April (finally !) 2026. Manchester to Tyldesley.
You learn a lot about the UK transport networks as a pub ticker. Some towns stand out as tough to tick, particularly the string of mining towns without a railway station between Manchester and Wigan. Thanks a bunch, Mr Beeching.
But this very week celebrates a decade of the Leigh-Manchester Bus Rapid Transport system, in part using the old rail track bed (see also : Cambridge Guided Bus), which just shows that if you live long enough things will get better like Brian Cox sang in 1994.
Names to conjure with along the V2 line;
someone should do a Rail Trail guide with a pint at every stop.
We’re in Manchester for the launch of a rather different pub guide,
and there’s actually two Tyldesley entries in the book. But are they the two I’ll visit ?
I’m so excited about the Guided Bus trip I actually forget to find out where it starts from. St Peters Square is a vast terminus containing the tram stops, library, and an expensive art installation called “9 years, £524.8 million“.
The V2 leaves from stop SD opposite the Art Gallery where I’ll meet Mrs RM later.
I tap-in (£2 single) and take the front seat up top, a big mistake as a wheezing bloke opposite stinks of dope, though I’m so innocent I’ve no idea if it’s actually weed or skunk, or if they’re the same thing. It’s not Paco Rabanne or Plum Porter, anyway.
What a great way to spend £2, seeing pubs you’ve never been in (like the Sawyers) on the trip over the Irwell,
and along Salford Crescent.
Kentish Paul went to Uni here, you know.
Half an hour of increasingly dull suburbia later we leave the bus land and hit the actual rail track,
and I get off at Sale Lane, expectant.
retiredmartin 
We spent a week in Manchester and I don’t think we ever noticed this system. Kind of interesting looking.
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I had to research ‘guided bus lane’; very cool.
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A week ago I’d have had to do the same, but I’ve just read an article about a disastrous (failed) attempt to introduce them in Edinburgh, which mentioned that the first guided bus route in the UK was in Runcorn.
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Thanks for that Rhys.
If guided buses were any good there would surely be more than two routes across the UK.
I’m old enough to remember trolley busses in Wolverhampton ( which earlier last century had the biggest network of them in the world ) but only recently did I learn that they were introduced to avoid the expense of maintaining tram tracks.
Trams though have of course now been reintroduced to several British cities and are no doubt more popular than bumpy buses.
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The string of mining towns between Manchester and Wigan are very unfortunate. Beeching couldn’t rip up the tracks used by regular coal trains hence the several Valley Lines surviving and still carrying passengers to and from Cardiff. Similarly the line between Walsall and Rugeley was easily reopened for passengers.
I’m surprised that there’s a Manchester one given that I thought the Cambridge guided bus hadn’t been considered much of a success. Are they as bumpy as normal buses ?
Only about one eighth of the buses my bus pass has got me on have been double deckers but I also often take the front seat up top. From Rhyl to Ruthin last month the bloke opposite obviously had quite severe mental health problems which reminded me that both my mental and physical health are thankfully about as good as might be expected as I approach my seventy-first birthday. Blokes stinking of dope is what happens when our government decides tobacco should be taxed even more heavily than beer.
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If you’d stayed in the doubled decker from Rhuthun onto Wrecsam you’d have been treated to a very scenic but also very twisty journey.
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Thanks Rhys, but I stopped off in Ruthin for a pint and also in three Dolgellau pubs on my way to a night at the Tal y Don at Barmouth. Wrexham was three days earlier, a slight detour on my way home from Pembrokeshire.
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I’d have considered the Cambridge bus way a failure if you’d asked me when I left for Sheffield in 2020, particularly with the delays in house building at Northstowe.
But usage has apparently been well above estimates, and it’s definitely well used, by runners and cyclists as well as bus riders.
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The money wasted on Cambridge’s Guided Bus Way, would have been much better spent by re-opening the former Cambridge – Huntingdon railway, along with the southern section, which was formerly part of the Oxford-Cambridge, Varsity Line. This is the line the authorities are now spending millions on, re-opening. Because of the bus way, the restored line will have to run into South Cambridge – it it ever opens.
I believe local politics, and other associated lobby groups, were responsible for these decisions, but I may be wrong.
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The names of the bus services which run along that route, the V1 and V2, always make me smile. Sadly, after rocketing down the guided busway and the bus lanes along the East Lancs Road, they then get stacked up in the rush hour crawl round Salford Crescent. I’m not sure why a Metrolink tram extension wasn’t thought of there, like the South Manchester Line from East Didsbury to Trafford Bar which also runs along a former railway track.
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Just to correct a couple of things mentioned in the comments to this.
# There are currently 8 guided busways in England: Leigh – Manchester, Cambridge, Luton – Dunstable and a shorter ones in Leeds, Bradford, Crawley, Ipswich and Bristol.
# Runcorn was never a guided busway, but is a system of dedicated bus-only roads
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Thanks. I had no idea of six of them.
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Yes, I did attend Salford Uni, but it was a long time ago, back in the days when a pint of Boddington’s was just 13p! Electrically pulled, and meter dispensed as well, so a full pint too! (CAMRA have much to answer for, with their insistence that a hand-pump was the true sign of a pint of real ale).
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Electrically pushed actually, with the pump being in the cellar !
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You’ve prompted a return to Salford as last time I couldn’t find the BBC bit and was running out of time.
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There’s two Salfords. The modern part where the BBC live, with a Lowry and Imperial War museum nearby, and a vast sprawling city with a bit of redbrick, a University and not much else.
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For many of us fifty years ago Salford meant the Eagle on Collier Street, the nearest Holts’s pub to Piccadilly railway station.
I expect Pail Bailey knew it well.
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