Saturdays

Yesterday (Saturday) usual sort of lunch time, all the children come out for an afternoon in Torquay. All with a ten pound note clutched in their hand, standing in a queue 4 or 5 long. Not a problem if you have been working for a few hours and have plenty of change, but if like me you have just started it can rapidly drain away all the float. And there is always one who gets a single ticket. Not planning on going home?, I used to ask but I have long since given up on that. I just wait for them on the way back trying to use the single ticket.

Then a bit later I was driving through Roselands on the way to Brixham ( the first of 3 trips down there) when an other 12A went by me heading for Newton. Nothing unusual in that except that it was followed less than a minute later by an other 12A. They should be 15 minutes apart, it wasn't busy so why was a bus running late? An other minutes passed, like minutes do and the voice of the controller drifted out from the loudspeaker attached to the radio, yes,it's still working. He wanted to know if the temporary traffic lights at the road works on the way to Brixham were still playing up. Oh my god. not more temporary traffic lights playing up? Haven't we had enough of temporary traffic lights playing up to last at least until Easter? Apparently not. Going into Brixham 20 cars at a time, coming out; 8. I mean how difficult can it be to set up the lights. Twenty seconds on green, change to red. Now the other end gets twenty seconds on green before changing to red. Both sides get an even chance. The only difficulty is the length of time both sets are on red for. At ordinary traffic lights the time between one lot going to red and the next lot getting a green light is 4 seconds but if the roadworks are long then this might not be enough, twenty yards and no problem 50 yards and green would come on before the other traffic has cleared. But it can't be a big deal. It isn't as if temporary traffic lights haven't been around for years. We can dial a phone number on a mobile phone and speak to some one in Australia, we can watch Gorden Brown in China on TV, we can surf the net for the lesser known mating habits of the Rousettus aegyptiacus if we want to but can we get temporary traffic lights to function properly? To answer this question I have emailed the Department of Transport to ask who is ultimately responsible for making sure these bloody things work properly. I'll let you know what they say or you could work, and I do mean work your way through this little book.
from the Dept of Transport. Go on, it's fun; really.

And one last item, I have heard a story (rumour) going round re the Rock Walk diversion. The bus service isn't going to be split at the Harbour after all. We are going to run all the way from Newton to Brixham and get an extra 15 minutes running time. Still nothing official yet of course but it only starts next Sunday.

Problems on the Road

Yesterday we had a few minor difficulties. First of all Torbay Council Highways Dept decided to dig a deep hole in Fleet Street. Not somewhere out of the way and hidden, no this hole was right on the bus stop where the road narrows and goes round a slight bend. The only way to move away from the bus stop was to set off and hope half a dozen buses weren't coming down towards you. Then in the middle of the day they brought up the heavy gang, one of those big yellow trucks that featured on a post a few days ago. Water needed to be removed from the drains. Meanwhile Devon Council were up at Aller repairing lots of small pot holes that had mysteriously appeared in the roadway. I say mysteriously because Devon Council repaired all these pot holes last year at great expense; and lots of traffic jams. Continuing while all this was going on was the Great Gas Works Temporary Traffic Lights Saga. On one side a queue 9 tenths of a mile long, on the other, 20 yards. And no one seems able to get the traffic light people to do anything about it.

The nine tenths of a mile side.

Usually I leave Torquay on time and get to Paignton 15 minutes late. Next little difficulty was the railway carriage heading from Churston to Windy Corner. Not on the track but on the road to Brixham. Trains might be able to do 200kph but not on the back of a lowloader. People must have driven from miles and miles to see this carriage, part of the South Devon Steam Train, because there was an almighty traffic jam in the area for an hour or so. Just as that big problem went a motorist in Paignton decide to remodel the crash barrier at the bottom of Hyde Road, which is a very busy section of road. He made a mess of the front of his car doing it which I don't really care about and caused buses to go on a long winded diversion which I do care about. While this lot were happening the lights at the exit to the bus station decided they wouldn't mind a short rest so for a few hours we had problems just getting out onto the road. When we got there we mostly wished we hadn't bothered. Oh yes; the lights at Torre Station also thought it was a rest day. Actually this switch down made it easier to get through the area as we drive down the road which has priority, the problem came after an engineer came down and gave the junction box a good kicking and the lights started working again.

Against all this heavy weight disruptive behaviour the piece of paper with TIMETABLE printed neatly on it didn't stand a chance.