Statto
Established Member
I didn't realize the 362 Wigan - Chorley has gone over to Go North West, i thought Arriva would have kept hold of the route & transferred it to St Helens depot.
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TfGM Bus franchising
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Xenophon PCDGS
Veteran Member
When tranche 1 of the Bee Network was launched, did that organisation in its advance publicity make any mention of problems that might be encountered by shortage of drivers or by bus supply problems in the early weeks after the launch?
What year was it when that service ceased to be a Chorley to St Helens service.
Statto
Established Member
The Monday to Saturday service was split at Wigan in 1995, the Sunday service still ran through until 2006
Halwynd
Member
Many thanks!
I thought that was the one - there seem to be a few of those knocking about in Wigan - but having done a bit of digging I think I've worked out that whilst, as you say, it was an Enviro 200, the bus with the comfy red seats has come from GoAhead North East, the red/blue livery being a slightly different. I think I've been on the Morebus version too... if they have single blue seats on the offside that will be them. Sorry, my knowledge of buses isn't good at all, but I'm learning!
I've found a picture of one on Flickr:
Go North West Alexander Dennis Enviro 200MMC L5498 NK69 FBN
Explore josh83680's 28450 photos on Flickr!
www.flickr.com
Do you know whether these buses from other GoAhead divisions are just on loan or whether they are permanent transfers to the Bee Network?
Thanks again.
MasterSpenny
Member
The ex Go Ahead London buses are permanent: many have appeared in Bee Network livery. Here is 4025 as a Go North West bus (not my picture)
I believe there are some loaned buses, but not sure what ones
Bee Network Go North West Fleet list at https://bustimes.org/operators/bee-network-bngn/vehiclesMany thanks!
I thought that was the one - there seem to be a few of those knocking about in Wigan - but having done a bit of digging I think I've worked out that whilst, as you say, it was an Enviro 200, the bus with the comfy red seats has come from GoAhead North East, the red/blue livery being a slightly different. I think I've been on the Morebus version too... if they have single blue seats on the offside that will be them. Sorry, my knowledge of buses isn't good at all, but I'm learning!
I've found a picture of one on Flickr:
Go North West Alexander Dennis Enviro 200MMC L5498 NK69 FBN
Explore josh83680's 28450 photos on Flickr!
Do you know whether these buses from other GoAhead divisions are just on loan or whether they are permanent transfers to the Bee Network?
Thanks again.
Anything with an L is said to be a loan until Christmas / until more new E200MMC arrive 4101-13/38 in service with a total of 50 on order.
Some suggestions the exFirst Berkshire 44560/5 E200 now L4560/65 have been bought??
Halwynd
Member
The ex Go Ahead London buses are permanent: many have appeared in Bee Network livery. Here is 4025 as a Go North West bus (not my picture)
I believe there are some loaned buses, but not sure what ones
And as a Go Ahead London bus (again, not my photo)
That's great, I appreciate the information - many thanks to you both!
Do you think they might renumber some services, as the Bee Network now has two 8s and two 10s, which might cause confusion if they tweeted about delays on the 8. It wasn’t an issue when it was different operators
What numbers did the Wigan services have before they were renumbered into low numbers?
I also wonder if TfGM will revert Rosso’s renumbering of Rochdale and Bury locals, or leave them as they are
What numbers did the Wigan services have before they were renumbered into low numbers?
I also wonder if TfGM will revert Rosso’s renumbering of Rochdale and Bury locals, or leave them as they are
markymark2000
On Moderation
Current number - old number
1 - 631
2 - 632
3 - 621
4 - 628
5 - 625
6 - 626
7 - 540
8 - 598
9 - 658
10 - 600
10A- 601
Man of Kent
Member
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The tender documents reverted to three figure numbers.
SLTRegular
Member
The 598 was the 593 that missed out the estate in Hindley
I wish they had kept it but as Bolton Depot ran it, it had to switch over. I have to buy two tickets to get from Chorley to St Helens now and to be honest, the service is not reliable anymore, some of the buses they are using are too small. Passengers left behind at Chorley last Tuesday on Market day when it was a small Enviro 200MMC. The next one either didnt show or was twenty minutes late which left a gap of over half an hour.
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
What is different from before? Are timetables tighter? Or was this happening anyway but without publicity?
Statto
Established Member
The 362 was rarely reliable under Arriva, as Arriva interworked the 362 with the 575, & the roadworks on the Blackrod By Pass which have been ongoing all summer (i'm not sure if those roadworks have finished) did for reliability.
Leyland Bus
Member
There has been a large demonstration in the City Centre this afternoon/early evening with a couple of road closures and a mass police presence, which will undoubtedly have a knock on effect across the City and surrounding roads... Unless "Burnham", as you put it, plans to ban this sort of thing then I don't see how he or the Bee Network can "give it serious work" bar notices on social media etc
Notice now the weather's turned that
And the issues are not a one-off because of a demonstration. The Twitter feed for the Bee Network from day 1 has been full of comments from people saying buses didn't turn up for over an hour, went the wrong way, sailed past empty (with unhelpful replies 4 hours later from the social media team which all say "did you manage to board a service?" or "we'll pass that on to our team").
