London's next dead bus R6: Orpington to St Mary Cray Location: southeast London, outer Length of journey: 4 miles, 25 minutes 347, 118 and 414 have already been extinguished and at the end of this week it's time for the R6 to join them at the big terminus in the sky. You won't miss it. The R6 exists to serve a couple of estates on Orpington's periphery and also to link them to trains at St Mary Cray station. It runs every half an hour and operates with two vehicles. It's not the least used of the R buses - the R2, R5, R8 and R10 have fewer passengers - but it is probably the least consequential unless you happen to live in the right place. In a now familiar tactic, TfL are withdrawing the R6 and replacing it in full by another route. That replacement is the B14, an outlier from the Bexley bus empire which runs via a fairly twiddly route between Bexleyheath and Orpington. The intention is to add one more twiddle at the southern end, following the R6's route in its entirety rather than a direct run from St Mary Cray to Orpington. It'll make every journey on the B14 at least ten minutes longer, the mitigation being that B14 passengers can always catch the more frequent R11 instead and not end up wasting their lives on a lengthy detour. The aim as ever is "to operate a more efficient bus service", and the appropriate buzzphrase is "to better match bus services to customer demand". The R6 kicks off from the lengthy bus stand outside Orpington station, alongside its single decker sisters R3, R5, R9 and R10. The parking space at the end now accommodates the overhead charger for the pantographs on route 358, the tram buses that got social media excited a few months ago. The B14 also starts here, conveniently, and will be shadowing us for the next mile and a half through the town centre. busiest bus stops in London, being served by as many as 17 TfL bus routes, although that'll be going down to 16 from Saturday. It's also despised by at least one local resident who recently submitted a vituperative FoI. “The bus stop opposite the Maxwell is lunacy!! It is: Virtually opposite another bus stop; Adjacent to a box junction; Opposite a T junction; Near a junction where pedestrians cross. I would struggle to think of a more dangerous place to put a bus stop. Please consider removing or moving it. I would be interested to know the number of road accidents in that spot, and if the frequency of accidents has increased since the last road amendments there.” TfL fobbed him off with a suggestion he looked at their collisions dashboard, which I have and there have only been two 'slight' collisions here over a seven year period. Those fears of lunacy are thus misplaced, which is good news for the hordes of passengers who would have been instantly disadvantaged had this awkwardly located stop been closed. We bear off from the main drag at Riverside Gardens, which is good because there are long-term roadworks on Cray Avenue so we're dodging a bullet there. Only the R4 and R6 come this way so they're the go-to choice for every car-less resident this side of the River Cray. The houses are older here and the roads narrower because this has been a hub of cottages since Victorian times. I'm mystified by the name of the next stop being Reynolds Cross/Red Lion because no pub of that name exists, but all is explained when a cul-de-sac of fresh flats appears called Red Lion Close. The White Horse, more recently shuttered, looks like it'll be going the same way soon. 477, an hourly non-TfL service to Swanley and Dartford, but you can't wave an Oyster on that. And then we turn off again for a trunk-shaped loop up a very ordinary residential sidestreet, the kind that wouldn't normally get a service elsewhere in London. Here it's needed so that a couple of hundred homes don't find themselves too far from a red bus, and also so that residents of the further-flung hamlet of Kevington get a vague return on their council tax. By the time we've done the one-way circuit barely anyone is left aboard. A schoolboy hops aboard as we enter the last half mile, his target the station across the valley. To get there we return to the High Street by the village green, which isn't anywhere near as nice as you're imagining, then duck beneath a lofty railway viaduct. On one side are roofing supplies and auto traders, and on the other side a 13th century church with cedar shingles because St Mary Cray is much more historic than it looks. both on the same street, right near the end of the route. I'm guessing that passengers on the B14 won't be happy to find themselves dawdling round the outer estates of St Mary Cray next week, thinking "oh goodness we can't be turning off down there as well good grief we are". And there's every chance they won't be expecting it because from what I saw nobody's gone round and stuck up any posters advertising the change at any of the R6's bus stops, or they hadn't at the start of the week. It could be a very simple poster too, it only needs to say "catch the B14 instead" and be done with it. Instead a big surprise is coming to Orpington as yet another bus route dies, to better match services to customer demand and to save TfL a bit of dosh. • Route R6: route map Route R6: live route map Route R6: route history Route R6: timetable Route R6: withdrawal consultation

Unchosen Overground line names an excellent scoop yesterday by publishing the longlist of names which were under consideration for the six Overground lines. I'm not sure how much much of the list is behind his Substack paywall so what follows is abbreviated from someone else's cut-and-pasting on Twitter. I've organised the names into my own entirely unofficial categories. (if you don't like these names that's fine because they weren't chosen, so don't moan) Rejected because TfL ultimately decided not to name lines after people [Suffragette] [Lioness] [Liberty] [Mildmay] [Suffragette] [Lioness] [Weaver] [Weaver] Considered for Liberty line Considered for Mildmay line Considered for Suffragette line Considered for Weaver line Considered for Windrush line Also, somehow Discovering Hidden Stories Around the London Overground. This was published on the day the actual six names were announced, so I suspect this half-dozen got further through the process than most. fifty further names which didn't make the longlist, and if you hated these you'll hate them too. But it doesn't ultimately matter, remember, because none of them were chosen.

