Silliness at Stranraer [4]

In 1953, there was a bus every two hours from Glasgow to Stranraer via Ayr and calling at Cairnryan. (click on any of the three panels to enlarge)

This was supplemented by short working journeys from Stranraer, presumably to suit the Navy as it pottered about its port. British Railways ferries ran from Stranraer, of course.

There were also buses from Dumfries ...

... every two hours but with a first Stranraer arrival as late as 1100. But way back then there were train connections direct on to the gangplank of the ferry from the South, from Newcastle and from Glasgow.

Today, the bus service from Ayr is much the same but through journeys from Glasgow are by Citylink/Ulsterbus as per yesterdays blog. Likewise the 500 from Dumfries. There is very little difference in 60 years! 

So we can ask Traveline for a journey from London (England!) to Cairnryan (Scotland) and back comes a list of 8 possibilities.

Ferry departures from Stena are as below ...

... and from P and O:

The most impressive schedule is for just under 7 hours and offering a potential connection with a 1930 sailing from Stena and a 2000 departure from P & O.  If we expand this journey ...

... we see that, for Traveline Scotland, "London" is Victoria Station; but we, virtually, may start at Euston. There is plenty of time to change at Carlisle into a National Express (NatEx) coach, service 921. NatEx timetables appear and disappear from their web site at erratic intervals. Searching for Stranraer or Cairnryan on the current web site is fruitless.

Timetable finder

Instead of listing all of our many destinations, we've made it easy for you to download and print timetables for our most popular routes. Just type in the name of your nearest town, city or airport into the box below and choose from the list that appears.

Thankfully, Traveline Scotland reveals all. Service 921 runs from Birmingham to the P & O terminal; but not, apparently serving the "opposition" a mile or so further north.

The service is technically joint with Ulsterbus which maybe why it is disowned by the NatEx website; we found the same UDI for the 923 from Edinbrgh and Glasgow yesterday.

But what about overnight?

A schedule is on offer via the soon to be re-branded Caledonian sleeping car trains. 

Being Traveline you would expect nonsense and a couple of walks (a) from Dumfries Rail Station to Dumfries Railway Station and (b) from Port Rodie Tesco to Port Rodie Ferry Terminal are just plain silly. The 8 minute connection at Carlisle looks decidedly risky!

But Traveline is unable to find the overnight run that, fbb guesses, would be the most popular and the most convenient. It is another National Express secret!

Sitting on a coach for ten hours is not fbb's kind of fun, BUT ...

... it takes about the same amount of time as not sleeping in the through rail sleeper (The Northern Irishman) of the "good old days". The coach will be massively cheaper, too.

Whoops forgot. NatEx disowns the service. Give Up.

Ulsterbus brochure for fares from Belfast

But will it be cheaper? According to ...

Sssshh, it's a secret! You can buy cheap combined train & ferry tickets between Belfast and London or any station in Britain, in either direction, via either Cairnryan-Belfast, Holyhead-Dublin, or Liverpool-Belfast, see the route map below. One price covers the train & the ferry all on one ticket. It's the traditional, time-honoured way to get there, through the countryside by train and across the Irish Sea by ferry, the environmentally-friendly alternative to a short-haul flight.

And there it is. London to Belfast via Glasgow, Ayr and Cairnryan for ...

... £35 single! It is, of course, a schedule that Traveline doesn't offer.

Public transport is just so easy!

 Next Pacer blog : Thursday 5th March 

Silliness at Stranraer [3]

Interchange by Bus or Coach?

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fbb makes yet another mistake!

Those who were reading yesterday's blog between 0200 and 0300 will have witnessed the consequences of a glorious bludner by the old man! Under instructions from No 1 son, all fbb's pictures are backed up in a cloud ...

... somewhere; and that includes all the illustration from this blog. Every so often Google tells fbb that it has snatched another batch. 

On Sunday evening the innocent abroad in technology-land tried deleting a few from this cloud. They disappeared after a warning that the pictures would also be expunged from "all linked locations". fbb had no idea what that meant!

Thus at 0230 (yesterday, Monday), when the insomniac ...

... arose for a drink after a mild attack of cramp, he had a quick look at yesterday's just-posted blog. And there were lots of illustrations - gorn! The blog, apparently, is linked to the cloud. Panic set in; quiet nocturnal gibbering ensued, but fortunately the Google-monster had not pinched the pics from the laptop and fbb was able to restore all to its fascinating glory by 0300!

This technology can be profoundly frightening at times!

But back to the comparative sanity of Stranraer and Stena.

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Stena announced its departure from Stranraer circa 2010 and moved to a second Cairnyan terminal in 2011. This was duly reported by the BBC (link here). Stranraer Harbour was thereafter empty!