Having a live bus tracker app that just shows the location of the bus according to the published timetable instead of real time is unforgivable (and I strongly suspect would have been harder to program than showing an actual live position as someone must have written an algorithm to simulate the bus location!). Just that issue on its own has made people wait for buses that don't exist and there's no good reason for it.
If there aren't enough drivers and the contractors have to hire agency staff, or the controllers and managers didn't TUPE across when expected, tough. That is on Burnham. He wanted it, he's got it.
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On another note, I've noticed for the first time the new yellow livery looking distinctly tatty and dirty on the lower panels on a lot of buses the last couple of days. Obviously road dirt in wet weather is a thing, but the livery shows it up pretty badly!
Sauce for the Goose, etc. We're paying hundreds of millions of pounds for this service, which Mr Burnham is more than happy to attend photo-ops for, and allow his client journalists at the Guardian and Manchester Evening News to wrongly imply is a renationalisation. Previous problems with buses were all - apparently - due to evil Tory Brexit Gammon profiteering bus companies taking cash out of people's pockets and if you're going to spend shed loads of public money on making a service better, it ought to be better.
And the issues are not a one-off because of a demonstration. The Twitter feed for the Bee Network from day 1 has been full of comments from people saying buses didn't turn up for over an hour, went the wrong way, sailed past empty (with unhelpful replies 4 hours later from the social media team which all say "did you manage to board a service?" or "we'll pass that on to our team").
Having a live bus tracker app that just shows the location of the bus according to the published timetable instead of real time is unforgivable (and I strongly suspect would have been harder to program than showing an actual live position as someone must have written an algorithm to simulate the bus location!). Just that issue on its own has made people wait for buses that don't exist and there's no good reason for it.
If there aren't enough drivers and the contractors have to hire agency staff, or the controllers and managers didn't TUPE across when expected, tough. That is on Burnham. He wanted it, he's got it.
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On another note, I've noticed for the first time the new yellow livery looking distinctly tatty and dirty on the lower panels on a lot of buses the last couple of days. Obviously road dirt in wet weather is a thing, but the livery shows it up pretty badly!
I didn't know about the protest, but whether it's that, football, Christmas markets, general traffic congestion or the wrong type of snow being blamed today, the point is you can't have this fantastic publicly owned bus service if you are frequently unable to operate anything even slightly resembling the advertised service. If it's a one off maybe you can get away with a notice on social media, but this sort of disruption isn't a one off.
The city centre needs rethinking to improve bus speeds and resilience. Whatever form that takes, Burnham needs to have the guts to push it through. And if there is a reason they can see that nothing is going to get through I'd suggest they need to have somewhere in Salford to turn the buses round. Drivers running out of hours crawling to Piccadilly and then cancelling the outward journey is a total waste of time.
I notice the very first route change the Bee Network has made in the city centre has been to extend the number 8 back to Shudehill, after Diamond cut it back to Deansgate because their buses were just spending all their time stuck in traffic. Not really showing that they recognise the problem there.
markymark2000
On Moderation
Maybe their staff went to the same school of customer service as Arrivas team haha.
You can't just give a contract to basically a new company (based off GNW not running anything in these areas prior) and expect them to mobilise 300+ buses and what must be around 700+ staff. Any staff which have TUPE'd over will only know a very limited set of routes. Vantage drivers will only know Vantage, Arriva drivers will only know a couple of routes. Many drivers won't know the routes which were ran by Vision, I doubt many Wigan drivers would have known the 362. Combine that with buses doing random things, I don't know if it's one big mess of cross networking with buses or whether it's a case of new driver takes any bus that is in the bus station and no logic applied to keeping buses on routes, I really don't know but literally everything seems to interwork with eachother.
Manchester City Council doesn't want buses and that much is clear from their various masterplans and biased consultations that they keep pushing onto people including never ending plans to push buses out of the main city centre and they refuse to take action against private motorists. You only have to look at the Arndale Car Park which has been an issue for years. Manchester City Council has constantly refused to support local buses by not giving them sufficient layover spaces or enough road space for buses to operate reliably. I believe that all of the anti bus measures were a typical 'Labour against private bus companies' policy, I guess we will have to see if the attitude suddenly changes now that Labour also run the buses.
As for somewhere to turn buses in Salford, that exists, Pendlebury/Salford Shopping Centre or Salford Crescent (with the bus then looping underneath). The issue here though is that unlike London, buses aren't all set up with these short terminating points, there is insufficient layover spaces in these areas for the bus to wait before it's return trip. Most of the buses don't have announcement systems/next stop displays fitted yet so to short turn a bus would mean the driver leaving the cab to tell passengers. For anyone further up the route, I don't think that the real time systems would all talk to eachother yet to amend the destination (like TFL iBus tells the countdown screens if a bus is terminating early, I don't think that is in place in Manchester yet).
