Wednesday 30 November 2011

Moving Day

This is a photo taken on the day the buses left Princess Rd Depot for the last time. I have almost cirtainly riden on the front two buses at some time in the fifties and early sixties but the 53 at the back brings back memories too. Extremely long circular route starting from Brookes's Bar. Just can't remember where it when to at the moment.
 
No more on Princess Rd depot until I next go up to Manchester.

Tuesday 29 November 2011

The Government has at last realized the South West is part of the UK

At 12:59 the chancellor announced that the A380 Kingskerswell bypass would be built. At last. The south west also got a small gift in that our water bills will go down by £50 per household. South West Water is the most expensive in the country and even with this 50 quid it will still be the most expensive in the country. On the down side (there always has to be a down side) my heating allowance arrived to day and is for £200 which is 50 quid less than last year. You can't win them all.

Ken Russell

Ken Russell died a couple of days ago at the age of 84. He made several films that were called controversial such as Women In Love, which featured Oliver Reed and Alan Bates wrestling nude. I never went to see that film as I can not stand DH Lawrence. I was forced to read Women in Love at college and decided that if ever Britain was to go on a book burning frenzy I would be first in line with an arm full of Mr Lawrence's tedius and apperently unending work. I call it unending because I never did get to the end of any of his books. I gave up on Sons and Lovers by page 17. But I digress. In all the mention on the news relating to Ken's career we got men wrestling naked again and again but not one mentioned his favorate film and the one he considered to be his best. If you haven't seen The Music Lovers yet then add it to the list of 100 things to do before you follow Ken into the great unknown.

Saturday 26 November 2011

Pensions Justice Event Walk

Public sector workers ( some of them ) are going put on strike on Wednesday. The ones that will effect the most people , unless you happen to be travelling in or out of Heathrow, are the teachers. Parents of younger children will be effected if they are working as they will have to either pay for extra child care, stay of work or risk letting their loved ones spend the day on the streets. Other disruptions will be to rubbish collections and to parking attendants. Piles of uncollected rubbish littering the streets and cars parked anywhere their owners feel like parking them will be an added hazard to anyone trying to move about. To add insult to injury Union St and Fleet St will be closed from 10:00 am to allow the striking workers to march through town to force home their message.

And what exactly is that message? Well I'll tell you. It is that supposedly well educated and allegedly intelligent people haven't got the brains they were conceived with never mind born with. Funds for public sector pensions have been paid for, until now, out of a seemingly bottomless pit called the tax payer. When I was a teacher the government took 6% of my salary to pay for my pension. When I worked for Stagecoach they also took a percentage of my wages to pay for my pension. The difference is Stagecoach invested the cash they took from me and put the proceeds into a pension fund. So when I get my pension from Stagecoach it hasn't been paid for by some one who got on a bus and paid his fare sometime last week. But the 6% the government took from me all those years ago wasn't put in a fund to grow and pay my pension. The money the government collected from you and me last month in the form of income tax is what is used to pay my teachers pension and I am getting a little concerned that us tax payers might not be able to sustain the level of giving required to keep all us public sector pensioners in Pensions. So is the government, twenty years too late in my opinion, but better late than in 10 more years. Hopefully they will manage for the next 20 years, after that I probably won't care. But what about the long term future, it isn't a problem that will go away unless the effects of global warming come upon us faster and much more savagely than most people expect.

So; don't go on strike, manage with what you get or eventually you won't get anything.

Friday 25 November 2011

Arriva in Malta

I know that Transport Malta and Arriva have recently amended the routes, but do we really now have a Sliema-Enfield Town link, as spotted on this bus on the Strand in Valletta?

And when they get to Enfield I assume there is a return journey. Would my bus pass get me there? It'd be cheaper than Ryan Air even if it did take a day or two longer. Well done, once again to Arriva because if nothing else, they really are having fun in the sun in Malta

Saturday 19 November 2011

Home Again from the North





I've just got back from a week in Manchester where the weather was fine except for the day I chose to take a drive up into the Peak District. That day it was thick fog, down to 15 mph at times. But a good time all the same.



So lunch time to day I went down to the Harbour for a walk round and a couple of pints and maybe take the odd photo or two. These are a couple of the ones I took. Three men were arrested for driving a car, possibly not theirs, onto the pavement to get some cash out of the ATM at the HSBC. I know parking can be difficult here in Torquay but this is an extreme way to avoid car parking fees.



There is a item in the paper about a call centre that was coming to Torquay and hopefully providing 500 out of work people with a job. Seems the place they wanted isn't big enough but they can't have their call centre in a bigger building because there isn't planning permission in place. With 500 hundred jobs at stake you would think the Mayor would drive round to all the homes of the councillors on the planning permission committee, take them to the Town Hall and say," You aren't leaving here until planning permission is granted for the call centre. You've got 20 mins before the shotgun comes out and blood will be shed."



But this is Torbay so there might actually be a meeting some time next summer to set up a working party to discover if Torbay does in fact have a planning permission committee. Usually people who apply for planning permission give up and go somewhere else or die of extreme old age or boredom.



And in Complete Contrast and an example to our beloved but apparently inapt council. An other item in the same paper is about Elliot Massey a



Torbay Boys' Grammar pupil. Elliot, helped by a group of friends, run a website TorbayBusRoutes which has around 35,000 visitors a month. It has timetables and information on all six local bus companies.