10 items of post-Stockport housekeeping 100 largest towns and cities by population. At the start of the year I had 13 to go but since then I've ticked off Sunderland (32nd), Hartlepool (84th) and Stockport (60th). Of the ten that remain the largest is now Huddersfield (33rd), the southernmost is Mansfield (99th) and they're all in a sort of stripe between Lancashire and Lincolnshire. Visiting Sunderland ticked off another postcode area (SR), so my sole omissions within England and Wales are now BB and HD, i.e. Blackburn and Huddersfield. My trip to Stockport cost me just £15.20, thanks to buying ridiculously cheap tickets two months in advance during the Rail Sale earlier in the year. London to Crewe was £5.20 and Crewe to Stockport was £2.40. I can't currently find a way of getting to Stockport by train for less than £50 (or Chesterfield for less than £40, or Huddersfield for less than £90). If you like bargain fares, be aware that Southeastern are offering thousands of £5 fares over the weekend of April 5th/6th as part of their Network Weekend promotion. There are still some left. More information here. I've snapped up two so I can fill in another gap in my attempt to (eventually) walk the entire Kent coast. Fingers cross for non-windswept weather. My trip to Stockport very nearly never happened because the line north was blocked by "a casualty on the tracks" near Rugeley Trent Valley. My first train stalled at Milton Keynes for an hour while British Transport police 'conducted an investigation', which I fear was because this very train had been first over the tracks in Rugeley earlier that morning. Very few trains were going anywhere. I got lucky by eventually transferring to an Avanti service, next stop Crewe, although this subsequently went on a guided tour of the West Midlands which would have made certain trackbashers very happy. I was then permitted on a second Avanti where I sat amid business suits, somewhat embarrassed how little I'd paid, arriving into Stockport just half an hour late. That lost half hour ruined my chances of visiting a couple of attractions but it could have been much worse and I might have had to give up in Milton Keynes and go home. (We all have similar tales of "oh my it was a dreadful journey" which nobody else is interested in, but sometimes it's a fine line between a fabulous day out and a full refund) Bee Network in Manchester a single bus journey costs £2, and by scanning the QR code on the ticket "you can use it again to board any Bee Network bus within 60 minutes from the time it was issued." This is very similar to bus fares in London where the equivalent price is £1.75, but London's daily bus cap is £5.25 whereas Manchester offers a one-day bus ticket for just £2.50 which is a total bargain. I also stopped off in Crewe for an hour on the way back, this because the homebound connection was otherwise too tight to risk. I can confirm that the new bus station is finally open and looks quite pretty at dusk.

