Great -I will look forward to he Moreton in the marsh intergalactic space sport then...........................
Because they want to make it sound more grand that it is. It may just be phase one, but then again future phases may not happen, particularly as they seem to be reticent to say what they are!
Perhaps we can look forward to:
Phase 2 - somewhere to park your space hopper;
Phase 3 - a small lay-by with a "Taxi" sign;
Phase 4 - a metal pole being put up with a sign carrying the words "Bus Stop" on it.
Each to be accompanied by a gushing press release and "jimm" fawning over how wonderful GWR are.
My, my, what wits you are. No idea what the point of your interventions in the thread is supposed to be - a bit of good news for the railway and a small town and this is your contribution. What on earth is a 'space sport'...?
43096, the mask slipped in the end, didn't it? Revealing that at the root of it, yet again, is your near-pathological dislike of First Group and all its works. People in Moreton-in-Marsh are just grateful that, after waiting 20 years and through umpteen failed schemes, a concrete step has been taken to help address the problems with car parking in the town centre and at the station and to make some other improvements while they are at it.
I would have thought the following route would be viable for both locals and attracting locals:>
Cheltenham Railway Station (at present, the buses from villages only go to downtown Cheltenham meaning that people must either walk the mile to the station or take a bus with a different company - how dumb is that with all the trains that call at Cheltenham?
Anyway - Cheltenham Railway Station > town > Andoversford > Northleach > Lower Slaughter > Bourton-on-the-Water > Stow-on-theHill > Maugersbury > MIM (to match with trains so a little dwell time) > Bourton-on-the-Hill > Chipping Campden (which could do with its own station) > Hidcote Manor > Mickleton (connects with a bus to Stratford-upon-Avon) > Weston-sub-Edge > Broadway > Toddington (for Steam Railway & Stanway Manor) > Winchcombe > Cheltenham town > Cheltenham Railway Station.
I would brand the above service ‘Cotswold Explorer” and GWR, Cross Country & Transport for Wales could market travel to the stations at Cheltenham & MIM with tickets that include hop on hop off on the above buses. GWR could even allow travel to/from MIM and or Cheltenham with the above ticket to help attract tourists. As things stand, for tourists wishing to travel around the attractive villages in this area and stay an hour or so, it is virtually impossible. Car is the only option and many foreigners are scared stiff about driving on the wrong side of the road let alone on country roads. Local bus timetables are complicated and often involve different companies and then you get all this stuff about this bus does not operate on school days as it is being used to transport kids. (Most schools have their own mini buses - why not use them and hire in a mini bus if they are needed for field trips etc.)?
So that connects all the main villages to 2 railway main line stations and I would have such a route running clockwise and anti-clockwise ideally at hourly intervals. We probably have local bus operators who don’t even check the train schedules plus 2 useless County Councils who won’t come up with viable support because this area borders two counties.
This is like one of the 'let's link up various rail services, just because we can' threads - meet a tractor or lorry or two along the way on narrow lanes and the timetable would fall to bits.
The 801 does not exactly run at warp speed now - with detours off the main road into Stow, Bourton-on-the-Water and Andoversford - send it on yet more and extend the journey times to and from Cheltenham and you would do a pretty thorough job of driving off most of the local passengers. There simply is not enough custom out there to justify running both an 801 and a magical mystery tour. The last effort locally to explicitly serve tourists - the X55 Bath-Cirencester-Stratford service - lasted just a couple of summers at the end of the 1990s.
The 801 ran to and from Cheltenham Spa station for a short time. The number of passengers was so low that it was cut back to operate to and from the town centre again. Most rail-borne tourists travel from/to London and Moreton-in-Marsh is the obvious station to use - and strongly recommended by Japanese travel guides, hence the Japanese direction signs around the station put up 10 years ago.
The number of passengers on the 801 getting on and off at Northleach when most services ran that way was so low that it recently reverted to all but a couple of journeys running direct between Bourton-on-the-Water and Andoversford to get people to and from Cheltenham faster.
Good luck with trying to get anything bigger than a minibus through Lower Slaughter or Maugersbury. Not sure why you think a bus should go to the latter every hour - the 802 to Kingham station sticks like glue to the main road from Stow-on-the-Wold, suggesting there is no demand. Hardly surprising when about 150 people live there and tourists have this habit of sticking to the hotspots like Borton-on-the-Water.
The timetables are hardly that complicated, and the only alterations involving school journeys on the routes serving Moreton station mean some minor timing changes on school or non-school days. Overseas tourists, notably the Japanese, have never had any problems getting to the key places they want to go on the existing routes.
The bus operators do check the rail timetables, though the GWR timetable change in December 2019 caused some issues, as a result of the Paddington departure time of Cotswold services shifting from xx.20 to xx.50, and the bus timetables also have to reflect other needs, such as work/college related arrival and departure times in Cheltenham.
The No 51 service launched last September was basically built around the rail timetable. That route is funded by Warwickshire across its boundary into Gloucestershire, while the 1 & 2 are jointly supported by Gloucestershire and Warwickshire, after separate Moreton-Chipping Campden and Stratford-Chipping Campden routes were combined more than 20 years ago.
The site of Chipping Campden station is about a mile and a half from the town centre and the high school, so not the most attractive proposition for reopening, never mind the price tag.