Graham Butcher

Chelmsford at the time was only a market town with a population of around 100,000 so hardly a city, and it was a very common sight to see buses sort of forming a convoy on the town routes. In the mornings and evenings as well, there used to be special "Works" services that would be be routed from the edges of the town into all the factory sights dotted over the town and the reverse in the evenings to take them all home. It would be these services that I and many of the engineers would catch to go to the garage in the mornings. When I got myself a car (Hillman Minx of 1957 vintage) I was then asked to be one of the first to arrive in order to ensure that the buses were already ready for the crews to take on the road. Twice a year I would definitely be the very last person to leave the garage as I had to ensure that the clocks were all resynchronised with the clocks being reset to reflect the Summer Time 1 hour difference. These were mostly operated by a master clock in the offices with the others being slaved from that on ring circuit with 20 second pulses to all clocks. This is/was the differences between a nationalised service and private services, the former was a public service and run for the benefit of its users, the public and the latter, purely for profit and the public go do whatever they like.

That for me is easy to do, when you see one normal service bus full up and following behind it is two or three other buses showing in the destination blind s window either the words "Duplicate" or "Relief", meaning that there was far too many passengers requiring the normal service bus so the inspectors at the garage decided bring out more buses to take those passengers, rather than leaving them to catch the next service bus in 20 minutes time. Did you have to erect some tents or bring some caravans?

@Ootohere and with many buses across the UK running at less than 15% capacity each time, that's a load of pollution being produced for nothing, whereas if those buses were running much nearer to 100% each time, then they would be more environmentally friendly. Strangely enough that is almost as they were when I worked on them, often running well at 200 to 300% at peak times, which took loads of cars of the roads, and roads lasted far longer and potholes were almost unheard of and then capitalism took over and worked against the best interests of the country.

Like so much in this thread, this is loosely connected with the theme of electric cars, but it was mentioned a week or so about electric boats, and this has popped up in my suggested viewing list on YT.

Neither am I, but the expectancy in 1960 was low compared with today anyway, and in 1950 it was 68.69 years and I'm a 1949 child, so already beaten that expectancy figure and my mother was a 1922 child so what was her expectancy figure I wonder?

My Late father died in his 40s and my Mother went on till she was 92.

When you had your attack, were you in a very dusty environment, because that is what I've been told is more likely to trigger an attack these days.

Now I'm not looking to start an argument here or anything, but like you say, just pointing out the bleeding obvious. I have stated before how I used to suffer from very bad Asthma years ago (when the air was really polluted and we always had every winter really thick fogs), I used to have to carry with me at all times 2 inhalers and I had (still have it somewhere) a peakflow meter to measure my lung capacity, none of which I needed now for over 20 years, that is a sign of just how much we have cleaned the air as the engines keep getting cleaner and every new Euro standard takes that a significant jump forwards. Now if the air was as polluted as we are being told it is then why is that in 1950 the life expectancy of an adult here in the UK was just 68.69 years and today that has jumped up to 81.92 years. Now mine and also my sons personal experience of Asthma seems to back up the theory that pollution has been cut massively and looking at the percentage change year on year, that growth rate, since the introduction of the low emission zones across the UK, has dropped pretty dramatically and even went as low 0.07% in 2014, from 0.29% the year before and is currently only at 0.18%. My late father once said that one day they would find a way of taxing the very air we breathe, and it certainly looks like they have finally found how to do it. That to my mind that is a pretty good illustration of why it seems we are all globally having the wool pulled over our eyes by politicians who are being lead by lobby groups like the World Economic Forum (WEF) and the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) and others who are being secretly funded by many wealthy companies with vested interests in the outcome of them getting political agendas changed. U.K. Life Expectancy 1950-2024 | MacroTrends

Well, I'm not 100% positive, buy I think that Amazon may not be all that impressed with their electric vans. I thought that my local delivery depot had EV vans, but the last few times they came to me there were in ICE vans.

Occasionally we get a red kite take a bird in flight and land in our back garden to devour its catch, my son has taken photos of it on a number of occasions, and we get left with after that is a load of feathers, which it plucks from its kill.

So, are La Poste and EDF still using EV vans or are they beginning to go back to ICE?

This video is very informative I thought and helpful.

Correct the people concerned, one has to accept, that the others have considered the options and decided that the car is often the right tool for the job. As an example, when I was working on the buses, I often had to get to the bus garage before any buses where scheduled to be running, in fact on many occasions I would be the first to arrive and at others, the very last to leave, when I had to drive a bus out into the sticks with the other last person to leave, the refueller on board as his last bus left before he even started his shift. I would then have to turn the bus around, drive back to the garage, open it up, park the bus inside and then lock the garage up with all the buses inside all washed, fuelled and any running repairs completed, ready for the drivers the next day, then drive my car home.

