Altrincham Interchange

This post is part of Multimodal Manchester.

Altrincham is a large town located in south-west Greater Manchester, close to the border with Cheshire. I don’t intend to do this entire series in alphabetical order, but Altrincham Interchange is alphabetically the first place on the list to visit, and as we’ll see shortly, it has a fairly long history and is very well connected, so it seemed a sensible place to start.

History

The railway station on this site was opened by the Manchester South Junction and Altrincham Railway (MSJ&AR) under the name “Altrincham and Bowdon”, with four platforms, two used by the MSJ&AR itself and two used by Cheshire Lines Committee trains to and from Chester. The “and Bowdon” part of the station name was dropped in the 1970s, but the station itself is still very much recognisable from its opening in 1881. There is a rather stark difference in level of service between the two routes: the MSJ&AR route is now part of Metrolink, which for most of the day provides ten departures an hour towards Manchester with modern electric light-rail vehicles.

The CLC route, in contrast, has only one service per hour, which is provided by Nothern using diesel multiple units - almost excusively Sprinters originally built in the 1980s.

The bus facilities are a considerably newer development, having been been opened originally in 1976, and then rebuilt extensively in 2014. The building we see today is a modern glass structure which has been built as an extension of the old station building.

Today’s services

Unusually for the Manchester area, the largest operator in Altrincham is Arriva. They provide several local services, mostly under contract to Transport for Greater Manchester, using a mixture of VDL/Wrightbus single deck buses (image in the next section) and Mellor Strata minibuses. The oldest of the Wrightbuses have now been in service for more than 15 years, and it really shows - but they’ll all be gone from here before too long. Come January, bus services in this area will be fully controlled by TfGM under the Bee Network scheme, and Arriva has not won any Bee Network service contracts.

Warrington’s Own Buses, a municipal bus company owned by Warrington council, calls here with its oddly-numbered “CAT5” and more normal X5 services, which use Alexander Dennis Enviro 200s of various ages. Pictured here is one from the newest batch, delivered in 2018. Because this service is run from Warrington, which is outside Greater Manchester, it is out of the scope of the franchising scheme, so these rather attractive blue “Cheshire Cat” branded buses will continue to serve Altrincham in their current form.

Meanwhile, the behemoth Stagecoach is soon to see its empire in south Manchester reduced to just one depot - Stockport. Stagecoach currently has one route serving Altrincham - the 11 - which is indeed run from Stockport depot, using Alexander Dennis Enviro400 double deckers of an even wider age range. This example is from 2017…

… and here is another one, which is almost brand new, which was delivered to TfGM’s speciication, presumably in preparation for the changes in January (Stagecoach may be retaining operation of the route, but they will still have to run it to TfGM’s standards). As it leaves the interchange ahead of another Warrington bus, it provides a brief view of what the future will look like here.

Diamond Bus North West also runs from here to Stockport - their routes, 370 and 371, mostly use Wrightbus Streetlites.

In the photo above, you can also see yet another Stagecoach Enviro400, this one much older.

D&G Bus runs the hourly 88 service from Altrincham to Knutsford, extending to Macclesfield every other hour, using various short single deck buses. The one I saw was an Enviro200 painted in a heritage livery to mark the 100th anniversary of the North Western Road Car Company.

And finally, local independent operator Belle Vue Coaches runs an hourly minibus service on route 280 to Partington.

These six bus companies, plus Metrolink and Northern, mean a total of 8 different transport operators serve this interchange, giving Altrincham one of the largest varieties of transport operators in Manchester.

What’s the Interchange actually like?

That’s enough of the service patterns - we shall move on to some discussion of the interchange itself. The 2014 rebuild also included the construction of a new footbridge, allowing for easy connections between buses and all rail platforms.

There are two layover stands near the entrance where terminating buses stop for passengers to alight. Unfortunately, these are outdoors, meaning that despite them going to the effort and expense of the interchange footbridge being covered, passengers making a bus-rail connection will still get wet if it’s raining!

There are five departure stands, given letters A through E, all positioned along the same side of the building, and each is provided with an automatic door. These doors only open when a bus is present in front of them, which is intended to prevent passengers accidentally walking out into the area where buses are manoeuvring. This is a common setup for modern bus stations, but it does sometimes cause confusion when people expect the doors to open and they don’t: this most often happens when passengers alight from a bus and then try to get into the building through the “wrong” door. Of course, the irony there is that the system intended to encourage waiting passengers to remain inside is keeping them out of the building.

The bus waiting area is rather oddly shaped, following a sweeping path which is much narrower at one end than the other. Each departure stand is provided with a row of seats, a pair of “perch” benches, a litter bin (something which transport facilities often don’t have enough of), a live departure board and a timetable display in TfGM’s usual format. Near the wider end of the concourse is a large departure board covering bus, Metrolink and Northern services. I’m a big fan of the architecture - it’s a lovely space which manages to be attractive, with lots of open space and natural light, but doesn’t give the impression that it prioritises form over function.

Between the bus waiting area and the rail platforms are various passenger amenities, though they aren’t without their flaws. There’s what proclaims, by means of a large black and yellow sign, to be an Information and Tickets counter, but - in a wonderful illustration of how far we still have to go when it comes to multimodal integration in this country - it displays smaller signs about things they don’t offer. Metrolink tickets are not sold here - use the yellow ticket machines. Train tickets are not sold here - use the blue ticket machines. Still, it’s nice to see that the interchange is permanently staffed. There’s a “Gourmet Coffee Bar & Kitchen”, but it’s closed due to nonspecific “property issues”. There are public toilets, but they require you to pay 20p¹ in coins only, which is a little irritating when you consider that this is the same TfGM currently trying to persuade people to switch to contactless card payments on Metrolink. Finally, there is also an automated photo booth, which is a little bizarre, but did at least seem to be in full working order, though I didn’t use it.

More departure boards, please

Another place I feel there is room for improvement is live information. There is a large screen on the concourse, as mentioned earlier, which provides a summary of all departures from the interchange, but that’s the only one of its type anywhere. It’s useful if you’re entering the interchange from the town centre, but it’s at the opposite end from the alighting stands, and also a bit out of the way if you’re connecting from rail to bus. It also commits the cardinal sin of combining service information and irrelevant advertising content on the same display.

On the Metrolink platforms, the situation gets even stranger. For some reason, there are two departure boards on platform 1 and none on platform 2. All boards show all departures, with no indication of which platform they are from, though I suppose that would usually be fairly obvious.

Concluding remarks

Finally, I feel it’s worth noting that all bus and Metrolink services have step-free access, though for buses the driver will have to deploy a folding ramp for you. In theory, step-free access is possible for Northern services as well - the interchange bridge has lifts, and online information suggests boarding ramps are available - but platform 3 (for trains towards Manchester) is quite narrow, so I have no idea how well this works in practice.

My advice - and this goes for everyone - would be that anyone heading for central Manchester from Altrincham uses Metrolink instead of Northern. You pay a slightly lower fare for a far higher quality service: there’s level access with no need for ramps, services are far more frequent, and, although the journey time is a few minutes longer, you’re likely to save time overall because Metrolink runs on street to take you directly into the city centre rather than terminating at Piccadilly station².

I like Altrincham Interchange a lot. There is evidence that costs were cut in some places, but it’s very well-connected and certainly a pleasant place to spend some time while waiting for a bus or train.

Footnotes

You can view a gallery of the images from this post, plus a few extras.