F Is For Ferry!
Pictures of Sydney Harbour will often include the well known ferries painted green and cream. They offer an extensive networks of 10 routes …
They all operate out of Circular Quay …
… meaning that interchange between ferry routes is very straightforward.
Services extend westbound along the Pramatta river …
… although F3 only gets to the very end once an hour!
As we have come to expect there are full PDF timetables for every route as here for that to Manley running every 15 min seven days a week!
There are train …
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… and Light Rail connections at Circular Quay …
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The Metro is not too far away
Then came Fox Star in Newport South Wales …
… with buses branded as “The One”.
These operations failed in various catastrophic ways. Their young entrepreneur …
… has most recently been MD of the Transpora Group with various operations in various locations.
The result has been a disqualification of holding an operators licence.
The background to this ban is well recorded in the public domain and fbb will leave his readers to come to their own conclusions.
He has borrowed, hired, bought (unlikely the latter!) a shiny blue Glider from Belfast and painted it yellow. Without much involvement of bus professionals he has announced that this “may” be the shape of future bus travel in Merseyside.
The above report goes on …
Originally lined up for new routes to the Wirral Waters development in Birkenhead, young Steve is commiting the authority to runs them two Liverpool’s two football stadia and to the John Lennon Airport. (Who was he?)
Not everyone is over the moon with the trendy looking vehicles in Belfast.
Whether the fault is of the buses, the timetable or management is unclear, but there has been a stream of problems with this much vaunted bus system. Does Steve know?
Gilmoss, by the way, is a Liverpool bus depot and is here used for alliterative and literary reasons. It is not yet decided which bus company will operate these buses IF they ever materialise.
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So that’s why TfL renamed Old Street underground station and confused tens of thousands of passengers. They did very well out of the mobile phone company that was presenting its over priced and over-spec product.
Apparently this offer, which we all though was to increase passenger numbers after Covid, was actually aimed at modal shift. It was supposed to get Scots commuters out of their cars and on to the trains.
Just a little thought for the Scottish Transport Minister. To achieve modal shift is often a slow slow process and needs much more that a small fares reduction. It needs cheap comfortable park and ride sites, free parking at stations and a good network of buses for onward travel from station to workplace.
The only relief from its unrealistic rubicund regalia was the transfers and the black plastic “net” of the working mailbag flinger and catcher.
… and reduced the blackness of the net by a replication the red panelling underneath.
Door furniture was picked out in black and a suggestion was added of the lights which would have been turned on to show that mail was to be dropped or uplifted.
In a slightly different older livery this has just been re-released at a whopping £73
Some retailers are discounting this price as above.