23 May sees the launch of the 2026 season for the Peak Sightseer open top bus tours. There will be one feeder trip from South Sheffield in the morning, departing Meadowhead at 09:54 and running via Woodseats, Millhouses and Totley to Chatsworth, returning from Chatsworth at 17:43. Inbetween those times tours will run hourly from Chatsworth to Bakewell (Red route) and Chatsworth to Mam Tor (Blue route). The price of a Peak Sightseer ticket is £14 for adults and £9.50 for concessions, this allows you to hop on and off as much as you like. See stagecoachbus.com for more details.
April saw the Department for Transport publish their “Better Connected” strategy for joined up transport. Much of this was about improving and standardising online information and ticketing with selected digital partner companies, however of perhaps more interesting for us was the announcement that £6m of funding had been awarded to run a pilot of the proposed “Mini Switzerland” network in the Peak District.
The “Mini Switzerland” concept sees a bus network that runs to a clockface timetable every hour that is designed to connect with Hope Valley trains at Grindleford, Hathersage, Bamford, Hope and Edale stations with core corridors of Castleton to Hathersage and Calver to Eyam offering a bus every 20 minutes. The idea is you can get a train into the Hope Valley every hour and connect into a conveniently timed bus to the villages not served by train all day every day the trains operate and all on one combined ticket.
The proposed network includes:
- existing bus 272 Sheffield-Castleton every hour via Hathersage, Bamford station and Hope
- existing bus 257 Sheffield-Bakewell every hour via Bamford village, Hathersage, Calver and Eyam
- existing bus 173 Castleton-Bakewell increased to every hour via Hope, Bradwell and Tideswell
- existing bus 65 Sheffield-Buxton every alternate hour via Grindleford, Calver, Eyam, Tideswell and Litton supplemented by bus 66 Chesterfield-Tideswell via Calver and Eyam with the two routes combining to provide an hourly service Calver-Tideswell.
- new hourly service 256 Castleton to Eyam via Hope, Bamford station, Hathersage and Baslow (a combination of existing services 272 and 257).
- new hourly service 258 between Bamford station, Bamford village, Yorkshire Bridge and Fairholmes visitor centre (Derwent dams)
- existing service 62 amended to run Edale to Buxton every alternate hour
- new minibus services 63 and 64 operating a circular route between Edale station and Castleton (one via Hope, the other via Winnats pass).
If you’ve been following our guides to Peak District pubs in our branch area along bus routes or live in this part of the Peak District, you’ll realise that these changes could represent game changing improvements that will make lots of great country pubs much easier to get to, especially where evening and Sunday services are introduced on routes that don’t currently have them.
We await details of when the project will actually be delivered and whether it will be the same as the above proposal in the consultation document.
One small development already implemented however is on route 272 with a bus from Castleton to Sheffield added at 11:59pm (midnight ish) on Friday and Saturday nights.
Meanwhile in Sheffield, The South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority (SYMCA) is working towards phase one of bus franchising with whoever wins the contract taking over services that operate out of Olive Grove depot (currently the base for First bus who have sold the depot to SYMCA) from autumn 2027. SYMCA currently have a public consultation survey on their website regarding priorities for improving bus services when they take over the whole network, the survey is open until 17 May.
One recent improvement that has happened in Sheffield is the addition of a Sunday service on routes 61/62 between Hillsborough and Bradfield, this is being operated by First bus under contract to SYMCA. Timetables and live tracking is available at bustimes.org.