The least used station in Britain: DENTON Greater Manchester The problem thus isn't Denton's location it's the timetable, which these days consists of just two trains a week. Between 1992 and 2018 it was only one, so this is an improvement. Saturdays Only   southbound  northbound  Stalybridge 08300928 Guide Bridge08370920 Denton08420916 Reddish South 08460910 Stockport08590904 We're on the Stockport-Stalybridge line, an outer orbital route through the outskirts of Manchester which opened in 1845. It was originally deemed useful as part of a connection between Crewe and Leeds, but when services started going via Manchester instead it lost its mojo. The towns the line passes through aren't insignificant, and the fact it's shadowed by a motorway suggests some underlying demand, but in the end it's a self-fulfilling prophecy in that if you run hardly any trains you get hardly any passengers. Year16/1717/1818/1919/2020/2121/2222/2323/24 Passengers 14470469212503454 Rank12th3rd1st5th7th4th2nd1st When they last totted up the annual passenger numbers Denton had just 54, fewer than at every other railway station in Britain, bringing a brief moment of celebratory notoriety. That's effectively just one passenger a week, which is remarkably low given you'd think stations like this would attract a fair number of traingeeks. Admittedly most of those would choose to ride the whole line rather than alighting at the halt in the middle, plus this is quite early on a Saturday morning, hence the tumbleweed. I didn't visit on a Saturday so I won't be upping the numbers. But I did explore the station because you can just walk in, there being no gates let alone barriers or pads for tapping. The entrance is on a bridge above the railway on a slip road off a motorway junction, Denton being the place where the M67 bears off the looping M60. There are much nicer places to be, but also Victorian terraces round the corner and a fine parish church up the road so things could be worse. The boards outside the station include a warning not to bring e-scooters onto trains, a map with a sad-looking dotted line and a paltry list of train times, four destinations tops. It's 28 steps down to the platform, which I was surprised to see someone had salted despite no trains being due. The station, such as it is, consists of a long island platform chopped off two-thirds of the way down because no trains ever stop at the far end. There are three station signs, all referencing the Greater Manchester Passenger Transport Executive which rebranded in 2011. A single blue bench has been provided in case you face a long wait. There's no lighting because trains only stop during daylight hours. A sign tells you which side trains for Stalybridge depart, because when trains are weekly it would be terrible to get that wrong. And there are three rather nice wooden planters abuzz with shrubbery and even a few daffodils, these provided by The Friends of Denton Station. Alas a notice at the roadside reports that FODS have had to suspend activities "due to circumstances beyond their control", but someone's clearly still coming down and looking after things so thanks for that. I was expecting to have the station completely to myself so really wasn't expecting to hear the sound of an approaching train. The driver honked to let me know they were coming, twice, presumably just as surprised to see someone wandering around in this godforsaken outpost. A lengthy freight train then rolled by, taking several minutes to pass, which did at least allow me to get some unusual photos of an already unusual station. Research later showed the train was on an eight hour safari from a freight terminal in Liverpool to a power station in Middlesbrough, and that's one good reason why this passenger-unfriendly line remains open. There being no trains, and the local buses not going to either Stockport or Stalybridge, I headed off on foot. For locals it's 20 minutes down the A57 to the main crossroads in Denton, former hub of the hat industry, just far enough away for many of them not to realise the station exists. Instead I followed steep steps to a subway underneath the motorway, this evidently the most direct route south from the station, only to find two comfy sofas had got there first. Below them the path dipped down into a seasonal mudbath awash with plastic bottles and a couple of Sainsbury's trolleys, crossed by a handful of haphazard planks, and what I did was retreat very fast and go round the long way instead because it was horrible down there. Nobody cares, I thought, and maybe carelessness is why this is our least used station. The 5th least used station in Britain: REDDISH SOUTH Greater Manchester Reddish North is on a busy line with regular services to Manchester and New Mills, thus attracts over 180,000 passengers annually. Reddish South however lies on the twice-a-week Stockport to Stalybridge line so is a railway white elephant, which is peeving because it's much closer to the town centre and ought to be much more useful. Year16/1717/1818/1919/2020/2121/2222/2323/24 Passengers 941046015818108100128 Rank6th7th3rd9th10th8th5th5th We've passed two miles down the line, a journey which can be made by train in four minutes once a week. Reddish South station lies below a road bridge thrumming with vehicles and pedestrian footfall, just around the back of Morrisons car park. Like Denton there are information boards at the roadside listing miserably few trains, but this time also a proper Transport for Greater Manchester station sign alerting everyone to its existence. The gate at the top of the steps is lockable but wasn't, and I suspect rarely is, which was great because it allowed me to head down to the platform again and explore. Originally this was an island platform but one track's disappeared and been replaced of late by a rather nice garden. A white picket fence shields a bank of shrubbery, at one point with a carpet of blue spring flowers and at another with a burst of pink blossom. That's because as you might have guessed