So who is this Bolton at Home then? If they don't own the back alley, then maybe that is a council owned alley and maybe its them who won't allow people to install chargers? I assume (maybe wrongly) that Bolton at Home is possibly a Housing Association? Bingo, that is what they are Bolton at Home - Homes and neighbourhoods we can all be proud of | Bolton at Home

Haha, I, love the bus too, seeing as they don't cost me a penny and I can go almost anywhere in the country, but it's all the standing around at bus stops in all weathers and the sheer amount of time that it takes along with the time limits placed on my senior bus pass that does my head in. Plus of course at 75 years old I'm not any as nimble or fit as I used to be in my 40s or 50s and even getting up the stairs is a bit of a struggle these days as well. So on a pure financial basis the bus would a no-brainer option if it was just myself that needed to be somewhere (as long as it was within the time limits attached to the free pass) but sadly the body says otherwise. Using the bus pass sort of takes me back to the time when I worked on them as part of the "perks" was that I used to get free travel at any time on the National Bus Network, and I used to do just that, but things do change.

And the real question here, surely, is what do you do when in Castleford, how do you do your shopping, at say Asda or the other retail centres? When Asda first opened up here in my city they used to provide free bus service to and from the store, that has long since stopped happening.

So says the person who knows everything. I did ask you many months, maybe even a couple of years ago what your age group was and you never answered that in fact I seem to recall you gave me what you thought was a clever answer 😒 I'm going to guess that you are either quite young or middle-aged and so you have simply no idea what other people far older can do or indeed would wish to do, but please remember that as you get older, your priorities change as does your physical well-being and capabilities.

Oh for the record, I was implying that you said the buses were the answer, did you close, the railway goods service down? That was I believe the government of the day and hence the question was aimed at politicians, and hence why I don't have any faith in the governments over the current electric car policy which I firmly believe will be proven in due course to be the wrong strategy Problem is that for me to use the park and ride, I have to drive out of the city to park and bus back into the city to go shopping, juggle 5 or 6 bags of shopping onto a bus to go back to the park and ride car park and drive back into the city, zero logic there for me, just juggling the bags is a no-no, I can't walk that far, not particularly steady of my feet either, yes, yes, I know, the right tool for the job, which is exactly what I'm already using. I'm like you, speaking from a personal view point of what is right for me. You will never get the other options right for most people in today's society, people lead such a busy life now, many have second jobs in order to make ends meet, and the places that have to be at various times are these so often in opposing directions and locations. Years ago all shopping, banks, dentists, libraries, dentists etc all used to be in the town centres, these days that is no longer the case (London might still be one of the exceptions due to its maturity). In my city for instance, it used to be a small market town that has steadily grown over the years and is now granted city status. All the essential services that people used on a regular basis were all located in the town centre which was then tightly encircled by housing estates. This growth has meant that the town centre could no longer cater for peoples weekly food shopping requirements and many of the buildings were listed buildings and so knocking them down and building larger shops was not an option. That meant that supermarkets moved out to the edge of town where there was open spaces for them to build big stores and car parks. Then along come more housing estates beyond them and the shops etc that they vacated have converted into flats etc in the city centre so we have a city centre that is mainly residential and eating establishments with a couple of shopping malls that are decades old and there is not a single food shop in either of them. Now I have seen the same thing repeat itself time and time again all across the country in smaller towns. In the old days, you never had to wait long for a bus to arrive as the town was pretty small and so a bus would take only a few minutes to go from end to the other of its route these days the routes are so long that there are no routes that do that, all routes now from the edge of the city to the pedestrianised centre and back again, hence they are called shuttles now. So depending on where you need to go it could involve multiple bus changes and walk a across the pedestrianised centre to reach your next boarding point add in a fixed (currently £2 per bus, per person) it could be a lengthy and expensive process, and hence a car makes it so much more comfortable, quicker and easier and can also be cheaper than buses.

@Winston_Woof true, but the car will take you door to door in comfort and at a time of your choosing 😉

On the subject of switching a car for train on a trip, how much do you think a sleeper cabin for an overnight train between London and Cornwall costs? £217, yes, that's right that's one way, not a return. No wonder car is king, well under half that price you can get 5 people to Cornwall.

The only way that lecky will get cheaper is with proper regulation or better still take it back into public ownership so any profits remain here in the UK and not foreign banks.

