Kettledrum
Member
- Joined
- 13 Nov 2010
- Messages
- 790
I have family that live in Dorset who largely consider Swanage and Corfe Castle inacessible during the summer months. A journey from Bournmouth or Poole to Swanage can easily take more than 2 hours in the summer months and hence why they also found this trial service useful and used it last year. The queues for the Sandbanks ferry can easily top 1 hour. The A351 will usually be queuing traffic all the way from Corfe Castle to the Bakers Arms (A35) roundabout goung north during the summer and nearly as bad going south. The buses on the 40 get stuck in the same traffic as there is no room for bus lanes on the A351 (and this is a rural area, so many people are dependant on cars). On the route 50 from Bournemouth they can skip the queue from the Sandbanks direction (because the road around Sandbanks is one way with one lane for ferry traffic and another for through traffic, so the bus can use the through traffic lane and a short bus lane to skip to the front of the ferry queue). However this only works if the queue for the ferry is not back beyond the one-way system (it often is in summer). At the other end there is no bus lane and the buses do what looks to me a rather dangerous manouvure, which is that they have flashing lights and beepers on the bus and drive on the wrong side of the road in order to get to the front of the ferry queue. I presume they communicate with the ferry to make sure they don't do this as the ferry is just unloading, but there is still the risk of traffic coming from the beach car parks etc.
I'd love to see SWR run a regular service (ideally hourly) from Wareham (or even Bournemouth) to Swanage supplemented by seasonal steam trains between Norden and Swanage but I can't see it happening at the moment, though a seasonal service might be possible (there were rumours SWT was considering such a service as I believe they applied for a path from London to Wareham with a Diesel unit which would suggest an intention to run onto Swanage).
I recognise everything you have said here about the difficulty of getting from Bournemouth to Swanage in the Summer, and I too would like to see Summer rail services to connect them. The other huge problem with the number 50 bus is that in the Summer it is often full to capacity, and so has to drive straight passed many of the bus stops on route leaving passengers totally stranded. This is a regular occurence, so an alternative rail option is badly needed.