And there, sticking out in a load of silt and sea is the station. There you will find a staffed booking office ...

... open for an amazing number of hours ...

... even on Sundays, if the National Rail web site us to be believed. There are six trains from Glasgow Monday to Saturday, three on Sundays.

But you are a bit stuck at the end of Stranraer Pier!

Various authorities inform us that Stena offers a coach link from Ayr station to their terminal. All fbb could find was a Scottish Citylink service 923 with three journeys ...

... as the example above, plus departures from Edinburgh 1100 and 1500, Glasgow 1220 and 1630. These connect with Stena Line sailings at 1130, 1530 and 1930. Not a dickybird about P&O sailings. The service is "joint" with Ulsterbus.

The Stagecoach "ordinary" bus service from Ayr runs every two hours Monday to Saturday with a weird collection of route numbers (58, 60, 358, 360) and calls at both ferry terminals (click on the timetable to enlarge).

And you might be lucky enough to get a bus in a special livery ...

... branded Carrick Coast Link.

But if you have arrived by train with luggage it is a hard slog back along the pier and up to the Port Rodie terminal ...

... hardly lavish!

But what is this on-line happiness dated November 2013?

Stranraer electric bus service launched

Transport Minister Keith Brown has officially launched the first fully-electric local bus service in Scotland in Wigtownshire. It is being used to provide a link for passengers between the Irish Sea ferry terminals at Cairnryan and the railway station at Stranraer. The vehicle cost £120,000 - jointly funded by the transport partnership SWestrans and the Scottish government. It is run by McLeans and has been in operation since September.

Mr Brown described the project as "innovative" and forming a "vital link" in the transport network. "It will improve access for passengers going to and from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which is particularly welcome in view of the potential increase in traffic during the Commonwealth Games and Ryder Cup events next year," he said.

Yippee!

So we can catch our train to Glagow, then to Stranraer then hop off the train onto the bus and be whisked to one or other of the two Cairnryan terminals.

Yippee again!

But the 350 is hardly frequent. According to the Dunfries and Galloway web site this is the sum total of connection from train to ferry ...

... both with a half hour wait at Harbour station. Stena Line offers more hope ...

... but only if you are travelling from Stranraer town, i.e. Charlotte Street. The 0640 from the station is no help as the first daylight train arrival is 0958; or you could arrive at 0052 and wait for five hours and fortyeight minutes.

Would it be fair to say that Scotrail, Stena and The Scottish Government have given up on the short sea route for foot passengers.

Nevertheless, we will see what can be done tomorrow.

 Next bus blog : Tuesday 3rd March 

Service 265 - Simply Broke at Limpley Stoke

Major Diversion : Major Headache

 Stranraer blog returns tomorrow 

Until 2008 (?) Wilts and Dorset [W&D] and First ran a joint service between Bath and Salisbury. X4s ran hourly, jointly operated ...

... with First bus X5s providing a half hourly frequency to Warminster. On Sundays it was First only as X5 with a summer "tourist" excursion X99 between Westbury and Salisbury run by W&D.

Then W&D pulled out and First ran only between Bath and Warminster. The Salisbury bit became the 24, operated by the late-lamented Hatts coaches with a variety of rolling stock.

Then, Hatts threw in the towel and First decided to operate the route commercially as 265 ...

... reverting (almost) to the original timetable.

Journeys via North Bradley, the erstwhile X4 variant, were initially numbered 264 but this wiggle was later abandoned by First.

Through journeys now take an extra 25 minutes!

But from today, the service has a bit of a problem between Bathampton and Winsley. The busy A36 road is to be closed completely until June, the blue bit on the map below ...

... to sink piles of piles into the subsoil to stop the road sinking.

Closed completely! Who would be a bus operator?

The solution is to divert the though service via the "Sally-in-the-Woods" road, better known as the A363 (the grey road on the First Bus map of the undiverted 265 : below) and rejoin the normal schedule at Bradford-on-Avon.

And that odd road name? The Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre writes:-

There are three versions of the tale. The first is of a supernatural nature, and was published by Kathleen Wiltshire in 1984. It tells the story of a young couple who knocked down a girl dressed in white when she ran from trees across the road in front of their car. Another version, this time by Maggie Dobson and Simone Brightstein relate that Sally was murdered in the woods or imprisoned in nearby Brown’s Folly, or that she was an actual road accident victim. Katy Jordan in her book ‘The Haunted Landscape’ mentions that Sally in the Woods does have the reputation of being an eerie place, where ‘no birds sing’, so you never know...

The funding for the 2.3 million road rebuild includes provision of a shuttle bus (266) from Bradford to Winsley.

