Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

This kinda forms a supplement to my previous entry. That outlined the difficulties posed by having so many different transport operators in South-east Wales, and no overall structure to make ticketing easy and affordable. My friend and I are planning a trip to Caerphilly Castle (weather permitting, of course). Problem: find the cheapest way of doing it. You see, we'd initially have to pay to get from beyond Aberdare to Caerphilly – by bus and/or train – and then pay to get into the castle. Not cheap, as you'll see from the tables below. But luckily for us, I know the area quite well as I've travelled it extensively over the last forty years. I know bus routes have changed – and timetables and fares have certainly changed – but the basic framework is still there. I also get newsletters from the public transport providers, so I get to hear about their special offers. Summer is always a good time for these because it's tourist season. The real trick is to combine as m...

Next week I'm planning a day trip to Bristol, and I need to be a short distance outside the city centre by 12.30 p.m. Considering that Bristol Temple Meads lies on a direct route from Cardiff Central, that should be a piece of piss. Shouldn't it? You might think that – I couldn't possibly comment. To make sure I'm where I need to be in good time (and even that isn't guaranteed, of course), I'll have to arrive at Temple Meads at 1119. That gives me ample time to catch the bus to Bedminster and find the right place. (Any later and it'll be cutting things too fine.) So that puts me on the 1030 departure from Cardiff Central. And here's the problem. To get to Cardiff Central in time for 1030, I'd have to catch the 0922 train from Aberdare – eight minutes before the off-peak fares kick in. (According to raileasy.trainsplit.com I'd have to catch the 0852. I don't know whether they allow a margin of error for changing platforms.) Either wa...

On Saturday, two friends and I travelled from Cardiff to London by National Express coach. Yesterday I received a market research email asking for my feedback on the journey. Here's what I told them: I booked three seats on 31 May 2017, to travel on 29 July. Two months' clear notice. We were unable to sit close to each other because a large family was monopolising one seat each (to the extent of placing luggage on vacant seats), and ended up sitting some distance apart for the entire journey. We were travelling light. If we'd had luggage, we would have observed the guidelines and placed it in the baggage compartment – not taken it on board, so it would fill up a seat which someone had paid for well in advance. The British railway companies sell pre-booked seats (not tickets – seats), and National Express would do well to follow their example. This morning I received the following reply: Dear Steve, Thank you for taking time to submit your review. I am really sorry you were ...

It only occurred to me a few days ago that October 2016 marks thirty years of bus 'deregulation' (i.e. privatisation) across most of the UK. You won't have heard anything about this momentous occasion on the TV or radio news, of course. Nor will you have read anti-nostalgic articles about 'the bad old days' in the national press. That's because bus service were only deregulated outside Greater London – and, of course, as far as the Westminster Bubble of politicians, journalists, newspaper columnists and business lobbyists are concerned, that's pretty much the extent of the Observable Universe. As for the rest of us, as I've pointed out on several occasions, deregulation panned out exactly as the prophets of doom (myself included) said it would. The results included wonderful spin-offs of the capitalist system: cheaper fares initially, which quickly shot back up after cut-throat competition forced smaller operators off the road; fewer services running on...

It's that time of year again, when the claustrophobic nature of Aberdare and the closed-minded nature of many of its denizens really starts to grate on my nerves. It usually happens when the nice weather finally arrives, and my friends start embarking on day trips or short breaks to relieve the monotony of small town life. Yesterday, Rhian and I had a pint in the beer garden of Thereisnospoon, and talked about our various misadventures at the hands of Arriva Trains Wales over the years. It's a pity that I wasn't blogging back in the day, as I could have started a subsidiary blog charting the various events which prevented us from getting to work on time, or getting home at a reasonable hour. British Rail used to have an advertising slogan, Let the train take the strain . I told Rhian that my blog would have been called Let the Train Cause the Strain , and I've decided to adapt that title for this entry instead. I told her about a day trip to the north Devon resort of Ly...

