tbtc
Veteran Member
One of the most frequently discussed topics on the “rail” parts of this Forum is the debate about “biggest place without a direct service to London”.
Inevitably this gets into argument about the boundaries of places/ whether X is a suburb of Y (or a place in its own right)/ whether somewhere (e.g. Pontefract, Hartlepool, Wrexham) was transformed by a token London service or is better to have frequent connections at the nearest main line station.
But I don’t think we’ve had a similar discussion about buses/ coaches(?).I think that this may be more interesting/ less obvious (partly because buses/ coaches tend to play a secondary role to rail, so there may be some places where it’s just not worth National Express etc trying to commercially compete with a faster/ subsidised train service, but also because the economics of coach operation mean that you can run a daily service at marginal cost and extend beyond the “big city” to serve the kind of smaller towns that rail cannot penetrate – e.g. a London – Newcastle coach can run on to little places like Blyth that cannot sustain trains).
So, which are the biggest places in the UK without a weekly direct bus/ coach service to the relevant national capital (Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff, London)? I’m not just talking London, since the economics of coach travel mean that it’d be too long to reach some places each day. Plus, the CityLink/ National Express changes over the years mean that some places in Scotland lost the London service they used to have.
I don’t know the answers for the four capitals. I’d guess that the best Scottish examples will be towns on the far side of Glasgow (Paisley, Ayr, Kilmarnock etc), since the old CityLink 500/501 stopped running west of Glasgow (with Stagecoach picking up the pieces between Glasgow and Ayrshire)?
(for argument’s sake, if it’s advertised as a through service in a timetable, even if it’s one of those “drivers hours” fudges, where you can sit on the same bus/coach but technically it becomes a different service then it counts as a through service in my eyes – as long as you can do it with one ticket and don’t have to get off the vehicle en route)
Inevitably this gets into argument about the boundaries of places/ whether X is a suburb of Y (or a place in its own right)/ whether somewhere (e.g. Pontefract, Hartlepool, Wrexham) was transformed by a token London service or is better to have frequent connections at the nearest main line station.
But I don’t think we’ve had a similar discussion about buses/ coaches(?).I think that this may be more interesting/ less obvious (partly because buses/ coaches tend to play a secondary role to rail, so there may be some places where it’s just not worth National Express etc trying to commercially compete with a faster/ subsidised train service, but also because the economics of coach operation mean that you can run a daily service at marginal cost and extend beyond the “big city” to serve the kind of smaller towns that rail cannot penetrate – e.g. a London – Newcastle coach can run on to little places like Blyth that cannot sustain trains).
So, which are the biggest places in the UK without a weekly direct bus/ coach service to the relevant national capital (Edinburgh, Belfast, Cardiff, London)? I’m not just talking London, since the economics of coach travel mean that it’d be too long to reach some places each day. Plus, the CityLink/ National Express changes over the years mean that some places in Scotland lost the London service they used to have.
I don’t know the answers for the four capitals. I’d guess that the best Scottish examples will be towns on the far side of Glasgow (Paisley, Ayr, Kilmarnock etc), since the old CityLink 500/501 stopped running west of Glasgow (with Stagecoach picking up the pieces between Glasgow and Ayrshire)?
(for argument’s sake, if it’s advertised as a through service in a timetable, even if it’s one of those “drivers hours” fudges, where you can sit on the same bus/coach but technically it becomes a different service then it counts as a through service in my eyes – as long as you can do it with one ticket and don’t have to get off the vehicle en route)