He has also been concentrating on developing MyStop, his revolutionary new computer/phone app to help local bus users. The simple mobile-friendly MyStop service allows users to check on the next bus from their mobile phone and all departures by logging on and selecting where they are. All this from a young man who collapsed on the Strand a few months ago and spent over a week in intensive care where he was diagnosed with heart-stopping ventricular fibrillation. That's something most people don't know they've got until it kills them. He now has a defibrillator implant to stop another cardiac arrest and takes beta blockers. None of this stops him though and I for one am waiting to see what turns up next.



Click here for the MyStop web site.

 

and here for Torbay Bus Routes


sorry I got the link wrong last time round and thanks to Simon for mentioning it.

Tuesday 15 November 2011

What's Happened to Princess Rd Bus Depot

On Monday I borrowed my brother's car. I wanted to go somewhere in South Manchester so drove down Princess Rd. Now ever since I can remember there has been a bus depot in Princess Rd. In fact in 1948 I went to the school, Bishop Bilsborrow Memorial School, that was right next to the bus depot. From time to time our football would get kicked over the wall for the school playground into the depot and I used to go round to collect it. The bus drivers usually made us wait at the entrance while they went and got the ball but now and then we went for it ourselves. So this was the first and as it happens the only enclosed bus depot I have ever been in. It was huge, smelling of oil and full of noise and loads of mysterious machinery and a few buses. Always an exciting place to visit.

So there I was driving down Princess Rd looking out for the big clock tower. Under the clock tower was the original entrance, very high for the trams to get in but by the time I started school the trams had all been taken up to Hyde Rd depot, had petrol poured over them and set on fire. Sad. Past Clarmont Rd and no sign of the clock, I was getting worried, what had happened to it?

I was soon to find out, sadly.

It has been pulled down, demolished, flattened, turned into a pile of rubble to make way for 200 houses. The has school suffered the same fate. Is nothing sacred? Have all the buses been taken up to Hyde Rd depot and set on fire like the poor trams?
 
PS 62 years after setting foot in Bishop Bilsborrow school I decided to look him up and find out why he had a school named after him. he was Bishop of Salford in the last quater of the 19th century and a strong advocate of eduction for all, rich and poor. He died in Babbacombe in 1903. You learn some thing new every day. (I hope)

Princess Rd Bus Depot Manchester

On Monday I borrowed my brother's car. I wanted to go somewhere in South Manchester so drove down Princess Rd. Now ever since I can remember there has been a bus depot in Princess Rd. In fact in 1948 I went to the school, Bishop Billsborrow Memorial School, that was right next to the bus depot. From time to time our football would get kicked over the wall for the school playground into the depot and I used to go round to collect it. The bus drivers usually made us wait wt the entrance while they went and got the ball but now and then we went for it ourselves. So this was the first and only enclosed bus depot I have ever been in.


So there I was driving down Princess Rd looking out for the big clock tower. Under the clock tower was the original entrance, very high for the trams to get in but by the time I started school the trams had all been taken up to Hyde Rd depot, had petrol poured over them and set on fire. Sad. Past Clarmont Rd and no sign of the clock, I was getting worried, what had happened to it?




It has been pulled down, demolished, flattened, turned into a pile of rubble to make way for 200 houses. The has school suffered the same fate. Is nothing sacred? Have all the buses been taken up to Hyde Rd depot and set on fire like the poor trams?

Saturday 12 November 2011

1111111111



Nothing particularly striking or special about this photo. It was taken on the Snake Pass in The Peak District on a cool foggy morning at a place called Nether North Grain. The one thing that marks it out against all my other photos is when it was taken, on the 11 November 2011 at 11 minutes past 11, or to write that time and date out using the following system, yymmddhhmm, it comes up as 1111111111. The world didn't end, a chorus of angels didn't burst into song, the pyramids didn't take off and vanish into space to rejoin their makers, a new world order didn't start in which all debts were wiped out (Pity). It just a time and date that won't turn up again for a hundred years. But the same could be said for any such date.

Thursday 10 November 2011

Green Buses?




I am up in Manchester for my annual family visit. Very warm day for the time of year so I went in to town to take a few photos, Never seen a green Stagecoach before and here are two in Piccadilly Bus Station. Did some colour blind painter get hold of the wrong can of paint or is there some reason for this new colour scheme?




I travelled up to Manchester yesterday by train instead of by coach. It took 3 hours less and travelling by train is much more comfortable than by coach. The lower ticket price on the coach used to be worth the extra time and discomfort but our wonderful, much loved government recently removed the subsidy they paid to Nation Express to provide us over 60s with half price coach tickets and now the difference in fares is almost insignificant. Still we must all make some sacrifices other wise the country will end up like Greece and Italy, sadly about to go broke.

Tuesday 1 November 2011

Two Tales of One Tree

On Saturday I took this photo of the rather bare looking tree on Abbey Gardens.




Then I went by on Monday only to find the tree surgeons had cut the tree in to small pieces so it could be removed from the site more easily. Turns out it had been blow down some time in the early hours of Monday morning, fortunately the elderly couple weren't still walking by.

Torquay United won again on Saturday and won the midweek game. That's 2 games won out of the last 8. Plymouth Argyle aren't doing too well, still stuck at the bottom of the Table. At least the saga of administration is over now that local business man James Brent has taken over the club. Well done Mr Brent.