tbtc
Veteran Member
IMHO there's an interesting contrast between the way trains are viewed on the forum and buses/coaches.
For example, I grew up in a town on the CityLink network (with direct services to England) - there's not been any CityLink services for a generation now, and the local bus operator provides a more frequent coach service than in my youth (albeit not to quite such exotic locations) - but this seems to suit the vast majority of people. That's generally the approach I favour - public transport providing reliable/frequent services to the nearest big cities with connections available there (rather than the tokenistic stuff).
It seems that this is in line with other posters on here (witness the calls for routes like the X43 to Burnley or the Coastliner to Scarborough to be used as valid connections)
But with rail, there's an obsession with through services, connections apparently can't be trusted, passengers don't like to change, we must cram lots of services through bottlenecks because we insist on direct trains etc etc.
People on here say that it's vitally important that we provide public transport to various rural villages/ small towns, but National Express cut back services and abandon some larger places and there's pretty much silence - for all that "Workington Man" was apparently the "hero" of the recent General Election (and people pretended to care about these "left behind" towns), the West Cumbrian town can lose its only public transport to the world outside Cumbria and there's no fuss made - yet a thread about cutting the trains to somewhere insignificant like Breich will have hundreds of people demand that this "vital" service be retained.
Maybe the "bus" side of the forum is just a lot more realistic about the wider world, but if people *genuinely* cared about the "left behind" towns beyond the supposed metropolitan liberal elites of this country, if people were honestly bothered about providing public transport to places that don't currently have a train station, then this thread would be a major talking point and we'd maybe discuss a way of subsidising some kind of regular coach service to forgotten places like these (instead of various threads where people argue in favour of spending hundreds of millions building heavy rail to connect villages/small towns).
Whilst I'm on my soapbox, this should be an issue for politicians too - but it's much easier to say "nationalise the trains" (and assume that this solves things) than it is to deal with the reality of places taken off the public transport map (given that buses/ coaches are a much simpler/cheaper/faster way of tackling gaps - you could have a hundred brand new coaches running to such towns whilst one heavy rail proposal was still stuck in the feasibility studies.
There are local services in the Lake District, sure, but no more long distance links in some towns (which, given the way people on here talk about the importance of maintaining long distance trains to Cumbrian towns, feels significant).
Given that the train obviously doesn't provide long distance services for Warrington/Whitehaven, I could see there being a market for a daily service from Manchester/ Liverpool to the West Cumbrian towns, via Windermere and Keswick, of use to the leisure trade who just want to sit on one vehicle and see bits of the Lake District beyond the Windermere train terminus, but I guess that market is more filled by Shearings etc nowadays?
That seems to be the way things are going - interesting, given the well documented problems that XC have!
This is exactly the kind of random assortment of services between two large cities that we'd have if we followed the approach some want on the XC threads (e.g. if we accommodate Liverpool/ Brighton/ Portsmouth/ Carlisle)!
Messy.
For example, I grew up in a town on the CityLink network (with direct services to England) - there's not been any CityLink services for a generation now, and the local bus operator provides a more frequent coach service than in my youth (albeit not to quite such exotic locations) - but this seems to suit the vast majority of people. That's generally the approach I favour - public transport providing reliable/frequent services to the nearest big cities with connections available there (rather than the tokenistic stuff).
It seems that this is in line with other posters on here (witness the calls for routes like the X43 to Burnley or the Coastliner to Scarborough to be used as valid connections)
But with rail, there's an obsession with through services, connections apparently can't be trusted, passengers don't like to change, we must cram lots of services through bottlenecks because we insist on direct trains etc etc.
People on here say that it's vitally important that we provide public transport to various rural villages/ small towns, but National Express cut back services and abandon some larger places and there's pretty much silence - for all that "Workington Man" was apparently the "hero" of the recent General Election (and people pretended to care about these "left behind" towns), the West Cumbrian town can lose its only public transport to the world outside Cumbria and there's no fuss made - yet a thread about cutting the trains to somewhere insignificant like Breich will have hundreds of people demand that this "vital" service be retained.
Maybe the "bus" side of the forum is just a lot more realistic about the wider world, but if people *genuinely* cared about the "left behind" towns beyond the supposed metropolitan liberal elites of this country, if people were honestly bothered about providing public transport to places that don't currently have a train station, then this thread would be a major talking point and we'd maybe discuss a way of subsidising some kind of regular coach service to forgotten places like these (instead of various threads where people argue in favour of spending hundreds of millions building heavy rail to connect villages/small towns).
Whilst I'm on my soapbox, this should be an issue for politicians too - but it's much easier to say "nationalise the trains" (and assume that this solves things) than it is to deal with the reality of places taken off the public transport map (given that buses/ coaches are a much simpler/cheaper/faster way of tackling gaps - you could have a hundred brand new coaches running to such towns whilst one heavy rail proposal was still stuck in the feasibility studies.
There are local services in the Lake District, sure, but no more long distance links in some towns (which, given the way people on here talk about the importance of maintaining long distance trains to Cumbrian towns, feels significant).
Given that the train obviously doesn't provide long distance services for Warrington/Whitehaven, I could see there being a market for a daily service from Manchester/ Liverpool to the West Cumbrian towns, via Windermere and Keswick, of use to the leisure trade who just want to sit on one vehicle and see bits of the Lake District beyond the Windermere train terminus, but I guess that market is more filled by Shearings etc nowadays?
That seems to be the way things are going - interesting, given the well documented problems that XC have!
This is exactly the kind of random assortment of services between two large cities that we'd have if we followed the approach some want on the XC threads (e.g. if we accommodate Liverpool/ Brighton/ Portsmouth/ Carlisle)!
Messy.