I'm in Cardiff at the moment, using a remarkably slow wifi, even by Wetherspoon standards. I needed to get online as I had an email from Andy Tillison via Facebook yesterday (see Our Friends in the North .) By way of thanks for my support from (almost) the beginning of Gold, Frankincense and Disk Drive's career, he'd sent me the entire CD of Where Do We Draw The Line? and the accompanying booklet as a zip file. I didn't fancy using up all my bandwidth trying to download it using Myfi, so I decided to wait until I got to the pub instead. Shanara the Dippy Bint phoned me yesterday, to see what time I anticipated being in town. We must have some sort of weird psychic link, as we always seem to know when one of us is thinking about the other. We're going to have coffee in the restaurant of House of Fraser (which was formerly Howell's, and also played the part of Henrik's Department Store in a few episodes of Doctor Who ), as we can take the baby in there. After...

Having breakfasted in fine fashion at the Log Cabin near Symonds Yat Rock (see Rocking Around the Forest ), I retraced my steps through the trees and eventually emerged onto the minor road to Coleford. It didn't take me long before I found a signpost. It wasn't a great deal of use, to be honest – I already knew where I was, and travellers wouldn't exactly be spoilt for choice. To the north lies the village of Symonds Yat; to the south lies Coleford. There's not much in between, unless you count Berry Hill/Christchurch. But it confirmed that the strange twisting path through the forest hadn't totally confused my sense of direction. I was heading south, exactly as planned. The signpost also advised me that Coleford was two miles away. Once again I found myself in the unenviable position that Achilles had been in when racing the Tortoise. I was pretty sure that I'd walked a lot further than two miles to get to Symonds Yat in the first place. I looked at my phone an...

I've been planning a break away from Aberdare for the past few weeks. The stifling, small-minded, and claustrophobic ( polyphobic , in fact) nature of the place has really been getting me down lately. I'm bored to tears with seeing the same bloody faces and having the same mind-numbing conversations day in and day out (see A Brief Interlude .) Last weekend I decided to do something about it. I've had a tent for a number of years, but I've never actually used it myself. Mother bought it for me as a Xmas present after I went to Cropredy with the boys one year, and it seemed as through I might be doing festivals more often. In the event, that was my one and only festival. For various reasons I never bothered going again. Leafy borrowed the tent one weekend when he went camping, ages ago. Other than that, it's lived in the cupboard under the stairs for its entire life. I decided that it, and I, could do with some fresh air. I had a bit of money from a proofreading job I...

Well, it's less than half an hour before I set off for my expedition to the Forest of Dean. I've been through innumerable websites and compared a huge variety of bus timetables before deciding on my itinerary. Here it is: Aberdare (dep)                0950 Merthyr (arr)                 1030 Merthyr (dep)                 1100 Abergavenny (arr)           1225 Abergavenny (dep)          1530 Monmouth (arr)               1615 Monmouth (dep)             1715 Coleford (arr)               1735 As you can see from this, I'm actually not travelling for longer than I'm travelling. It would be nice to have a look around Abergavenny and Monmouth for a little while, but not with a tent and a rucksack in tow. There won't be anywhere to leave them, either, so I think I'll probably end up killing time in a pub or a café with the crossword and/or a book. Now, remind me again, what was all that crap that politicians used to talk about 'integrated public transport...

In just under two weeks' time, Trecynon (and the wider area of the Valleys, in fact) will resound to the relentless drone of motorcycles. The National Road Races have taken place in the Park, only a tyre's throw from my house, since I was in my early teens. When I lived in my old house, it wasn't too bad. I was too young to go to the pubs anyway, and if the Park was out of bounds for one Saturday a year, it wasn't any great loss. When I lived in Llwydcoed, we were more or less within earshot, but we still didn't get the full effects. I was working in Pontypridd, and later on in Cardiff, so I generally managed to be out of the house before the first wave of bikers arrived in the village. When I got back to Aberdare in the evenings, the pubs would be full of people winding down after the day's event (see Motorcycle Emptiness .) My young friend Cath P., was in Cardiff one day and called into the shop on her way to the station. We made our way home on the train, and...