Airport To Anchoraga (2)

Bus Service Changes

Anchorage Park was developed from about 1990, some seventeen years after Portsmouth City Airport closed. It is mainly private housing built in a collection of culs de sac off a small loop spine called Sywell Crescent. At the Langstone Harbour end of the estate is a Morrisons store ...

... with stops on Anchorage Road at the entrance to the car park.

The car park exit is on Sywell Crescent just opposite Ecton Lane ...

... the closest Northamptonshire village to fbb's childhood home at Little Billing.

So, historically speaking, the bus routes looked like this.

A recent timetable showed a 21 bus every 10 minutes to Anchorage Park ...

... with two journeys each hour continuing to Leigh Park, West Leigh and Havant.We will look at Leigh Park in tomorrow's blog.

Note route 17 peeping in.

There have been various attempts at route branding over the years, usually linked with service 20, as here in Stagecoach beach ball style with lime green appurtenances.

A rather more obvious brand was also used, much more distinctive, especially of you were following a bus or stuck in a queue behind same!

The latest "back to the future" craze is to abandon local liveries ...

... and teplace the lot with dismal dark blue.

Just for the record, in the early days, Anchorage Park benefitted (?) from competition when an expensionist Provincial (Gosport and Fareham) played around with minibuses.

Sometimes you had the deep joy of travelling on a Tesco bus ...

... to go shopping at Morrisons!

The tendered 17. mentioned in Tuesday's blog ...

... soon fizzled out like a damp Nov 5th banger.

This brings us neatly to this week's changes.

fbb is always suspicious of bus timetable changes. The operator always aims to accentuate the positive, often simply "revised timings to improve reliability" but rarely these days, frequency improvements. Less is said about frequency reductions which are just presented as a matter-of-fact "revised timetable".

The 21 now runs as far as Amchorage Park only ...

... and, a big surprise NOT, is reduced to every 12 minutes from every 10.

Note that it runs in a terminal loop on the estate.

Through buses to Leigh Park ate now just one an hour, numbered 19 and following the former 17 route. Does fbb espy some Portsmouth Council tender money for the 19?

In another negative, please note that journeys from Leigh Park do not bother to enter the Anchorage Park estate. In true Good Samaritan style, they pass by on the other side, using Anchorage Road.

So both functions of the 21 route (the estate and through journeys to Leigh Park) are now significantly worse after he changes.

Tomorrow we will see how the rest of the Leigh Park routes are reorganised.

STOP PRESS

Confirmed yesterday. The potty changes made in First Bus management structure, as reported by Roger French, were NOT an April Fools' gag. They are real and utterly potty. fbb was told this by a former First Bus boss who shared fbb's view that the new structure was as potty in practice as it seemed on paper.

They do say that fact is often stranger than fiction.

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 The Easter Jigsaw 

Vines!

From way back in the Old Testament, the Vine (grape bush!) was a mini parable of the relationship between God and Man. A bad vine would be pruned and burnt, good vines produced plenty of fruit. So which one would be us?

Jesus told the parable of the vineyard as Easter approached.

The owner (of the vineyard) sent another supervisor, and they killed him; and they treated many others the same way, beating some and killing others. The only one left to send was the man's own dear son. Last of all, then, he sent his son to the tenants. ‘I am sure they will respect my son,’ he said. But those tenants said to one another, ‘This is the owner's son. Come on, let's kill him, and his property will be ours!’ So they grabbed the son and killed him and threw his body out of the vineyard.

The "owner" was God; the "tenants" were the people of  Israel. And what did they do to the owner's son?

The consequences for the parable's presenter were hardly tactful! (Again!). but for the nation's leaders ...

“What, then, will the owner of the vineyard do?” asked Jesus. “He will come and kill those tenants and turn the vineyard over to others.

There was an inevitability about the outcome for the perpetrators.

Jerusalem was destroyed in AD 70. The nation of Israel ceased to exist

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 Next Havant Happening blog : Friday 11 April