In Happier Times:
A Day Out with Arriva Yorkshire
26 June 2022
ABOVE: Arriva 1518 (YJ61 OAO) a VDL DB300 Wright Gemini 2, in Westgate, Wakefield, at the start of another run to Bradford.
All photos in the article were taken on Monday 16th August 2021.
All photos in the article were taken on Monday 16th August 2021.
As I write this, a bitter indefinite strike has seen Arriva Yorkshire buses off the road for more than three weeks.
As I do not live in the area, I want to find out from Arriva’s website as to exactly which services are affected. Let’s say I’m interested in the 203 from Leeds to Huddersfield. After all, I had a ride on it last summer. Maybe I want to ride it again?
As usual, being that we’re talking about Arriva, the website is less than helpful in terms of useful information.
I go to a page labelled “Yorkshire Service Disruption”. That will tell me what I need to know, won’t it?
No. All it says is:
“We are disappointed for all our customers to confirm that the strike will be entering a fourth week, with no date yet for services being resumed. We remain committed to getting our drivers back to work and buses back on the road as soon as possible.
“We once again ask the union to call off the action and let our people vote on the latest pay offer.”
…after which is just advice on ticket refunds.
So which services aren’t running? Why is it so difficult to produce a list of numbers?
Incidentally, every Yorkshire service seems to have been taken off the Timetable pages of the Arriva site. Tap in any route number and the response is “No options” – not even a footnote to say that the service does exist, but is suspended – not great for future custom. Sadly, Arriva has been less diligent about taking information off other data feeds, so all services can be found in Traveline, for example.
In happier times, I had a day out with Arriva Yorkshire last summer, which started in the streets of Leeds City Centre at 7.50 in the morning.
If your bus from Leeds does not serve the City Bus Station, it can be quite tricky to find out where it goes from. Eventually, I find my way to Infirmary Street to catch the 446 to Wakefield. The double-decker bus pulls up but the driver has never heard of the ticket I am asking for – an “Adult Day West Yorkshire”.
Instead he sells me an MTicket, which turns out to cover exactly the same ground (West Yorkshire), but without being restricted to Arriva. It costs a teeny bit more, but presumably, as a multi-operator ticket, Arriva has to donate some of that into a central pot of some sort, so that my rides with other operators are reflected, whereas with its own ticket it would have kept all the money?
As I have said before, there are many different routes between Leeds and Wakefield (without the aid of a map – as Arriva don’t do them – it’s hard to know exactly how many). Look at a map of the route followed by the 446 and it’s a big semi-circle.
There’s a mistake on a bus stop flag in Stanley, where ‘Lane Ends View’ has been recorded as ‘Lanes End View’.
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ABOVE: SPOT THE DIFFERENCE between the road sign and how the road is described on the bus stop flag
Otherwise it’s a very quiet journey indeed, with very few passengers and little traffic to impede the journey – it’s too early for Freedom Pass holders and the schools are shut for the summer holidays.
I have written before about how Wakefield Bus Station is (normally) a “sea of Arriva blue” (have a look at the second photo in an earlier article). It must be very bleak there right now.
ABOVE: Another collection of Arriva buses in Wakefield Bus Station. The 118 & 110 are two of the routes that link Wakefield to Leeds. As well as these, and the 446, there are at least the 117 & 444, and there may be others. If you’re in hurry, the 110 is the one you need (or the train)!
My aim now is to ride the 268 to Bradford, but there’s a 427 loading up so I take that instead. There aren’t many route 427s around – there’s one (Acton to Uxbridge) that passes the end of my road, and the only other one I know of is a once-a-day school bus on the outskirts of Bristol.
This 427 is a nice run through places I have never heard of before, such as Tingley, Gildersome and Drighlington (plus Morley, which I have heard of)! The territory is quite built-up – lots of residential areas, out-ot-town retail and industrial estates, and we pass by the shadow of the M621, right where it meets the M62, making for a highly-complex series of road junctions; drivers new to the route must get palpitations about the risk of accidentally straying onto one of said motorways.
