For Seaford branch folks. Perhaps a hidden gem?
Seaford Branch Line
A special bus service will operate at 06:25 to Uckfield to Connect with
the 07:33 Uckfield – London Bridge 10 Car Service.
A return service will operate at 17:37 from London Bridge arriving
Uckfield at 18:52 connecting to a 19:05 rail replacement service back to
the Seaford Branch.
Excellent, except that the 0733 from Uckfield isn’t exactly quiet at the best of times. The lack of some school run passengers at Edenbridge Town will definitely help, but it’s normally full (by which I do mean
full) beyond Hurst Green even on a good day, without any school traffic. In disruption I’ve known it to be full and standing by Eridge.
Evening trains tend to be better, with loadings more extreme around the time the 1637 leaves, partly due to the varied length of the trains. The 1737 is busy but not usually unbearable, unless Thameslink fall apart and everyone needs an alternative service to East Croydon all at once.
It seems it’s actually quicker, by about 10 minutes, to go via Three Bridges anyway.
Seems a bit risky to me on the return run. If I was a commuter I don't think I would chance it for fear of missing the bus and then having to travel all the way back to East Croydon before heading back south.
No need to return that far - you could always get a normal service bus from Uckfield (or for that matter maybe even as far north as Eridge).
Brighton & Hove Buses will accept rail tickets on routes 28/29 from Uckfield to Lewes and Brighton & vice versa.
As it is a rail replacement bus would they not hold it for a late running train?
Depends very much on whether anyone is on duty at Uckfield station and whether GTR Control will be able to advise them that the bus needs holding. Uckfield can in theory be staffed specially (depending somewhat on the staffing commitments over the whole of the local area) but is normally unstaffed from lunchtime on weekdays.
That being said, it should be painfully obvious to most bus drivers that they are running a pointless and empty service if they don’t wait for anyone off the train. (Many drivers will care, some don’t - a sad fact about the work culture of rail replacement almost anywhere in Great Britain.)
In my experience elsewhere that assumes the bus driver knows if the train is late. If they don't then no they won't wait.
As above, it’s not that clear cut.
I have spoken to one of my mates who works at GTR and apparently there is 56 bus companies involved in total. They have come from all over the South East so lots of drivers don't have geographical knowledge.
I am a bus driver and i was driving some of the GTR rail replacement yesterday evening and night and again will be this evening and night (and in fact every day during this nine day closure) and can tell you that it is complete chaos as usual. Every time that GTR put on rail replacement buses it is chaos.
We do not receive any route training or any form of training. Luckily i have very good knowledge of all the roads in the area but many other drivers from further away do not. All they normally give out to those drivers is a simple basic map printed out on an A4 sheet for them to follow and some don't even get that. There is certainly no route training being provided (unless some of the larger bus operators decided to provide it to their drivers).
In regards to waiting for connections this is often not done because bus drivers don't know the train times. We are not told when the trains are due so we won't even know if a train has been delayed. So often this can result in passengers missing their rail replacement bus connection.
Also most of the staff controlling the rail replacement buses in the car parks and helping passengers are completely clueless. They don't have a clue which bus is going where or what time the buses are meant to be leaving.
As usual GTR are completely incapable of organising anything.
The maps I’ve seen could be improved but
detail is not something I’ve ever really noticed to be majorly lacking. More perhaps of any issue is the medium - a cramped paper map, barely of black and white photocopy quality, does not help a bus driver who is also trying to drive with a modicum of safety. I am sure most bus companies have a policy on how drivers should drive unusual routes, and so if they approve of a better map or satnav system, a preset route for such a system shouldn’t take an undue amount of effort to set up.
I can’t honestly believe that bus companies are just being asked by GTR to send out drivers and buses, without said companies having some inkling of where they’re being sent or the likely calling points en route... so really they need to be ensuring they can send their employees (and equipment) out to work safely. GTR will know where the bus is timetabled to go, and do act on feedback about routes which are impossible for buses (eg. tight bridge clearances) but they are not a bus operator, first and foremost, even this week; they do not have in house teams to maintain competency and route knowledge of individual companies’ bus drivers.
With regards bus control and train integration, I will agree the quality of this does vary. Perhaps GTR need to take this in house as a permanent function of station staffing, even if they don’t run the buses themselves. Indeed, the times when I have worked with full-time station staff who’ve been commandeered to run buses, they’ve been a lot better at it than the bus company or agency staff. Your experiences may vary, though...
I take a shuttle every morning in Singapore where I live. The drivers are sometimes substituted but they use an app by Beeline / Grab which has all the stops in and they just follow the navigation and timings. As it's using Google maps we reroute around traffic sometimes. On my side I can follow their position in the app as well.
I really don't understand why something similar couldn't be implemented. A controller could then send a message/retiming to delay a buses departure in the event of a late running train etc
It would be fantastic - and there have been murmurings for a very long time about the traceability and transparency of rail replacement. Some of the bus controllers on GTR operations do now have a bit of a better idea about where their buses are, and some of the bus companies have GPS tracking, but on a large operation it’s more than a bit piecemeal, and any such data certainly hasn’t made it back to customer facing apps/websites/station CIS screens.
Also, a number of the companies who supply replacement bus services during major operations are quite small, not large well-established city bus companies with sophisticated IT arrangements. So if you wrote this sort of infrastructure into their contracts, there’s a good chance they might just pull out, or else submit poor quality and misleading data to the rail companies and the public. It doesn’t entirely excuse the lack of information, but the reality is that rail replacement is quite complex, and can barely ever cope as it is, so any complications like this really can become quite lengthy and tortuous.