there's a group of volunteers called The Friends of Reddish South Station and they're still very much a going concern with an unexpectedly comprehensive website. Along the back wall is a vibrant mural symbolising 'Second Chances' and also a recent panel celebrating the line's 175th anniversary. According to signs on the fence Reddish South has won three times in the awards for Cheshire's Best Kept Station, which is incredible given it sees two trains a week and has never been in Cheshire. The actual platform, however, is ill-surfaced with occasional humps which I nearly tripped over twice. No matter how poorly used the station there is of course a yellow line to stand behind and a parallel stripe of tactile paving. Again the far end of the platform is fenced off, this time not with flowerboxes but with a wonky station timeline. Here and there are plaques unveiled by former local MP Andrew Gwynne, who it seems was always willing to turn up so long as WW2 was being commemorated, and who was also a long-time supporter of returning better services to the station. The posters advertising Northern Rail services feel very out of place, especially given that if you ever head off on a day trip from here you can't get back. Also the sign saying this is platform 1 feels somewhat unnecessary because of course it is. The southern half of Reddish meanwhile gets on with daily life without the availability of a decent rail connection. It boasts hilariously named businesses like Reddish Ale, Reddish Grill and Reddish Hair. It has a Conservative Club called the Reddish Con Club, which at first I thought was a gaffe but the more I think about it the more brilliant a name it is. It has a magnificent behemoth of a cotton mill at the heart of Houldsworth Model Village, since converted to flats. It has a Grade I listed gothic church at St Elizabeth's, which is where Ashley married Maxine in Coronation Street in 1999. And it's a lengthy yomp into Stockport or £2 on the bus whereas it could be a quick trip by train, and not just one-way before breakfast on a Saturday morning. Opportunity missed, or perhaps unnecessary, but definitely a right Northern quirk. 11 photos Denton 9 photos of Reddish 30 photos of Stockport all 50 photos in one album [FORSS has designated this Saturday's northbound service frpm Reddish South and Denton as the Breakfast Special Folk Train, leading to "music, bacon butties, hot drinks & local ales" at Stalybridge Buffet Bar (one way only, make your own way back), just in time to boost passenger numbers before the end of the financial year]

Gadabout: STOCKPORT Stockport is a former textile town on the Lancashire/Cheshire border, since swallowed up by Greater Manchester. Of the ten metropolitan boroughs it's the southeasternmost. Previously I'd only ever seen it from the train while crossing the lofty viaduct over the River Mersey, noting the tall chimney with 'Hat Museum' written on it and thinking that might be a good place to visit. And indeed it was, not just the headgear repository but the unexpectedly split-level town, its heritage and its wider points of interest. Join me to discover what's underneath the shopping centre, where Joy Division recorded, what Lowry painted and how many rabbits it takes to make a hat. [Visit Stockport] [30 photos] Let's start with the Hat Museum, or Hat Works as it's been officially branded, perhaps because museums are old hat. It's based in a former cotton mill with a striking 200 foot chimney, which thankfully for reasons of authenticity was later used for hat making by local company Ward Bros. A lottery grant helped transform it into a flats and a heritage centre, the latter opening in 2000, and a further grant funded a major "refurbishment and reinterpretation" which reopened last year. It's only open three days a week so I chose the date of my visit carefully, but it is free to enter which is good going for something they could easily have charged for. The first floor down is the Gallery of Hats, because obviously what you do in a hat museum is display as many different types of headgear as you can. Here they have several hundred, from pillboxes to pith helmets and kepis to kippahs, appealingly laid out in bright display cases. A subject like hats screams out for thematic curation so that's what they've gone for, with underlying issues like faith, pride and sustainability subtly woven in throughout. The red Mini they've squeezed into one corner seems a bit redundant, but it does at least signpost the way to some splendid Mary Quant numbers. Also full marks for filling the reading corner with appropriate children's books including I Want My Hat Back and The Quangle Wangle's Hat. Downstairs is the factory floor which is awash with all kinds of machinery used to make all kinds of hats. I think sometimes they turn some of it on because there were a heck of a lot of ear defenders hanging on the wall outside. Separate gizmos helped with dyeing, shaping, lining, dimpling and even adding those little fiddly ribbons on the inside. Pick your time right and you can be led round on a proper tour, pick your time wrong and you end up mid-school-trip. One aspect of the latest reinterpretation is a sign warning that the room contains 'aspects of the hat trade which some people may find upsetting'. Skinning rabbits for their pelt fair enough, and maybe the manufacture of extra-cheap hats to send to slaves in the West Indies, but anyone upset by the concept of 'inequality' probably needs a better grip on the world. It was twelve rabbits per hat, by the way, so Stockport was once slaughtering 150,000 a week. It feels odd that the Hat Works entrance is on the top floor but that's because Stockport is a split level town with an upper bit, a lower bit and several sloping connections. It takes some getting used to walking round and suddenly finding yourself on a high bridge crossing a low road, or realising that what looks like a neighbouring street on a map is in fact a steep climb away. High Street is well named. The quirkiest area is