A West London & Southampton Bus Ride Trilogy
10 May 2022
ABOVE: King Alfred keeps a beady eye on activities in Broadway, Winchester, on Bank Holiday Monday 2nd May 2022, as Stagecoach 10892 (YX67 VCE) prepares for another trip on route 64 to Alton. Two of the three journeys described below have used route 64.
If you’re a regular reader, you might be surprised to learn that my long-distance bus riding is a relatively recent thing for me. Although I had travelled extensively across the country since childhood, trips out of the traditional London Transport red bus area were mainly by train, or later car, and outside London bus rides were just as a specific means of getting from A to B (how old-fashioned).
I certainly never had the idea to link several rides into a long cross-country trip until the electronic information age came along, and the idea of staying away and making a holiday of such things was an even more recent innovation.
The first time I made such a complicated ride outside of London was in 2008. I was already over 40, and I travelled from my home in West London down to Southampton. It’s a journey I have now made three times by varying routes, so I thought I might describe and compare the three. It’s especially interesting as much of my original 2008 trip is no longer possible, due to service cuts.
My most recent journey, last summer, started on a route that I would have loved as a child, only it didn’t exist then. The Transport for London (TfL) / Abellio 482 (Southall to Heathrow Terminal 5) takes a shortcut to Hatton Cross, which I regularly visited after the Piccadilly Line extension opened that far in 1975. In those days we had to go via Heathrow or Hounslow but the 482 now makes this journey substantially faster and requires a lot less effort.
The 482 is also one of the best ways to tour the back end of Heathrow Airport, as it will take you around the southern perimeter on its way to Terminals 4 & 5, calling in at the Cargo Terminal en route. (Terminal 4 is closed to air passengers at the time of writing, but I believe that the buses are still calling there.)
The 203 from Hatton Cross to Staines, also a TfL route (operated by RATP), is less easy to cope with as it’s packed. It’s another of those routes that is crying out for double-deckers. Even a 6pm Sunday evening departure from Staines will be busy, so you can imagine what a 7.45am service looks like on a school day.
The Mercedes-Benz Citaro (a full 12m model) is rammed when it comes into Hatton Cross Bus Station (having originated in Hounslow) and remains so all of the way to Staines. Not a comfortable journey, especially as I have a suitcase with me on this occasion.
I’m now heading for the White Bus route 500 to Camberley. The driver seems surprised to see me; “the train would be quicker,” he says. “Yes,” I reply, “but far less interesting”!
I’m the only passenger on the 0915 departure from Staines Bus Station, although we soon start picking up passengers once we reach Egham, and it really is a lovely ride through the Surrey countryside. I had an aunt who lived in Egham so I know the town reasonably well. Her house is still there but now sits literally in the shadow of the M25 motorway. We pause at Sunningdale level crossing for a train to London to speed through, and are soon edging into Camberley, where the service is getting busier.
I came through Camberley on my 2008 trip as well. On that occasion I had travelled via the TfL 81 from Hounslow to Slough followed by the First Berkshire 191 to Bracknell.
My departure from Slough that day could not be replicated now. I was boarding at the old bus station; a dark, dismal place, since demolished and replaced with a new bus station that is far more pleasant but completely exposed to the elements.
As far as I can tell, the 191 no longer exists today. It was a two-bus operation on an hourly headway and took 55 minutes end-to-end, so any delay was likely to be damaging to its reliability. Such as, for example, the Changing of the Guard in Windsor, which left us stuck, on the 2008 trip, for 15 minutes and knocked the timetable right out. (The Changing of the Guard happened at the same time every day (still does), so why wasn’t something built into the timetable?)
I should have missed my connecting First 194 in Bracknell that day, but that was running late as well! That route does at least still exist today, now run by Thames Valley Buses.
I then took Stagecoach route 200 from Camberley to Basingstoke. I can’t find any evidence that this route exists now, and it doesn’t look as though there is a simple bus link at all between the two towns nowadays – a sign of the decline of bus services in affluent areas.
I have a recollection of passing through the village of Hartley Wintney, near Hook. There are still several bus routes through there, but none are very attractive in terms of frequency, few go very far, and none are going to get people out of their cars.
From Basingstoke I had taken the Stagecoach 86 to Winchester. This again doesn’t appear to be possible now but can be achieved by taking a 76 from Basingstoke to Whitchurch, from where the shortened 86 still runs to Winchester. Whitchurch is a small, pretty town, but the streets are very narrow and congested and it doesn’t look like the ideal place to change buses, or even to turn a bus around.
On my latest trip I am going from Camberley to Aldershot on Stagecoach route 1 – not the only route 1 I will use on this trip. This is a frequent Stagecoach Gold double-decker service and makes for a nice run through the Hampshire countryside via Farnborough.
ABOVE: Not a great bus picture but the best I have of Stagecoach Gold route 1 (Camberley to Aldershot). It’s 10776 (SN66 VYX), an Enviro 400 MMC. You may just make out the clear but non-intrusive route branding on the side. This is Farnborough Road at the junction of Prospect Avenue, north of Farnborough Town Centre, on Wednesday 4th August 2021.