That obsession with cars has largely been driven by governments and the lack of joined thinking. When I worked on the buses, they used carry large posters on the back of them saying something along the lines of "its me or upto 70 cars, which would you rather have" Also there was some hard effort put into the timetables to ensure that when the trains pulled into the station from London, as many of the local bus services were due to arrive about the same time at the station in order to take the commuters onwards to their homes. That does not happen any more. The buses when privatised almost immediately started switching to OMO buses (One Man Operated buses) so that then meant that buses spend more time stationary at the stops as the driver took fares and as @skomaz said rival buses would block others in at stops in an attempt to scoop up the others passengers and make more profit. The government sold it to the public as giving the consumer greater choice and a better service etc, (now where have I heard similar before), when in reality it was the reverse, services chopped, fare rises and poorer bus services and poorly maintained buses as well, not to mention increased traffic jams as a result of the loss of bus conductors took its toll. When I was working on the buses, my estate was on the very edge of town and at peak periods mornings, lunchtimes and evening when people finished work and headed home it was very common to see 3 or 4 of the double-decker buses in convoy from the train station to my estate, full of passengers, 4 time an hour, each bus could carry up to 80 people. Compare the with the buses we have these days 3 times an hour and a further 3 large estates have been built after mine and the bus also goes onto the large hospital at the very edge of the city and it is these small single deckers which are never even anywhere near half full. And this video shows one of them running from my Skoda dealer into the city centre, with a handful of people on board. So tell me again just how buses are the answer, and who was it that drove people into car ownership, and who is it that now wants to separate us from our cars?

Here in my city, the railways used to have a pretty large goods yard and also small branch lines that used to run into local factory sites that are now large housing estates in the red square number 1 to the side of the station can be seen the old goods yard with small lines that used to go to Hoffman Ball Bearings factory, Marriages the flour millers and also Marconi's radio and TV transmitter factory, all now have gone and huge estates built. In the red square 2, there was another great big factory Crompton and Parkinson who made electric motors, electrical test gear, control panels and also did some electrical fit outs on diesel locomotives. When I was working on the engineering side of the then nationalised buses (Eastern National) who had the main garage and station on the other side of the road by the train station I often had to go and meet trains that were also carrying urgent spares for the buses, from the Coach Builders in Lowestoft (Eastern Coachworks), or parts from Bristol who made the bus chassis and from Gardeners who made the engines or even CAV who made the electrical parts. When Beeching made his cuts, all of those items were transferred to road transport and the diesel locomotives went up north somewhere to be fitted out. So that was a shot in the foot because look at the problems we have today with roads and the pollution from the exhausts, CO2 nox etc, which ever you look at it, many of the problems we are facing today are the direct result of poor political decisions taken years ago.

Very true, but that percentage change of a fire shoots up quite a bit higher as the cars age, and I can see exactly the same thing happening when and if electric cars last until they reach 11 to 16 years of age. Plastics and other insulation will begin to breakdown etc and fail leading all kinds of things happening as old electrical appliances in the home also begin to fail as they age.

Well I and a good few other people are going to have to continue to disagree with you. This country and quite a few others around the world all operate on a for-profit basis and if that profit is not there except for certain times of the day, then those services are simply not being offered outside the lucrative times, full stop. Our rail network was destroyed many years ago by the Beeching cuts when large chunks of the infrastructure were removed and disconnected from the system, leaving people living in the areas served by the trains no other options but to either move to a large city (not at all easy or possible for many people) or go and get themselves a car and join the car set. Buses in these areas is also not an option as I know from actually working in that sector when they were nationalised that rural parts of the country would get a limited bus service at certain times of the day, again not ideal, but better than what they get today, with zero bus services. Since they were denationalised it is run as profit centre, no profit, no service. When that happened the publicly owned Royal Mail decided to operate a fleet of mini-buses in the rural areas but was only operating when the post was being either delivered or collected from post boxes or village post offices, the later of which have now largely been axed. The Royal Mail is now a privately owned business focused on profit only, so these services now no longer run. Even in some large towns and cities the bus service is woefully inadequate and offers only a partial solution with large chunks of real estate not being covered and the areas that are covered only operate between certain times and when you get things like flu, or covid etc, then they operate like massive conduits to pass it onto the population in vast numbers because that the only transport available. No I'm sorry, but mass transit systems are not the solution, they are part of a solution if you happen to live in the right area, which London is just about the best connected city in the UK but even then it does leave a lot to be desired. You happen to live in London and I have heard the arguments that you present many times before and almost certainly it is repeated by people like you who live in London and can take a reasonable level of service for granted, those less fortunate cannot see the logic in your thinking. To advocate dropping the car and using mass transit system is like it or not going backwards, a bit like taking away your UHDTV and giving you back in its place an old black and white TV with just 3 programs, BBC1 BBC2 and ITV in 405 lines transmitted via the air and if you again happen to be in the right location, you can get a picture. You would not be happy with that, I'm sure.