Poor Impressions: Newport to Coleford
9 April 2022
ABOVE: Newport Bus 311 (YX12 DMF) in Monmouth Bus Station at the end of its journey on route 60 from Newport.
All photos in this article were taken on Saturday 12th March 2022
All photos in this article were taken on Saturday 12th March 2022
I have just arrived in Newport, South Wales, on a decent, sunny March day. Newport itself is as dull and uninspiring as ever. The location of the bus station is not something that signage at the railway station is going to reveal. I shall have to find it myself.
I’m aiming for the 9.30am departure of Newport Bus route 60 to Monmouth, a place I have never visited before. I’ve found the bus station, but there’s no guide as to what route goes from what stop, so I need to walk down the line to find the appropriate stop, which turns out to be about halfway down.
The good news is that, 15 minutes before departure time, the bus is on the stand. There are already a couple of possible passengers hovering. There’s also a child of about 10 on a scooter, causing mayhem as he scoots at speed between the various queues, while his mother turns a blind eye.
9.30 comes and goes, and there’s no sign of a driver. Another driver wanders across towards his own bus, and is asked whether he knows where our driver is. “No idea, mate” is his response, and he’s not about to go and find out for us.
This journey is make-or-break for my plans today. If it doesn’t run, the next service is four hours later. I’m certainly not going to be hanging around for that!
A few minutes later a woman (possibly part of the servicing team?) checks on the bus and goes off to make enquiries for us. At 9.40am the driver finally arrives. With no apologies or explanation for the delay, we leave 12 minutes late with four passengers on board. A couple of others who had been waiting have not hung around.
It’s a poor first impression of this operator. We’re also in the middle of its Free Bus Travel month for local services (something that doesn’t stretch as far as Monmouth, unfortunately), but you would never know. Bus and Train User gives his verdict on this in his excellent article here).
The driver is in a hurry, but still stops for half a minute at Caerleon Town Hall, just a few minutes out, for no obvious reason.
We’re soon into the countryside, although the views from this short E200 are partly obscured by the many notices plastered over the windows (I count eight separate notices on one window alone). An old-fashioned farebox at the front of the bus looks incongruous, especially next to the modern contactless-accepting ticket machine.
ABOVE: The old-style farebox on Newport Bus 311
At Llangybi, we pick up two more passengers. Again the driver stands briefly for no apparent reason. Is his watch wrong?
We cross the River Usk and enter the town of Usk – the most sizeable community on this route. It’s a small but pretty town, and there’s a Victorian Clock Tower in the Town Square dated 1887 – so presumably installed for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
We gain another passenger here and stand for another unexplained 30 seconds. I would love to stop off here, but who knows how long I would have to stay if I did?
Further along, the driver passes through a deep puddle at speed. The whole window is temporarily covered in water. It clears in time for me to get a quick glimpse of Raglan castle.
ABOVE: Raglan (or Rhaglan) Castle
All that rushing around has done some good – we’re only a couple of minutes late arriving into Monmouth “Bus Station”. All four of us who boarded in Newport covered the full route. The bus is very quickly heading back again.
ABOVE: Coming into Monmouth from the south-west, via the B4293 bridge over the River Monnow (barely visible as I got the camera out too late)! The Monnow Bridge itself is in view – a scheduled monument and a Grade I listed building.
It’s hard to see how a market could be grown on a route like this. While there has been some intermediate trade, there are so many sparsely-populated areas on this route that the main trade will surely be end-to-end. A few more potential passengers might be out there; there might have been two more if the bus had left Newport on time.
So where to catch my connecting service, Stagecoach route 35, in less than 15 minutes?
No obvious signs exist to tell me. This isn’t what I term a bus station. There are two shelters, two bus stop flags (neither mentions the 35), and a bit of space for parking. There’s also a run-down shelter on the other side of the road, but that just advertises a local service 34. There is a timetable for the 35 amongst the main timetables in the shelter, so I decide to wait there.
The 35 runs only three journeys on Saturdays, to Ross-on-Wye via Coleford and Ruardean. On this occasion I am only travelling to Coleford, 25 minutes away.
The bus turns up at the scheduled departure time, but it pulls straight through the bus station without stopping. A bit of frantic waving and chasing (with a suitcase and a painful foot) gets the driver’s attention, and he points over to the other side of the road – not at the run-down shelter but a bit further down, at an unmarked spot which is apparently the pick-up point. Not sure why the pick-up couldn’t be in the main part of the bus station, which is at least segregated from other traffic.
The Stagecoach West bus has come from the English side of the border, and I want a Day Rider ticket as I’m heading right across its operating area today; eventually to Oxford.
The driver asks me whether I want a “normal” ticket or a senior one. Not quite sure why he thinks I might qualify for the latter (how can he tell – I’m wearing a face covering and a woolly hat). I’m some years off that, and I’m sure I could ask for a senior ticket by myself if that’s what I wanted.
I’m not actually sure why there is a senior ticket, as bus travel for seniors is normally free. I presume it’s something offered to Welsh Bus Pass holders who are travelling in England (and vice versa?), as free passes do not cross borders. It must be very confusing with services like this one that straddle the border. Perhaps that’s why there are only penny numbers of passengers on this trip.
The poor impressions don’t end here, though. The ticket machine only prints half a ticket. This is a day ticket and the date isn’t legible. After putting a teenager off the bus who only has a ten-pound note to pay with, the driver writes the date, his (first) name and staff number on my ticket.
I don’t think this is acceptable, but he has no facility to reprint the ticket and no “emergency ticket” facility to prove the authenticity of the ticket machine’s failure. He’s not prepared to open the machine and see if the rest of the ticket is still inside. In short, there’s nothing else that he seems to be able to do.
What I have is half a ticket, with the date missing and a hand-written annotation. He suggests that this will be enough to persuade subsequent drivers that I have a valid ticket.
I would feel so much more comfortable if he had an emergency ticket wallet of some sort (like the ones you get for weekly tickets) that he could stick the ticket into and annotate the missing details properly.
As it is, the ticket is basically unusable beyond that first trip, and I end up buying another Day Rider on my next bus. (I should have complained to Stagecoach about this but I never got around to it.)
ABOVE: Ticket on the left is the one I received in Monmouth. I have hidden the driver’s details (his name and number). Would this have been good enough to allow me to use the ticket all day? On the right, the ticket I received in Coleford, with all appropriate details intact.
There don’t seem to be many timetables for route 35 in stops along the route (where I can see from the bus), even though there are timetables for other routes. Even when I reach Coleford, the timetable is in Stop 1, but the bus has stopped in Stop 2.
The legroom on the Enviro 200 is poor and, with all other factors taken into account, I don’t enjoy the ride much; a shame as it looks like it might be a really lovely journey. I shall have to return to it, and to Monmouth, another day.
Incidentally, it’s only when I find the (very) small print on the Stagecoach website later in the day that I discover that the Day Rider I have bought twice is not fully valid on the 853 service that I am intending to catch from Cheltenham to Oxford. For the second time that day, I will be buying an unexpected additional ticket.