A standing joke on the Martinborough-Featherston shuttle bus is that when overseas tourists are dropped off right outside their homestay or motel, the driver will say, “Don’t bus drivers in London (or wherever the visitor comes from) do that for you?”
In the mornings, the driver picks up passengers on a set circuit of stops around Martinborough and delivers them to the station. In the evenings, though, Rick Reynolds and his drivers will often drop passengers right at the front gate. “If people live a bit on the outskirts I’ll ask them if they mind waiting until I’ve dropped everyone else off,” says Rick. If people want to be picked up from a bit further out of town in the morning they can just give Rick a call and “for a bit extra” he’ll pick them up first.
Rick and Robin Reynolds took over Wairarapa Coachlines in 2002 and they’ve noticed a steady increase in the number of passengers on the Martinborough-Featherston run over the years. “We carry about four times the number of people compared to when we first started,’ says Rick. To cope with the demand, the service has been upgraded from a mini bus to a slick new coach with air-conditioning, big windows and comfy seats.
Rick believes the reliability of the service is a reason for its growing popularity. “It’s a cheap way to travel and people know that they’ll definitely get home if they take the bus,” he says. If the train is running late for any reason, the bus driver will wait for passengers until the train arrives. In fact, passengers will often call Rick from Upper Hutt to let him know if there’s been a delay. In the mornings, not even flooded roads have stopped the bus from getting passengers to meet the train. “We just go the long way around,” he says.
The service may be reliable but part of the attraction has to be that it’s so friendly. “ It would be very hard to commute, especially in the dark and the cold in the middle of winter if you didn’t have someone to talk to,” says regular bus and train commuter Kirsty Shepherd. A lawyer in the public service, Kirsty and her husband Dave moved to Martinborough over six years ago. Dave works in the wine industry while Kirsty commutes into the city. “Dave met people through the vineyards but the bus was the way I first made friends over here,” she says.
Buses connect Martinborough with the train service throughout the day, but for those who put in a full working day in Wellington, there are three buses to choose from. Earlybirds catch the 6.00am, then there’s another at 6.30am and the 7.00am offers the last chance to catch the “late” train from Featherston at 7.32am. It’s a 20-minute trip, and according to Rick, it offers the chance for “a good gossip.”
Each bus carries entirely different communities of commuters according to Kirsty, and they may not necessarily know each other. “I catch the middle bus,” she says, “Sometimes I think about getting the late one but then I wouldn’t see any of my friends. It makes the train journey a lot nicer too, because we get all get on the train together.
“You do see a lot of people’s lives because you catch them at the beginning and at the end of their day,“ she says, “I travel in with a very diverse group of people and it is great for networking. And people are all very supportive of each other.”
Part of the sociability of the bus journey has to come down to Rick. Whenever new people move into town and start using the bus, he makes sure that he and his drivers know who they are, so he can greet them by name when they get on board.
Birthdays are celebrated on the bus, and once a year everyone will bring wine and food for an end-of-year Christmas bus party. “My Wellington friends really can’t believe it… and it’s usually the best Christmas party of the year,” says Kirsty.
People do retire or leave work (and the bus) to raise children but in a small community like Martinborough they do tend to stay in touch. The last bus party was held at the home of a recently retired commuter who was a bus veteran of 20 years. She still wanted to keep up with her friends from the bus.
Rick has noticed some changes even over the years that he’s been running the service, “At first, we would be taking mainly women from families who owned or worked on the vineyards. The husbands would be on the vineyard during the day and the wives would work in Wellington. Now the bus is pretty evenly divided between men and women,” he says.
“There’s a pretty powerful group of people living in Martinborough now, with a broad cross section of lawyers, accountants and heads of government departments who all work in Wellington,” he says. He has a pet theory that the really senior managers are the ones who take his bus and catch the train to work. “It‘s the middle managers that feel that they have to race over the hill in their BMWs to get there early in the morning,” he says.
The commuter service is only part of his work, he’s kept very busy running wine trails from Wellington, either picking up passengers from the city or from Featherston Train Station. He also runs a brisk business transporting wedding parties, including Kirsty and Dave, who had their reception at Craggy Range. And thinks some of this business is a direct spin-off from running the commuter service, “It’s because I’ve got to know all these people,” he says.
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