You have to remember, this is a half baked project. Burnham and TFGM don't give two stuffs about the passengers or the implications that this unreliability may be having, what matters to them is buses are now ran more by them, less by companies that they have zero control over. Burnhams Ego first, then worry about the passengers. Don't get these two mixed up.
You don't seriously expect these authorities to know where the traffic is. If only TFGM had been around for years and had central offices in Manchester and actively managed punctuality of the private operators for years and now suddenly punctuality doesn't matter.
HSTEd
Veteran Member
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- 16,959
I'm late to this conversation, but I live in Greater Manchester, outside the Franchise area....
And that's just how the buses in Manchester are?
Buses regularly ram up so close behind each other on Oxford Road that the driver in the rear can't see anyone signalling for the bus to stop.
Buses just go missing or run comically late, I've spent over an hour at a bus stop waiting for a 12 minute frequency bus on more than one occasion this year.
Diversion around the Curry Mile on Friday and Saturday nights changes its diversion route every few weeks without warning, which makes the buses almost impossible to use in that area.
Service wasn't great before Coronavirus, but now its appalling, and its not because Bee Network is running them, because they aren't.
Statto
Established Member
Wigan area routes were 5xx & 6xx series, Stagecoach changed the numbers in 2018
I doubt TfGM will renumber Rosso, Bury & Rochdale locals, think they'll leave them as they are considering the numbers are Bx & Rxx
Rosso routes in Bury and Rochdale have reverted to 4xx numbers in the franchise documents - not sure if there is a direct correlation as the routes have changed several times since Rosso numbered them into Bury Bolts and Rochdale Runners
AREA B 24 March 2024
Awarded to Stagecoach
Middleton Large 56 112 114 115 117 118 119 125 129 156 171 172 415 469
Oldham Large 17 18 57 59 81 82 83 84 180 181 182 183 184 348 350 402 403 409 411 425 426 558
Queens Road Large 1 2 3 33 41 52 53 67 90 93 94 95 97 98 100 135 149 475 477 480 487
Awarded to Diamond Oldham Small 151 159
Awarded to First: Rochdale A small 6 434 435 440 442 447 450 451 457 458 461 462
Rochdale B small 467 468
Bear in mind the contract documents went out using the network as it was in (December 2020?)
Hence in Area C it includes all the "Little Gem" network numbers which have largely changed / been withdrawn.
AREA C January 2025 Yet to be awarded
Hyde Road Large 15 38 42 42A 42B 42C 74 76 142 147 201 202 203 205 250 253 256 374
Sharston Large 43 50 85 86 101 102 111 143
Stockport Large 11 23 25 191 192 197 314 322 323 325 327 328 330 358 374 378 384
Tameside Large 7 216 217 219 221 230 231 237 336 346
Wythenshawe Large 18 19 150 245 247 263 281 282 284 286 287 313 368 370
Stockport Small 364 364 375
Tameside A Small 335 339 341 342 345 387 396
Tameside B Small 343 356
Trafford Small 44 84 254 260 261 262 280 288
Bletchleyite
Veteran Member
Does anyone know who's got the (1)4x, i.e. the Oxford Road services, and are they just a simple "carry on as now" tender or is there to be any innovation like pseudo tram style operation?
It seems like they've gone the other way with Wigan having its own low numbers - very surprising - London does these local networks with a prefix e.g. "W1".
It seems like they've gone the other way with Wigan having its own low numbers - very surprising - London does these local networks with a prefix e.g. "W1".
johncrossley
Established Member
It seems the plan is to carry on as normal to get the system up and running but in policy documents linked earlier in the thread they showed examples of possible network rationalisation in the future, using the Manchester to Bury corridor as the example.
Stagecoach renumbered the routes after they bought out First in Wigan and TfGM have simply kept most of the existing numbers.
The contract winners for operators for Area C bus routes have not yet been announced. Roues operating in Area C are not due to change until January 2025 and so the announcement is likely next March 2024 - giving 9 months notice for operators to implement their change plans for vehicles, drivers, depots etc
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decades ago they renumbered the Manchester No.8, it caused so much uproar from the public it was renumbered back.
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Surely the 17/18 are Queens Road rather than Oldham?
Okay folks, this is just a quick reminder that any posts regarding fleet additions, repaints into Bee livery, etc., should be posted here:
TfGM Bee Network - fleet updates (repaints etc.)
For those who maybe interested, 40764 is the latest repaint into Bee Network yellow at BN depot, with 40796 the next one in. Repaints are also starting at outside contractors from this week too.
www.railforums.co.uk
Leyland Bus
Member
This isn't helped by the fact that Rotala never looked after the bus washes at Bolton (both of which came from Crook Street some 20 years ago and were new several years prior to that garage closing in 2003) and is in the process of being assessed as to whether it would be better to replace it or overhaul it... Rotala also removed all the pressure washers from Bolton too.
Goldfish62
Established Member
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- 10,185
I've heard a lot of stuff about what Rotala did at Bolton before they left.... Little wonder GSW got off to a shaky start.
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