Monday 14 February 2011

Interconnect 3 back to Weelsby Road

From 4th April Stagecoach in Lincolnshire Interconnect 3 (Grimsby-Lincoln-Newark) will return to operating via Weelsby Road and Hainton Avenue in Grimsby, rather than the quicker route via Bargate thanks to North East Lincolnshire Council funding. The Bargate route was introduced when the service was extended to Newark, leaving Weelsby Road unserved until temporary Stagecoach Grimsby Cleethorpes service 6 was introduced last Autumn - this will be withdrawn from April.

Grimsby Telegraph article

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

You might find the X3 Newark leg of the journey will be cancelled

Anonymous said...

VOSA is showing the X3 as cancelled from April. Perhaps the experiment is not what Stagecoach had hoped for?

David Barrett said...

If the withdrawal of the X3 between Newark and Lincoln is true then it must surely be in no small part because of the retention of the East Midlands Trains service between these two places to connect with main line train services at Newark North Gate. As originally proposed there was going to be a two hourly Lincoln to London King's Cross train service with a two hourly Lincoln to Newark shuttle in between, all operated by East Coast with East Midland's operation reduced to one early morning Lincoln to Newark service. As the East Midlands Trains franchise is held by Stagecoach I suspect that the introduction of ths X3 was a reaction on the part of Stagecoach at the potential loss of this work. However circumstances have changed, with the Lincoln to London King's Cross service now comprising only one service each way on Weekdays there is still the requirement for EMT to provide broadly the same connecting service as they do now and I suppose that it just does not make sense for Stagecoach to compete with itself for this traffic flow, although it has been found in the past that rail users do not, in general, readily take to substitute bus services which might explain why some pensioners from Market Rasen prefer to use the train service to Lincoln, for which they have to pay, rather than the parallel X3 bus service upon which they could travel for free despite this being more frequent than the train service.