RHODRI CLARK bemoans the lack of bank holiday buses in tourist towns — and even more the Lack of clear information about whether or not they do run — causing him to change his own holiday plans
PUBLICITY MATTERS
Having decided to spend the Easter bank holiday weekend in the historic town of Bridgnorth, Shropshire, my first port of call for bus information was Traveline’s online journey planner. This showed an attractive hourly service 436 by Arriva, hourly from the railhead at Shrewsbury. Journey time to Bridgnorth would be less than an hour.
For the return journey on Easter Monday, however, the journey planner showed only the first three services of the day. Asking for ‘Later’ times made no difference to the search results. My suspicions aroused, I downloaded the timetable as a PDF and was pleased to see that the service operates ‘Mondays to Fridays’, with no exceptions for bank holidays.
However, some doubt lingered, since no Sunday timetable was shown. Time to check Arriva’s own website, whence I downloaded a second PDF for the 436. This provided timetables for Mondays to Fridays and separate timetables for Saturdays, but nothing for Sundays. Again, bank holidays were not mentioned.
By now, an ordina…