After an hour-and-a-quarter, I’m back in Bradford’s large interchange for a tea break. This is also the moment when I appoint a conveyancer to progress the sale of a flat that I am handling. Amazing what you remember about a day out on the buses!
I finally acquaint myself with the 268, which will take me back to Bradford, but over a different route. And the route here is very clearly defined on the front of the bus. We’re going “via Heck’ and Cleck'”, otherwise known as Heckmondwike and Cleckheaton. It’s Cleck’ first in this direction and I presume that my bus is going via “Cleck’ and Heck'”, but I forget to look.
We also pass through Dewsbury, a sizeable market town that I always seem to be passing through rather than stopping in. I’ve only set foot in the town once, to change buses – and even that wasn’t planned!
I’m back in Wakefield and not quite sure where I’m going next, but there’s a Team Pennine service 435 on the stand heading to Holmfirth. This is only a two-hourly service, and it’s a ride I have wanted to do before, so it’s too good an opportunity to miss.
Holmfirth is one of my favourite spots in West Yorkshire. I first visited in 1992, making it quite an early foray onto a non-London bus route (as I have said before, I didn’t venture much onto buses outside London until the age of digital information).
Of course it is the association of "Last of the Summer Wine" that brings me here whenever I get the chance, although I hadn’t been expecting to be here today. It’s a nice ride, and busy. I’m on my first single-decker of the day, though; a long Optare Tempo. Scenery like this merits a top deck ride really.
Team Pennine, a Transdev operation, has not long been running when I make this trip. The operation has only recently (about three weeks previously) taken over the old Arriva Flying Tigers operation as a going-concern. Since my visit, the 435 has been rebranded as the X1 "Holmfirth Explorer".
Holmfirth is quieter than I have seen it before. It is a Monday lunchtime, so one of the quieter days of the week, but maybe the effects of "Summer Wine" tourism are starting to fade now that the series has been been out of production for a decade.
The first time I went to Holmfirth there were five separate hourly buses between there and Huddersfield. Things have been simplified since and the 310 (now half-hourly) seems to do most of the heavy lifting on this corridor. This brings me into Huddersfield about 40 minutes later – slightly delayed by slow traffic on the outskirts of town.
I finish my day with a ride on the 229 back into Leeds – a service that I had got tantalisingly close to a few days earlier. It’s a half-hourly service, although the one after mine is shown on the Bus Station board as “cancelled”. We’re going back via Heck’ again, where a supplementary service makes it quarter-hourly the rest of the way to Leeds.
ABOVE: Arriva 1895 (GN58 BSX), an Enviro400, on route 229
We’re not far out of Huddersfield when I get a reminder of why buses in rural areas sometimes get seriously delayed – a slow-moving farm vehicle on the road in front of us. Farmers are road users as well so there’s not much to be done about such things, except perhaps to build a few more minutes into the stand time at the terminus so that a delayed arrival does not lead to a late departure. Fortunately we turn off quite quickly and the delay is minimal.
At Heckmondwike bus station I see two separate single-deckers working route 268. One of the buses is branded for route 254, and there’s a double-decker on the latter route also visible.
ABOVE: Arriva 1102 (KIG 7305), a Volvo B7RLE Wright Eclipse Urban, standing in for a double-decker on route 268. You might pick out the branding for routes 254 & 255 (Leeds to Dewsbury / Halifax).
ABOVE: Arriva 1106 (YJ08 DVK), another B7RLE, is also covering for a double-decker on roue 268 – perhaps for the one in the background that is working single-deck route 254 to Dewsbury?
And finally we’re descending into Leeds, via one last set of temporary traffic lights.
These rides are all good ones, and in normal times I would recommend making a day of it on Arriva Yorkshire. It has a good network of interesting services across the region, and I for one hope to revisit them in the future. Let’s hope that services are back up-and-running soon.