Which leaves lonely Limpley Stoke. This, too is explained in the "diversion" leaflet.

Unfortunately, it will not be possible for the shuttle bus service to call at Limpley Stoke but Libra Travel bus service 94 will continue to run from Limpley Stoke to Bath and Trowbridge.

In fact the 265 barely calls at Limpley Stoke. Of he two stops so tagged by Traveline, River Bridge ...

... is better labelled Lower Stoke or Winsley Hill and the Viaduct Hotel (closed for redevelopment as Google viewed the street) ...

... is most definitely at Monkton Combe. So most Limpley Stokers would be using the 94 anyway. And talking of silly names, the ex-pub is at the foot of Brassknocker Hill.

The strange saga all began in July 1979, amid wild rumours that a terrifying monster was haunting the dark woods of Brassknocker Hill, situated near the old British city of Bath. Described variously, and in both excited and hysterical tones, as a long-fanged, four foot tall creature resembling a baboon, chimpanzee, spider-monkey, gibbon or lemur, the creature was of far more concern to some than it was to others. Locals Ron and Betty Harper were hardly in a good mood when they discovered that the mysterious creature had stripped whole sections of their old, mighty oak tree bare of bark. 

the mystery of the "beast" was never resolved.

fbb did search on-line for a replacement 265 timetable but on Friday 27th February ...

... First's web site was having one of its all-too-frequent off days. By Saturday the engineers had put a shilling in the meter but only the non diverted timetable was available. Not very good.

Maybe a "diverted" version will have appeared today?

 Next ferry blog : Tuesday 3rd March 

Please Trace a Pacer (2 of a series)

Birthday Burblings
Thank you to the computers at Rail UK Forums ...

... fbb had forgotten he had joined!

Thanks to all who added best wishes as comments to this blog. Much appreciated by he septuagenarian!

Many cards had a transport theme (surprise) but a couple of family ones were of interest. No 3 son was, sadly, one day late with his badge; fbb has promised to wear it to church on Sunday ...

... but No 1 son offered some passing encouragement ...

... whereas an Island chum recognised the inevitable.

... everything HURTS and what doesn't hurt doesn't WORK ... you feel like the MORNING aftr but you didn't go out the NIGHT before. Your KNEES buckle but your BELT won't. You can only burn the MIDNIGHT oil until 9 o'clock. The TWINKLE in your eyes is the sun hitting the bifocals and your BACK goes out more than you do!

Yes, indeed!

As well as a tub of Chocolate Brazils (fbb's favourite sweetmeat) the No 1 son (and family) parcel contained a model.

Southdown Plaxton Panorama 176 DCD dates from the mid sixties.

It is decorated in the familiar two tone green of Southdown with their signature gold and black lettering and silver coachlines. The replica roof lights have a masked black surround while the windows and windscreen are masked in silver. The interior seating is pale green, the dashboard is moulded in tan and the floor is moulded yellow-grey. The destination board above the front radiator grille shows the coach as heading in style for Brighton!

It costs a modest £14.95. The real coach (fleet number 1176) is seen below at Hastings in 1967.

The vehicle survived for some years after PSV use; this being its latter manifestation.

(click on the pic for a larger image) fbb likes the leopard!

Two cards came as a real surprise. One from Leicester chum David set your author a mathematical problem based on the picture on the card, David having been a Pure Maths lecturer at Sheffield University.

"I shall have confirmation of your age if I hear you can construct it from the engine's number using the five digits once only and in order. You are allowed + and - and concatenation. (e.g. 5 and 3 concatenate to 53)."

fbb spent several fruitless minutes looking for a difficult solution before realising that the answer was trivial! Old age; slow brain.

The loco is preserved on the Great Central Railway Loughborough.

But Mrs fbb hit the highlight with her Birthday gift. She scoured the second hand stocks at Hattons Liverpool model store.

Well, er, no! fbb was required to order his own gift, his ever supportive wife being unwilling to make a mistake and buy the wrong thing. She bought the old man ...

... a GMPTE liveried Pacer manufactured by Hornby! Pre-owned, but in excellent working order, the model is one of the original batch with a motor in each car. With electrical pick up on two wheels only, the individual cars have a reputation of being unreliable, stalling on pointwork, for example. Later versions had one motor but pick-up on four of the wheels. After a bit of cleaning and a squirt of WD40, fbb's ran beautifully; a colourful addition to the Peterville Quarry Railway.

And just a tad over £40 including postage. There is more Pacer prognostication later in the week.

That leaves one unexpected "card".

More than he got from a certain other operator way out west!

 Next bus blog : Monday 2nd March