The 292 bus route from Kidderminster to Ludlow – an important transport link?

292 at Kidderminster Bus Station in 2010

I have recently been on a short break to Cleobury Mortimer in Shropshire, travelling there by train and bus from where I live in Lichfield. The train journeys, from Lichfield to Birmingham and Birmingham to Kidderminster went very smoothly and were quite a pleasant experience. There were a number of route permutations, but we chose to walk between Birmingham New Street and Birmingham Moor Street, both on the way there and back. The bus leg from Kidderminster, on the Diamon bus 292 was rather less easy. The bus didn’t stop at Kidderminster railway station, with the nearest advertised stops (on Google and various websites) being 400m away in Oxford St. Arriving there however, we found this was not the case, with no mention of the 292 on the timetables at the stop, so we walked on to the bus station, another 400 yards away. There we eventually did get the bus, which was running over half an hour late. The journey itself was fine, and as we were in no hurry, the delay was of no particular concern to us.

Over the days that followed, I kept track of the buses on the 292 route between Kidderminster, Bewdley, Cleobury Mortimer and Ludlow, and it soon became clear that the lateness was endemic. The journey was timetabled for 50 to 55 minutes, with a two-hour frequency, with one bus shuttling backwards and forwards – see the timetable below – from https://bustimes.org/services/292-kidderminster-ludlow . This timing was simply too tight to ensure punctual running throughout the day. Whilst some of the delays came from congestion in the towns at either end of the route as might be expected, the most critical delays were due to parked cars on the A4117 between Bewdley and Ludlow requiring single file traffic through the towns and villages along the road. Such delays could of course be quite easily eliminated, given the political will.

Current 292 Timetable

Now service 292, currently operated by Diamond buses, is actually the truncated remains of a much longer Midland Red service with the same number, that ran from Birmingham to Kidderminster, Ludlow and Hereford. A time table for this service is shown below from 1991 for the Birmingham – Hereford direction – from http://midlandred.net/service/timetable/display.php?routeID=1007. The service was withdrawn, apart from the Kidderminster to Ludlow leg, in the early years of the current century. It can be seen at that time there was an hourly service between these two towns, rather than the current two hourly service. This represents a considerable degradation in service provision.

292 Timetable 1991

But the transport context has changed in many ways over the last few decades. The role of the long-distance bus has been largely taken over by trains, with a much greater frequency than 30 years ago. On the original 292 route there are now 4 trains an hour to Kidderminster from Stratford upon Avon through Birmingham, either terminating there or continuing to Worcester, and two from Worcester to Birmingham; at Ludlow there are two trains per hour in each direction between Manchester, Shrewsbury, Hereford and various destinations in south Wales. So in this sense, the truncation of the service was sensible and appropriate.  It now serves a purely local market for those who live on its route.  But I would argue, in any sane country that takes seriously the need to reduce carbon emissions and the need for modal change (i.e. not the one in which I reside), the Kidderminster to Ludlow route would be of some strategic importance. With improvements in frequency and connections with rail at Kidderminster and Ludlow, it would offer a route from the West Midlands conurbation, via  the Stour Valley line, into south Shropshire and the Marches, with major tourist potential. Further, if the route were combined with the hourly 52 from Kidderminster to Bromsgrove (and ultimately Redditch), it would offer connections from the south west at Bromsgrove into the same area, and also from the Cross City line that serves the north of Birmingham and the city centre. The 52 actually runs past both Bromsgrove and Kidderminster stations. Continuation of the service north of Ludlow to Craven Arms (in parallel with the railway) would offer connections to the Heart of Wales line, whose tourist potential has not been fully developed, and perhaps further to Welshpool for connections to the Cambrian line. All these possible connections are shown in the figure below.

But life is of course not that simple. For such a service to be a success other changes would be necessary. Firstly, efforts would be required to split the local markets in Ludlow and Kidderminster from the longer-distance markets to make overall journey times on through services as short as possible. There is no reason why this should not be possible but would require extra resources in terms of service provision to meet the requirements of the very local market. This mix of markets has been a major reason for the demise of long distance inter-urban buses in the past – perhaps most recently in the truncation of the Oxford to Cambridge X5 at Bedford, because the local market between Bedford and Cambridge resulted in significantly increased journey times.  Secondly, attention would need to be paid to the interchange points at either end of the route. For example, the bus stops of the Bromssgrove to Kidderminster route at Kidderminster Railway Station are on narrow pavements on a road bridge over the railway line – a very uninviting and inconvenient place for mode transfer. Attention would also o fcourse need to be paid to timetabling to ensure suitable connection times.

The other issue is of course more structural in that there is no overall transport policy in the UK that would facilitate such developments – see the recent blog by Christian Wolmar on this. And this lack of an overall policy means that resources cannot be channeled to such schemes, despite the fact that their benefits would be significant in terms of carbon emission reductions and stimulating local economies. It has always been thus as far as I can remember. I still want to believe that a competent government will one day realise that this is the road to take. But perhaps I am here opening myself up to a charge of naivety.