Greater Manchester

For those of you who have been to London and travelled on the Underground, the principles of our Overground will make perfect sense because ‘the tube’, as it is known, has a world famous map of coloured routes with evocative names such as the Circle Line (yellow), the District Line (green), the Piccadilly Line (blue) and so on.

The colour of the lines makes them easy to follow on the map and to identify at stations. Our Overground network follows the same principles. It has been developed as a network of easy to follow colour-coded routes, which are all high frequency – every 10 minutes or better Monday – Saturday daytime. At the moment we use the colour of routes to identify them – ‘the Yellow Line’ or ‘the Mauve Line’ – but in the future maybe we can have famous route names too!

Overground services are operated with our most modern, low floor, easy access buses. A major part of marketing the Overground services is the vehicle route branding. Buses are colour-coded to correspond with the colour of the route they operate along. Additionally, they carry details of the key destinations along the route and price information of our value for money ticket range.

Click here to view a pdf with some questions and answers about the Overground.