A while back yours truly asked the question ‘To TUPE or not to TUPE’, in a nod to Shakespeare’s famous line from Hamlet, in relation to drivers transferring companies in the Bee rollout. Now a lady from Denton quoted a similar line in a complaint to the, er, Crime Reporter at the MEN, Mayor B and local MP & Deputy PM Angela Rayner.
The quote came about after Metroline cancelled 3 consecutive 347 buses on the morning of an English Literature GCSE exam at Thomas More school in Denton – not good. They seem to have been struggling for a little while, feelings amongst drivers are that they’re just as picky as GNW when it comes to recruitment and many emails to their ‘joinmanchester’ email address go ignored. Metroline trotted out the usual ‘we regret any distress caused’ line and that changes will be implemented. The shit must have hit the fan at some velocity for the depot supervisor that morning!
A deluge of announcements came today as Chancellor Reeves whipped out the cheque book for about £15bn of transport projects mainly in areas with mayoral authorities. Hmm. Manchester mananged to nab quite a bit of the pie, though, with £2.5bn coming our way.
I’ll mention some of the headlines from out of the area first:
- £1.5bn for South Yorkshire to renew the tram network as well as bus services across Sheffield, Doncaster and Rotherham by 2027
- £1.6bn for Liverpool city region with faster connections to Liverpool John Lennon Airport, Everton stadium and Anfield, and a new bus fleet in St Helens and the Wirral next year
- £1.8bn for the North East to extend the Newcastle to Sunderland Metro via Washington
- £800m for West of England to improve rail infrastructure, provide more frequent trains between the Brabazon industrial estate in Bristol and the city centre, and develop mass transit between Bristol, Bath, South Gloucestershire and North Somerset
- £1bn for Tees Valley including a £60m platform extension programme for Middlesbrough station
- £2bn for the East Midlands to improve road, rail and bus connections between Derby and Nottingham.
Now to Manchester, and the main headline is that Metrolink is confirmed as coming to Stockport.
Becci Simmons, a local resident, was quoted by the BBC as saying she “can’t wait” for the extension to reach the town, saying “You’ve got to take the bus and the bus can take an hour.” Despite possibly being in the town with some of the best bus and train connections in the GM area.
Whilst details of the extension’s route remain to be figured out, early indications are that it’ll ‘tag on’ to the line to East Didsbury, along the old disused heavy railway line into Stockport currently being used as a cycle way. The trip from St. Peter’s Square into East Didsbury via tram is currently scheduled at about 26minutes, the train between Stockport and Piccadilly taking between 20-25 minutes with very regular depatures (a look at the train times for 1200-1300 tomorrow show 14 depatures with the longest wait of 8 minutes and the shortest wait was, er, 0 minutes), so the hopes of a 30-minute saving on the 1-hour bus trip time is quite distant. Even if TfGM’s love of delaying buses to prioritise trams at junctions can nudge up faux delays as much as possible, I reckon they’ll be pretty tied on which will be faster during the off-peak. Of course, at peak times it’s no contest.
There’s also confirmed funding for 3 additional stops on existing lines, Cop Road Oldham, Elton Resovoir Bury (at the site of the now barrier-less Hagside Crossing, where some enablement works took place a few years ago) and Sandhills at Collyhurst, as reported by Bee Buzz in August last year.
As also reported in that article by ourselves, the tram-train project to connect Oldham and Bury via Heywood and Rochdale was also confirmed. As stated last time, I hope they still allow the ELR access to the tracks. I think it might become the first heritage railway line to carry tram services if they do. Trains aren’t my strong point, nor are posting updates to this website. I wonder if Bee’s Tap and Go will work on ELR services if the tram gets stuck in town? A coal-fired train replacement service, anyone?
An additional 1,000 EV buses will be bought to turn the bus fleet 100% electric by 2030, meaning the buses bought in 2024 for the T1-3 transition will be 6 years at disposal and the gallons of yellow paint and miles of fabric retrimming seats into the Metrolink moquette on the inherited fleet will be wasted. Environmentally friendly! I wonder how TfGM will force, ahem, persuade SLSC operators to upgrade their depots and how they’re getting on electrifying their own sheds. In further electrification news, Metroline’s Ashton depot is now the first 100% electric depot in Manchester.
A mysterious announcement was for new interchanges at ‘Leigh and central Manchester’. I hope this is a replacement for the mess that is Piccadilly Gardens. Shudehill was only built in 2007 and is still quite modern looking and well kept. One hopes that if it is Piccadilly, that buses will be able to turn RIGHT into the bus station, not just left from Portland St. A bus station that can literally only serve buses running to the south of the city without fart-arsing around with Moseley St, and even then you can only serve half of the station, can’t loop easily, have no official lay-over area and can’t turn left to Piccadilly station meaning another fart-arse around Chorlton St.
Bury’s replacement bus station is set to be the area’s first ‘operationally carbon neutral’ interchange. One would say the current one is already carbon neutral being ‘open-air’! Just slap some solar panels on top of it. Not quite sure what’s carbon costly there at the moment, the nice heated back office? I do rather like Bury Interchange, despite being from the 80s, it’s aged rather well and quite nicely handles the hustle and bustle. It’s a shame the tiling on the BR Ticket office, now half-travelshop and half-office, was recently covered up with grey wood panels. It’s also a shame that the newsstand and cafes have closed. You can just imagine captain hat adorned, moustache bearing, long mac wearing Blakey’s roaming about with clipboards, with nursing watches at the top, dragging bus crews out of the greasy spoon whilst they downed a plate of full English with chunky sausages. I’ll leave you with that image.
