Is Your Journey Really Necessary?

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...

During the recent Rugby World Cup the state of the Welsh railway network came under scrutiny again. After each game at the Millennium Stadium, thousands of people descending on Cardiff Central Station found themselves in the predicament we've all become sadly familiar with after a home fixture: delayed trains, cancellations, and massive overcrowding on the services which did operate. The trials and tribulations of rail passengers during special events in Wales are nothing new, it seems. I've just found an irate letter to the Swansea-based Cambrian newspaper, published on 24 March 1882. THE TREATMENT OF EXCURSIONISTS—WHO IS RESPONSIBLE? SIR,—Permit me, through the medium of your columns, to record my vehement protest, on behalf of a large number of excursionists, against the treatment we received at the hands of the railway officials who had charge of the excursion train from Swansea to Pembroke Dock on Saturday last, on the occasion of the launch of the ironclad "Edinburg...

I still haven't finished working on the second half of my analysis of bus services within the Cynon Valley. I know it's taking ages, but every time I start making progress the companies change their timetables again. The most recent changes I heard about only a couple of weeks ago. It appears that services after the evening 'rush hour' (or what passes for rush hour in the Valleys, anyway) have been drastically curtailed. I'm reliably informed that after 6 p.m. you'll be unable to catch a bus to Llwydcoed, Cwmbach or Cwmdare. That puts these outlying districts on a par with Penderyn, Rhigos, Abernant, Perthcelyn and Cefnpennar, with no services at all on Sundays either. It's always baffled me why there's such a rapid drop in services after 6 p.m and at weekends. Logic would suggest that there'd be more demand for public transport, not less. After you get home from work, it's nice to go out for a couple of pints in the evening. Young people, too, ...

My brother used to work as a cartographic draughtsman for a number of public bodies. In fact, we used to joke that if anyone was ever digging up the ground anywhere in Wales (and a fair chunk of Western England), there was a good chance that he'd drawn up the plans beforehand. One useful piece of jargon I picked up from his career was 'desire line.' You've probably all come across desire lines, but I expect very few of you ever realised that they had a name. According to Wikipedia (because I'm at home, and I haven't got access to any textbooks on Town and Country Planning): desire path (also known as a desire line , social trail , goat track or bootleg trail ) can be a path created as a consequence of foot or bicycle traffic. The path usually represents the shortest or most easily navigated route between an origin and destination. The width of the path and its erosion are indicators of the amount of use the path receives. Desire paths emerge as shortcuts where...

Since leaving politics, the former Conservative MP Michael Portillo has carved out a new career as a broadcaster. His Radio 4 series The Things We Forgot to Remember looks at major historical events from angles which don't normally get covered in books. However, in my opinion, his real triumph started from a brilliantly simple idea: to use a Victorian guide to the British railways as a basis for exploring the history and culture of these islands. Great British Railway Journeys does exactly what it says on the tin. Mr Portillo criss-crosses a section of the country by train, visiting places which were mentioned in George Bradshaw's guides from the 1860s. At each stop he meets a local guide and gets a potted history of some of the events which shaped this country's development in Victorian times. I watched three of these programmes back-to-back last night, and only stopped because my medication had kicked in. To be perfectly honest, I could have watched them all night witho...