Happenings At Hinckley : Curious At Coalville
For a long time (fbb doesn't know how long and cannot find out) there has been a bus service between Coalville (map above upper left) and Hinckley (bottom left) Leicester resident and long-term elderly chum David reports that it used to be Midland Red route 687 (with a possible memory uncertainty factor of 50%).
It might have looked like this ...
... or, if double deck, like this.
Post privatisation, the route became Arriva 159 and might have looked like this ...
... or this.
As befits their long term strategy of being a good company serving the good folk of Leicestershire, Arriva gave up the 159 and it passed, on tender, to Roberts Coaches where it might have looked like this ...
... and often did look like this!
And you guessed it. Apart from the Roberts operation, fbb could not truffle out any pictures of Midland Red or Arriva on the route.
Unusually, he could not even find an old timetable or an old leaflet. Clearly the exciting corridor between Coalville and Hinckley has not attracted timetable experts or even many bus photographers!
Anyway, in recent years Roberts 159 has been under threat as the subsidy was too costly for the cash-strapped county piggy bank.
Councillors wept copiously as they announce the withdrawal of the subsidy.
You are right, the press extract doesn't read correctly, but you will get the idea.
Then to try and distance themselves from the situation, this "sound bite" appeared.
In fact the withdrawal was a bit of an on-off happening and its final demise was brought about by a blanket withdrawal of subsidy.
A long standing route was no more and the protests started in earnest. Being a rural route it came close to being pitchforks at dawn, but to no avail.
No longer could the citizens of Coalville travel all the way to Hinckley on one historic bus route. In practice, fbb guesses that very few rode the route all he way and, in practice, other links were available from many of the intervening villages, but not necessarily to the fleshpots of Hinckley or Coalville!
Having rid themselves of £160,000 or budgetary burden, this appeared in the local rag, The Leicester Mercury.
So there is money for expansion of Fox Connect (empty demand responsive minibuses) but none for a proper bus replacing the withdrawn 159.
But wait!
There appears to be more.
HM Government is spending lots of our money of "promoting" rural bus development with bags and bags of pennies.
So the council now has someone else's money to spend (yours and mine!) and guess what they are doing with some of the cash.
You guessed it correctly! A new bus service is starting soon (this time numbered LC6) between Coalville and Hinckley.
So a withdrawn service which carried insufficient passengers to justify its subsidy is coming back - subsidized by the cash-strapped council - but using someone else's money.
Clever, eh?
fbb will look at the LC6 and in general at Leicestershire's transport policy in tomorrow's blog.
In the meantime
More Daft Railway Accident Pictures
Looks nasty, but perhaps not nasty enough to grab the page-view figures and thus the generosity of the advertisers. So make it more ghoulish by adding badly scaled red car.
Not good enough. You really need a scantily clad female to tittilate the surfers. Ah, that's better.
Maybe we can get more advertising mileage from the picture by flipping it through 180 degrees and adding another train ... and some flames ...
... and two scantily clad females; the one in white flimsies having been similarly flipped left to right.
Now that's better!
Next Leicester blog : Weds 6 Aug
There is a 1970 Midland Red timetable on Timetable World. This shows that what was until recently 159 was 687, but there was also a 688 running a more easterly route via Bagworth and Earl Shilton. Both routes ran around every 2 hours, including Sunday afternoons.
ReplyDeleteTo have survived until now, the 687/159 must have been relatively busy, compared to many former Midland Red routes.