In A Tight Spot: Weston-super-Mare to Wells
17 April 2022
ABOVE: 33836 (SN14 TSU), foreground, is preparing for its next trip on route 126 to Weston-super-Mare. All pictures in this article were taken on 10th March 2022.
The new bus interchange at Weston-super-Mare is a slightly odd affair. It achieves its objective of bringing together all of the bus routes that serve the town, but doesn’t have a turning circle or stands for terminating services. The result is that buses still park at various points around the town, but call in at the bus interchange on the way in and out. This means that it’s empty of buses a lot of the time.
ABOVE: Weston-super-Mare’s new Bus Interchange has two Badgerline (First Bus) single-deckers and an unidentified double-decker passing through as I arrive.
There’s no diagram to show what stops where, but it’s a new facility so I suppose that is still to be added…? There are certainly still signs of building work – notably the area behind the interchange is still cordoned off. All of this will undoubtedly be fixed in due course.
Something that can’t be fixed quite so easily is that the bus shelters and seats do not quite align with the stops themselves, which rather scrambles the queue that has built up for route 126 to Wells by the time the bus arrives, seven minutes later than its advertised 1006 departure time (having only passed through on the inward journey at about its planned departure time).
This, like all of my buses today, is a First West of England service. It’s a smart Enviro 400 with Mendip Explorer branding and represents another route that has been ‘promoted’ to double-decker since I last used it some years earlier.
We have a decent load on departure from Weston, and are soon heading inland, past the Helicopter Museum in Locking (never heard of it before but a mental note now made), and across the M5.
Typical of the kind of territory route 126 passes through is Elm Tree Road in Locking, the first detour off the main road from Weston to Wells.
ABOVE: Elm Tree Road, Locking
ABOVE: Enviro 400 33834 (SN14 TRZ) in the centre of Barwell.
It isn’t long before we encounter what will be the first of a number of very tight roads. West Street, Banwell, is a very narrow lane in the middle of the village – probably just about wide enough for two cars to pass, but not a chance for a bus to pass anything else. It’s also the main thoroughfare so it’s busy! There isn’t any traffic control so the driver has to wait for a kind motorist to give way.
ABOVE: West Street, Barwell
Soon after, we reach Sandford Station Retirement Village. We’re in Station Road and there’s also a pub called the Railway Inn, so a fair assumption that there was once a railway through here? Of course there was – Sandford & Banwell station was on the Bristol and Exeter Railway’s Cheddar Valley line until the 1960s.
That’s not all Sandford has, though. There’s a large cider brewery here too. So with only an hourly bus and no trains, presumably the majority of its employees and visitors arrive by car?
Winscombe feels more like a town than a village, although it only qualifies for a mobile Lloyds Bank, which is parked up at the side of the road.
The first major traffic objective for the 126 is Axbridge – a pretty town of some 2000 people with the Cheddar reservoir (which stores water, not cheese) on its outskirts.
This is an incredibly difficult place to drive a bus through at any time, but is made more difficult by an illegally-parked lorry, which can only be passed by mounting the pavement (and forcing a car that comes into view at the wrong moment to move into a side road).
ABOVE: Dear bus driver – your challenge, which you are contractually-obliged to accept, is to drive your double-decker bus down this road (from which it is just a short distance to Axbridge Town Square). You need to pass the van on the right, and the lorry on the left. When you have passed the latter, head behind it to your left. Your time starts now.
Then there’s a building, right on the narrowest part of Meadow Street, to which some mobile scaffolding has been put up. This makes an extremely tight turning into the town square even tighter. This is the sort of territory where bus drivers earn their stripes, and our driver manages the manoeuvre with aplomb.
ABOVE: Just yards further down from the photo above, Axbridge Town Square, and relative safety, is in view ahead. The driver just needs to complete his slalom run past the illegally-parked lorry (you can just see one of the delivery carts, bottom left, that is standing at the back of the lorry). Once around this, the driver just needs to squeeze past the scaffolding, which can just be picked out in the centre background. Everybody breathe in!
Finally, we’ve made it into the Town Square. It is worth it!
And breathe!
ABOVE: It is worth it! The centre of Axbridge.
As we venture out of the other end, the roads are still tight, if not as tight as they have been.
We reach more tight roads as we come into Cheddar – a tourist spot that I am now passing through for the second time without stopping – I really must make the effort! There’s a short stop for time – the bus has made up all of its lost minutes despite the late start and the challenges of Axbridge.
ABOVE: 33837 (SN14 TSV) on route 126 in the centre of Cheddar. The main attraction, Cheddar Gorge, is just up the road to the left (the bus will turn right, however). This picture needed a cheesy caption, really, but coming up with one was driving me crackers.
A service in the opposite direction comes through at the same time, and the driver of that bus comes over to have a chat with ours. This is not a casual chat, but a serious discussion about the concerns the other driver has regarding the (for him still-to-come) scaffolding in Axbridge.
Cheddar to Wells is broadly south-east, and we’re following the main A371 for most of the rest of the way. A main road doesn’t make for a fast, wide road and there are several points where our driver needs to slow down for blind bends or passing traffic. He’s an incredibly good driver, steering us through the undulating territory!
We have views, at various points along this stretch, of the famous Glastonbury Tor, although my camera can’t do them any justice. We also pass within a couple of miles of Wookey Hole caves, which I visited in the 1990s. I recollection of that visit is that we had a very charismatic tour guide who, on completion of the tour, went back to his office / rest room singing an operatic aria at the top of his voice, of such quality that I hope he’s now topping the bill at Covent Garden or somewhere similar.
All too soon for me, but I suspect a source of relief for our driver, is our arrival in Wells, just a couple of minutes late, at 11.35am.
ABOVE: 33836 (SN14 TSU), on the right, has just arrived at Wells Bus Station, having carried me from Weston-super-Mare. On the left is 33665 (SN12 AEG).
It’s been busy the whole way through, with many passengers travelling, like me, from one end to the other. I have loved it, but I can’t help wondering whether regular, and especially relief, drivers on this route have palpitations and sleepless nights worrying about Axbridge? I would!