Friday 29 June 2012

Traveline East Midlands new timetables

Traveline East Midlands has timetables for some forthcoming service revisions.

Stagecoach Interconnect 51 (Grimsby-Louth)

As already noted in this comment, Stagecoach are extending the Monday to Saturday daytime Grimsby-Holton Le Clay 'shorts' to Tetney from July 23rd. New evening peak 'shorts' to Tetney are also being added, bringing the Grimsby-Holton Le Clay peak frequency to half hourly, as in the daytime. Oddly though while Tetney has an evening peak service, there is no morning peak link into Grimsby provided. 

There is also a wider timetable recast, which seems to require an additional vehicle. Departures from Grimsby are generally 5 minutes earlier, and from Louth 10 minutes later, and journey time to/from Louth is increased by 7 minutes to 60 minutes.

It is welcome to see an hourly service for Tetney. Does the attempt to develop a Tetney service suggest that Stagecoach may have no plans to return the Grimsby-Louth corridor to a half hourly frequency? Or is the Tetney extension just about using otherwise dead time as the timetable is recast to improve punctuality?

Hornsby 68 (Brigg-Barnetby-Kirmington)

Despite this being a September change, details are already available. And it would seem my guess about the Thursday 366 being amalgamated into the 68 was correct, with one Tuesday and Thursday journey from Ulceby to Brigg and return formed by extending a Kirmington-Brigg service. Good to see a Tuesday link added from Ulceby and Wootton, but with layovers at Kirmington on Monday, Wednesday and Friday this could have been done every weekday.

Other changes are that a schools service seems to be interworked with the 68, and a new timing point of 'Humberside Airport, near Airport Terminal' added. I wonder if that means the 68 will be using the Humber Flyer bus stop at the airport? Probably just an easy place to turn around, but might pick up the odd passenger. In one case a current Kirmington journey (1055 from Brigg Cary Lane) is terminating 'short' at the airport, but this seems to be to facilitate a more clockface timetable. Finally it seems only afternoon services will continue to serve Brigg Leisure Centre.

(Warning - Traveline doesn't seem to have the right codes for some journeys, so I am making 'educated guesses' for the above. According to Traveline the current timetable remains beyond September as well as the new one, with buses from Barnetby at 0912, 0930 and 0950!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I dare say changes to the 51 are to try and make the service more profitable.

For all we know it may still return to a 30mins, but said village.

David Barrett said...

Welcome changes to the Barnetby Area? To a point but I will make a few comments; the combination of the 68 and Thursday 366 services makes sense as it cuts out wasteful duplication without reducing the effectiveness of either and the re-timing of most journeys now makes connections at Brigg into Hornsby service 4 a convienient proposition for those wishing to take advantage, but with the extension of some services to terminate at Humberside Airport would better connections with trains at Barnetby not have been a consideration also. Living in Barnetby emphasises this situation as I am (and others are for that matter) asked regularly by passengers from the Station about how to get to the Airport. The re-timing of the current 08.10 68 to 07.50 makes for a rather early arrival in Brigg for passengers needing to be there at 08.30/09.00 although it would be more of an issue if there was a return run in the evening at some time after 17.00 instead of the 16.15 as shown. One thing that I can't understand in the timetable is the 15.12 Brigg to Barnetby shown as not running on Schooldays but the 15.30 return has no such reference, this may be a print error but it does, with the above example, illustrate how a regular service can be compromised when interworked with school services. One final plea however, could something be done about the Saturday service by supplementing the 366 with a few re-instated 68s?