A Dip in the Poole

A friend of mine is planning a trip to Poole in Dorset in the new year. (I won't go into details, but it involves stuff that young people do on smartphones, apparently.) Needless to say, she's called on my services as an independent travel consultant to plan out a route for her.

Easier said than done.

I was in my local library earlier, armed with Stuart K. Baker's indispensable Rail Atlas: Great Britain and Ireland (12th edition), and Ian Allan's companion book British Railways Pre-grouping Atlas and Gazetteer. (Both books are from my personal reference library – Aberdare doesn't have anything like those on the shelves – but I wanted to use the Wi-Fi.) Here's what I've found so far:

The Somerset and Dorset Joint Committee (a 'joint' line operated by Midland Railways and London & South Western) had what looks to be a nice route through Radstock, Shepton Mallet, Wincanton, Sturminster Newton and Blandford Forum. That was back in the days of steam, of course. It would have probably taken all day to get from Bath to Poole (and most of the previous day to get to Bath), but since it took us most of the day to get from Aberdare to London and back six weeks ago, we're kinda getting used to it.

I'd have written a nice newspaper article about the adventure, with some photos to add local colour. The Aberdare Leader would have printed it, no doubt, as that sort of novelty item would have been right up their street.

Unfortunately, Dr Richard Beeching deemed the S & D to be one of the many 'uneconomic' routes on which his axe fell in the mid-1960s. The North Somerset Railway project wants to preserve the stretch between Radstock and Hapsford (a few miles from Frome, where the trains still run), but that's as good as it gets. The line from Frome to Castle Cary is still open, but there's nothing running south from Bruton any more. The S&D (marked in red on the map) has all but disappeared by the time we get to Mr Baker's book.

You can get to Southampton from Cardiff by train, but that's the only service running direct to the South Coast. It's a long-winded alternative, running via Salisbury, and then changing at Southampton for a local train to Poole. It also costs an arm and a leg – unless we get into the mini-Hell that is split ticketing – so I'm looking for alternatives at the moment.

My first port of call was the National Express website. After all, they pride themselves on covering 'the whole of the UK', don't they? Well, kinda. I'd have thought you could get a coach from Cardiff to Bristol, and change there for a direct coach to Poole – or, failing that, a direct coach to Bournemouth, and catch a local bus from there.

No such luck. I've just checked their Journey Planner, and (believe it or not) the only way to get from Cardiff or Bristol to Poole or Bournemouth is via London. That's only a slight improvement on the steam trains I outlined earlier.

Next, I tried the Megabus website. Megabus is a subdivision of Stagecoach, and I've used them once to get to and from London. They seemed like a good prospect. After all, their marketing slogan is 'Low cost, intercity travel in the UK'. Students make up a sizeable proportion of their passengers, and they offer very low prices as long as you're flexible about when you want to travel. Surely they must be able to come up with a decent route. Wouldn't they? No, it seems …

I doubt if my friend really wants to travel from South Wales to Birmingham, and then to Southampton, and on to Poole, either by train or local bus services. (I saw her earlier on and she laughed out loud at the prospect. But at least she knows where Poole actually is now.) Nothing runs from Bristol or Bath to the South Coast. I'd assumed that Bristol would be a hub for services heading that way. Failing that, Salisbury would be a convenient interchange. It's about midway between London and the West Country, and if you draw a line between Bath and Southampton, Salisbury lies pretty much on that line. Then again, Bournemouth (population 183,491 according to the 2011 census) doesn't merit a place on the Megabus network. It's four or five times the size of Aberdare, and has a university and 'buzzing nightlife' (according to Wikipedia). You'd expect Megabus to offer somewhere like that as a destination. I did, anyway.

It all seems rather odd, doesn't it? Then again, in this, the Golden Age of Differentiated Public Transport, maybe it doesn't.

The final alternative was bus-hopping. I used to enjoy doing that when I was a lot younger, and before deregulation screwed your chances of getting connections between services run by the same operator, much less of connecting between rival companies. I went as far as Frome one day, using a rover ticket I'd bought in Bristol to hop between towns. You could do things like that back in the day. Bus stations had things like timetables and information offices, and if you knew what you were doing you could have some great adventures at a reasonable cost.

It turns out that it is possible to get from Bristol to Poole by bus: to Bath (an hour's journey time. Yes – a whole hour!); Bath to Salisbury (2 hours 45 minutes); Salisbury to Bournemouth (1 hour 14 minutes); and finally Bournemouth to Poole (35 minutes). It reminds me of my expedition to the Forest of Dean in July 2013 (see On the Road Again in my previous blog), when I spent more time not on the bus than I did in motion.

I haven't gone into the cost implications yet. My friend had a look at one of the train company websites, and the cheapest return ticket she found was about £60. As I mentioned earlier, we could probably get into split ticketing nearer the time, and – possibly – shave some money off the total. I know you can get from Aberdare to Bristol for about fifteen or sixteen quid, because I did it nearly two years ago. You could probably do Bristol to Salisbury for a similar sum. Switch to the bus for the run to Bournemouth, and go along the coast from there. But is it really worth the hassle?

I haven't suggested it to my friend yet, but I suspect she'd be better off booking an inclusive coach and hotel deal with one of the local tour operators. If the whole mission ends in failure, at least she'd have a bed for the night and breakfast in the morning.