Jonathan Welch travels to the Peak District to find out about Stagecoach’s unusual diversification into BSIP-funded open-top services
It’s all too easy to jet off to a foreign land for a summer holiday and forget about the gems that lay within our own island shores. Across the UK, we have places to explore that are often overlooked; for those wanting to get out and see the countryside, national parks from Dartmoor to the Highlands offer all sorts of outdoor activities, but their roads are often busy and car parking limited.
Addressing a need to improve the tourist offer in the area, in 2023, Stagecoach launched the first iteration of its Peak Sightseer open-top service, featuring a loop based on Chatsworth House in the heart of the Peak District, which ran until Christmas Eve that year, catering not just for the summer visitors to the house and surrounding area, but also those going to Chatsworth’s famous Christmas markets.
For the 2024 season, experience having been gained from operating the route, a number of changes were made, including reducing the size of the loop to create what for this year is the ‘red route’ and adding a longer out-and-back ‘blue route to Castleton and dramatic Winnat’s Pass. It’s a route which has attracted significant attention, both in the local area and within the bus sector, marking an unusual diversification for Stagecoach Yorkshire.
This year’s service can draw upon a fleet of eight open-top buses, of which six are required for the daily PVR (peak vehicle requirement) of five plus one spare at Chatsworth in case of breakdown or, more likely, delays caused by the unpredictable traffic that the area can be affected by on busy days.
Something new
To find out more about the service, I headed to Stagecoach’s Chesterfield depot to meet up with Assistant Operations Manager Shayne Howarth and Commercial Director John Young, before joining Shayne for a trip out on the Peak Sightseer network, starting off on one of the feeder journeys which run from Chesterfield (and also from south Sheffield) to Chatsworth every morning. Chesterfield depot itself is an impressively large and spacious building, with a peak vehicle requirement of 73, plus a further 10 National Express Coaches, as well as the Peak Sightseer operation. Part of the site is also let out to another user, whilst a number of new electric buses for Stagecoach Oxford were being housed there at the time of CBW’s visit prior to delivery.
John explained a bit more about the background to the service. “Derbyshire County Council received £47m in Bus Service Improvement Plan funding,” he began. “Derbyshire has always been a positive local authority to work with when it comes to public transport. Like every local authority, there are budget constraints, but this was an opportunity to do something new and try to reinvigorate the market in many ways. The BSIP money was used for a whole range of things across Derbyshire.
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