Recent content by gingerheid

Regulations and cost incentives are such that are school services are, within the environment that has been created, always vital. In rural areas they also often always will be. However in urban areas I wonder how many would still exist if the schools were under joined up LA control AND the...

The thing is though... Flix in the UK is already profitable! This could show one of a few things. Either Flix has mastered life and found the winning formula, or National Express is seriously broken... or some kind of mixture of both.

Chapelhall's service just went up in the world! It's a shame that our public transport network and infrastructure are as fragmented as they are. There's a remarkable opportunity for park and ride services here, but of course it's not in anyone's interests to build car parks for services that...

I came here to say the same thing. I think what's incredible about it is: - the fact that Cambridge couldn't benefit from orbital services but the two we got carefully avoids most of the places they could usefully serve - the number of places they serve that you would only be at if you had a...

Working in badly managed places that are going to the dogs and have virtual queues of peeved customers is rarely bliss.

Looks like they're operating it from Sanquhar, based on the timetable for the 131!

Adding in the coach market will make the size difference even bigger. But then it gets worse. If one was to be willing to take support for the service idea to the ends of the earth and try and put ridiculous ideas into practice then they might try and work out how to separate those two...

It's certainly mental to delay spending to spread it over a long period when it increases the period of time before you start to get a return on your investment :-(

We wouldn't want a Chinese railway though. We're not a country that would accept something with a percentage chance of not killing a lot of people somehwere random in the high 90s.

In fairness the existence of the services was kept quite secret, and the length of time they took to crawl round to Waterloo was something else. However the idea sets you down a line of thinking that helps you realise what a doomed idea this is. One might say that a moderately reasonable way...

And it has almost all the overheads (in some respects perhaps even more) of a full scale long distance operator, but only one train a day on each route.

There is an excellent "UK Bus Timetables" group on Facebook, which has an amazing collection of timetabes that includes the attached 8-)

The old transport company owned stagecoach would have done that, but I doubt the new asset management company owned Stagecoach would. If anything they might be on the same trajectory as National Express but an earlier stage?

While I use Flix grudgingly on the same basis as I use Ryanair because sometimes you just have to, I would have to concede that one thing they do well is that the driver has a list of the names of passengers. If your phone isn't working they can check your ticket by name.

Their last UK accounts show a profit, though this was before the big expansion. If I compare their local performance to National Express then they do seem to have the magic touch, in a kind of Ryanair way. I never used the National Express service because the timings weren't good and it was...