It’s a very short run from Aldershot to Farnham on Stagecoach route 18 (19 minutes). Farnham is a pretty busy town based on a one-way system and it takes me a while to find the right stop for my next service. The 65 has originated in Guildford, but I am heading the other way, to Alton. This is also a Stagecoach service but this vehicle is an early 2000s double-decker towards the end of its working life.
The 64 from Alton is a considerable contrast to the 65. It’s an almost new Enviro 400MMC and I board at the station in Alton. As well as the South Western Railway service here there is also the preserved Watercress Line. I spent a day some years ago on a works outing down here, cleaning one of their locomotives (not by myself, I might add).
The 64 will take me to Winchester. I used the 64 / 65 combination on the second trip, albeit I was travelling in the reverse direction on that occasion. The 64 was a single-decker in those days and, though the 65 that I travelled on that day was a double-decker, I got the impression at the time that it was not the scheduled type then.
On the reverse trip I went right through to Guildford, before travelling on the 479 through to Epsom. The 479 is a route that has passed through a number of operators over the years. It’s currently with Falcon Buses (Stagecoach on Sundays). I can’t recall who was running it at the time of my trip (it was a small independent), but I was struck by how scruffy the driver was; the operator of the time clearly didn’t believe in uniforms.
The last Saturday bus on the 479 from Guildford is now at around 6pm – it was considerably earlier when I rode on it. From Epsom I was back onto the London bus network and able to navigate home via Kingston.
Winchester is the only common point to all three of my journeys other than the start and finish points. This is a lovely City, as I can testify from three visits since 2019 to ride the preserved King Alfred Buses.
There is a beautiful view of the City and the Cathedral to be seen from the top-deck as one descends into Winchester on route 64. I have tried 171 times to get a decent photograph of this (sometimes from an open top bus during one of the King Alfred events), but have never been successful. (Have a look on Google Streetview instead.)
ABOVE: Opposite the entrance to Winchester Bus Station is the fine Guildhall, which has a fascinating history (see https://guildhallwinchester.co.uk/about-the-guildhall/history/). How could I not include a photograph of it?
But Winchester is a rather small city, and the bus station is tiny. Not as tiny as it was – the narrow entrance used to be the exit as well and it always felt that, if two buses were to pull off opposite stands at the same time, they would collide. Thankfully, someone decided to push a separate exit through the back of the bus station a few years ago and the scope for collisions has diminished substantially.
ABOVE: One of the countrywide problems afflicting the British bus industry is the use of the same route number on more than one bus service in any given location, and no number is used more than the number 1. Traveline lists over 150 route 1s across the nation, and there are two in this article, of which this is – neither! This is the Stagecoach route 1 from Winchester to Stanmore (a suburb of Winchester), unconnected to my story except for the fact that it was entering Winchester Bus Station while I was awaiting my route 1 (the Bluestar version). This is 37414 (YX65 PYJ) on Wednesday 4th August 2021, showing the drab new Stagecoach livery which is far inferior to the previous one.
On both of my journeys towards Southampton I have caught service 1 from here. Now operated by Bluestar, a Go-Ahead Group operator, the current service is a quality operation using Enviro 400 double-deckers. The one thing that grates during my 2021 journey is a series of repeated announcements about the new ‘ticketless’ travel options that are now available using contactless cards. I hear this announcement six times during the 60 minute journey, interspersed with further announcements about face coverings, etc.
ABOVE: Bluestar 1647 (HF66 CFX) is heading into Winchester Bus Station, ready for another run to Southampton on route 1, on Bank Holiday Monday, 2nd May 2022.
The 2008 journey was very different. By the time I had got to this bus we were into the early evening rush hour. In those days the buses were single-deckers; in fact, the one I rode on was a Volvo B10B which had been new to London route 88 (then Clapham Common to Oxford Circus), in the days when that service was run as a single-deck operation branded as The Clapham Omnibus.
The trip to Southampton that day was very crowded and not desperately comfortable, and I could see where the middle door had been taken out and replaced with seats, which is why there was a window across the front of the first raised seat immediately behind…
I varied things on the later reverse trip, taking a Bluestar service 2 to Eastleigh and then travelling on a local service, E2, back into Winchester. My recollection is that this one was covered by an Optare Solo. It’s a Stagecoach route now, but I can’t recall who ran it at that time.
I don’t know what was different on the most recent trip, but I arrived in Southampton with so much time to spare that I was able to head out to Romsey on a Bluestar service 4, before going round to Winchester on a Stagecoach 66. That then resulted in my travelling for the second time within the space of three hours on route 1 into Southampton!
Will I make a further trip between home and Southampton some day? Never say never, but there are plenty of other rides to do first… If I wait another 13 years, I wonder how much of my 2021 trip will still be do-able?