probably the Underbanks, a narrow meandering indent following the line of a former stream, the Tin Brook. Many of the trendier shops are down here, but also a proper chippie because Stockport is not yet up itself. The oldest building on Great Underbank is Underbank Hall, a three-gabled half-timbered Tudor townhouse which is now occupied, appropriately enough, by a branch of NatWest bank. I was so taken by Crowther Street's classic climbing cobbles that I paused for a photo, only to discover later that LS Lowry had done the same with his paintbrush in 1930. However the houses he saw were all demolished during later slum clearance and what's here now is a modern rebuild deliberately designed to echo Lowry's painting. Stockport's main museum is in the historic heart of the town, up top on a red sandstone cliff where the castle no longer is. It too is free, although it does wrap around a paid-for attraction which is Staircase House, an original 15th century home with rare Jacobean newel staircase. I was all primed to make this the first attraction where I'd paid Senior rates but they didn't upsell it, I suspect because closing time was approaching, so I just went round the ordinary exhibits instead. These spread across five floors and are properly varied, from all the usual local Bronze Age and municipal stuff to a scale model exemplifying the restoration of the Iron Bridge in Marple. I particularly enjoyed the current temporary exhibition in the basement showcasing rediscovered camera shots of Stockport market in the mid 1970s, Heidi's black and white photos being emotionally evocative. Another gallery focuses on Strawberry Studios, the first professional recording studio outside London, which was set up by early members of 10cc in 1968. The band recorded their first albums here and pumped some of the proceeds from their success into upgrading to a 36-track desk which attracted an eclectic selection of other artists. These included Hotlegs, Neil Sedaka, Sad Cafe, Cliff Richard, The Sisters of Mercy, The Smiths, The Stone Roses, Barclay James Harvest, Echo & The Bunnymen and the St Winifred's School Choir. Several of these get a mention on the blue plaque outside the former studios on Wellington Street, plus the seminal Joy Division whose first album was recorded here at Strawberry (and can be played in full within the museum gallery). You may have the album's iconic cover art on a t-shirt but Stockport proudly slaps it up on buildings ("yeah, Unknown Pleasures, that's one of ours"). Opposite the museum is the Market Hall, a striking cast iron and glass confection that narrows as it climbs. It houses three dozen stalls in that appealing way only northern towns seem to manage, selling such delights as Polish plum donuts, mop and bucket sets and embroidered hedgehog cushions. Other buildings hereabouts include the Robinson Brewery, a towering redbrick presence which looks like it ought to be flats by now but is still the heart of a 250 year-old independent brewery chain. I wasn't prompt enough to see inside their small museum and shop. A memorial on Hopes Carr commemorates the 1967 Stockport plane disaster, still one of Britain's worst, in which fuel issues brought the plane down on a scrap of open ground perilously close to the town centre killing 72 of those aboard. The town is still very obviously on the flight path for Manchester Airport which is five miles away and whose runway annoyingly aligns. Stockport's main shopping mall is perhaps unique in that it's built on top of a river. With nowhere else to cram it, town planners in the 1960s added concrete arches above a 500m stretch of the River Mersey and so created Merseyway. What's more the river was once the official boundary between two counties, so if you go shopping in Primark you're in historic Cheshire and if you cross the mall to River Island you're in what used to be Lancashire. The Mersey is a ridiculously young river at this point because its source is less than five minutes walk away, born at the confluence of the River Goyt and the River Tame. One starts in the Peak District and the other on Pennine moorland, meeting here in the town centre alongside the roaring ribbon of the elevated M60 motorway before launching off towards Liverpool. Mersey-side is also the location of the town's newest regeneration locus, Stockport Interchange. This replacement bus station opened a year ago on the site of the old, a futuristic split-level swoosh with an airy timbered waiting space and an elliptical bus stand. Up top is a new park with fine views over the rim, accessed via lifts, a long staircase or an unwieldy outdoor spiral called the Stockport Helix. Manchester's recently-launched Bee Network is gradually turning all the local buses a gorgeous shade of custard yellow, and yesterday saw the introduction of tap and go fares for the very first time. Displays within the bus station are very clear and a full rack of paper timetables is available, but alas there's not a map to be seen - I did ask at the information desk and got a smiley "no". Roger has a full report from opening day if you'd like to see more photos. And this whole area is dominated by the massive Stockport viaduct which remains one of the world's largest brick-built structures. It was built to carry the fledgling Manchester and Birmingham Railway across the River Mersey, comprises over 11 million bricks and was completed in less than two years. It looks splendid in the sunlight, and can be newly admired from a sinuous footpath connection which now links the bus station in the valley to the railway station on the escarpment. The best view however is from up top on a train, looking down across the town with its jumble of rooftops and occasional mill chimneys. I never got to see that because the station comes just before the viaduct, ditto I never quite made it to the Art Gallery, the Air Raid Shelters or Fred Perry's childhood home. But I really liked Stockport, it had unexpected character, so don't rule out a return visit. 30 photos of sunny Stockport