentle with them, apologise quietly, for you have inadvertently uttered a name all too redolent of nightmare and destruction, of anguish and missed opportunity, of death and dismal hopelessness.

This is nothing to do with Barnsley per se, you understand. The town itself is, as far as I know, a place of wide sparkling streets, contented locals and joy from morn till night. No, this is something more to do with its reputation as one of the nation's foremost transport slaughterhouses.

I can't put too fine a point on this. That's just what Barnsley is.

The phrase 'off to Barnsley' has become something of a byword in bus circles for a vehicle's very last journey – the journey to the knacker's yard, the terminus to end all terminuses... or termini. Or... no, it's term... erm...

Apparently, Barnsley folk have been cutting up and crushing old buses for donkey's years, so long in fact that they have become true experts in the art of dismembering double-deckers and turning them into something new and useful. On the outskirts of the town there are at least four scrapyards, all of them, bizarrely, next door to each other and all of them specialising in ridding the world of old, unwanted buses. From space, and indeed from Google Earth which I think is every bit as good and frankly a lot cheaper, it looks like a massive concentration camp, a veritable elephant's graveyard of buses.

But this is not butchery for butchery's sake, for heaven's sake. In the spirit of these more enlightened, greener and more environmentally-friendly days, when sustainability is all and recycling is king, these butcherers of buses play an important role in keeping other buses on the move. Roofs may be crushed, oil may be spilled, windows may be sundered into shards, but engines are carefully removed and re-used, gearboxes too, and much, much else besides. In fact anything which is patently not time-expired can easily find a new life on someone else's bus, and help smaller companies keep their older, more modest fleets on the road, greatly extending the life of perfectly good vehicles which would otherwise be too expensive to repair. And which would themselves end up in the scrapyard.

Such places are also the happy (and the not-so-happy) hunting ground for people who own and preserve old buses and struggle to get them, and keep them, on the road, and most of whom are also on fairly tight budgets - though at least one scrapyard has actually banned bus enthusiasts from their yard because of their all-too-often anguished reaction to the Bosch-like vision of hell that is presented to them, as well as their tiresome tendency to throw themselves in the path of the cranes and the gas axes and berate the yard staff with exclamations of 'butcher', 'murderer' and 'oh no, not the Leyland'. Some have even been known to nick the odd souvenir, which frankly in a scrapyard is something akin to shoplifting.

So clearly Barnsley is a place I will have to visit so I can experience for myself the end – or at least one end - of a bus's working life. To that end, I phoned a couple today and extremely nice and helpful they sounded, too. Not at all like murderers. Anyway, I have arranged to call in and have a rummage around in their yards for a while and I have to admit I'm rather looking forward to it.

I suppose I will also have to see if I can witness the birth of a bus, too. So that's next on my 'To Do' list....

A Sock in Time....

2010-03-28T12:07:00.000-07:00

I’m now only 47 days from setting off on my trip. The clocks have just gone forward, it's British Summer Time at last, the birds are singing with a little more purpose and volume, and frankly I can’t wait to get cracking.

Needless to say, with a month and a half still to go, I have already packed.

I should, in my defence, say that I unpacked immediately afterwards. Yes, I know that sounds just as nuts, but this was nothing more than a test pack to see what my bag – my carefully-selected bag, I should add – looked and felt like with enough clobber for the trip. It’s important that I take enough clothing for my needs, obviously, but it’s equally important not to take too much.

This is actually quite important. If was making the journey by car then I would probably take whatever I wanted, and then a bit more just to be sure. I'd take an extra jumper, for example, a smart jacket perhaps , spare shoes in case one pair gets wet, another spare (smarter) jacket, slippers perhaps, all if this on the basis that you never know what you might need until you find you haven’t got it. I’d probably pack a few books, too, and a couple of magazines, some portable snacks in case I get peckish. I’d probably leave the kitchen sink, but most other things deemed useful, or perhaps just possibly useful, would be chucked in the back of the car.

And that’s rather the point. None of this stuff I’d ever actually have to carry very far, except from the car park to the hotel room and back again. It doesn’t matter how big or how heavy any of this is, the car will scarcely notice it and so neither will you. But if you don’t have a car boot to fill and instead you are, like me, travelling by bus then it is you who will be taking the strain rather than the car. So reducing weight would seems quite a good idea.

The bag I have chosen becomes, with a few deft moves, a rucksack I can carry on my back. It’s therefore easy and comfortable to carry. Otherwise, it is fairly conventional looking bag of about 50 litres capacity, with a handle and a shoulder strap for variety. My trial packing has confirmed, as I hoped it would, that it is entirely adequate for 8 or 10 days of clothing, and a few bits and pieces like my netbook (which, incidently, I am using now for the first time) and camera.

I have deliberately chosen to go on my trip in early summer when, I hope, the weather will reduce my reliance on thick wooly jumpers and allow me to exist fairly happily with just T shirts and a few pairs of socks. At a pinch, I could rest the bag on my knees or under my seat without it getting in people’s way too much. Well, that’s the plan...

Everything seems to fit in the bag OK., so I suppose it’s probably the right size. In a few weeks time, we’ll know for sure!

Britain By Bus Part 3 – The Wild, Hilly Bit

2010-03-21T03:10:00.000-07:00

Suitably rested and with clean socks a-plenty, it’s back on the road on 14 June for the final part of the trip.

First I’m heading west up the Tyne Valley from Tyneside and along the line of Hadrian’s Wall all the way to Carlisle. From there, I’ll be heading over the border into Scotland en route to the capital of South West Scotland, Dumfries.

Day 24 will see me continuing my westward track through scenic Galloway all the way to the busy ferry port of Stranraer , then its northwards once more. I’ll be taking the coastal route up to Ayr, then taking the long run into Glasgow where I hope to squeeze a quick ride on the city’s unique underground railway – affectionately called ‘The Clockwork Orange’ – before turning in for the night.

Then it starts to get tricky. I’m hoping to visit Glasgow’s excellent Transport Museum before finding a way out of the city into the hills to the north. From there, I need to find a bus which will eventually take me to Stirling and then into the Trossach Hills at Callendar.

On Day 26 I’ll enter the Scottish Highlands properly, heading up to Killin in Perthshire before catching a Postbus to Tyndrum then a long distance bus to Fort William. Buses are so infrequent in these parts that I confidently expect to have plenty of time to sit and admire the view!

Next day, I’m heading by bus to Mallaig, hopefully catching a glimpse of the fantastic curved railway viaduct at Glenfinnan, made famous in recent years by the Harry Potter films. From Mallaig, its over the sea to Skye and a quick tour of the island before settling down for the night at the achingly-pretty waterfront town of Portree.

Day 28 is one I’m really looking forward to. Its back through Skye to the Skye Bridge at Kyle of Lochalsh, then along the shores of Loch Duich to Glen Sheil, up the glen and over the mountains to Loch Ness then along the lochside to Inverness – the whole trip through some of the finest scenery on Scotland. Magical!

Day 29 in the final day of the trip, and probably one of the longest in terms of mileage. From Inverness, I’ll be catching the bus all the way up the east coast of Northern Scotland to Wick and from there into the wilds of Caithness to my ultimate goal, John O’Groats.

It all seems a long way away… and it is!

But how will I cope with a whole month on a bus?