'Bus replacement deserves thought
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I AM WRITING to comment on your news item relating to Tory MP Peter Fry's comments on the Serpell Report which appeared in CM, February 12.
In your news item, it says: "it was true that after the Beech ing Report when buses replaced trains the results had been disappointing and the buses had been rapidly withdrawn".
If we look back to the mid-60s and ask ourselves why this was, perhaps I might be permitted to recall a situation that arose within a company I was working for at that time.
The railway line, which went into another operator's territory, was closed, so a joint replacement bus service was operated by the two companies concerned calling at places where hitherto there had been railway stations.
Fine, you may think, but what publicity was the service given? I remember in the bus inquiry office in the town at one end of the route a pile of British Railway leaflets advertising the bus service, and presumably a similar situation applied at the other end of the route, and so far as I am aware that was all.
Because of a fear of an abstraction of passengers from existing bus services, no publicity was carried in the timetable booklet and no attempt whatsoever was made to publicise the service in likely locations on line of route. Casual passengers, who previously would have used the train, quite clearly would not go anywhere near the railway station to find out about a replacement bus service knowing that the railway no longer existed, so what happened was the service very rapidly lost its passengers and was abandoned.
I do sincerely believe that the bus service could well be a bit more enlightened now and would welcome any opportunity to obtain additional work.
A former railway passenger transferring to a replacement bus service could well be a bus passenger found for other routes as well, and I applaud Peter Fry's view that bus replacement services should be seriously considered.
T. KNOWLES Lancaster Transport Dept