Monday 22 April 2013

Studying at St Andrews [1]

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Eclipse Busway between Fareham station
and not-quite Gosport is one year old today
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Back to our Scottish "studies" ...

Looking at Leuchars
Once upon a time, if you wished to travel to the Scottish golf and university town of St Andrews, you could alight from your train from Edinburgh and the south at Leuchars Junction and there, gently simmering in the bay platform, would be your connecting train. A short chug south via Guardbridge would deliver you to your desired destination.
Now, as previously blogged in "Exciting Edinburgh Experiences [2]" (read again), you nip across the much improved footbridge and catch a service 99 bus.
The Monday to Saturday daytime frequency is every 10 minutes, so it is unlikely that you would want to consult a timetable. Indeed fbb and Mrs, on their recent visit, had no time at all to investigate, so helpful were the connections. Indeed (again?), a recently-built sort of Leuchars by-pass road brings the buses slickly into their stance at the foot of the footbridge.
The former branch now shows only as a little dotted line from cutting to river bridge south of the place name "Milton."

Despite the shortage of time, fbb did manage to snap a few bits of transport infrastructure at the junction. There was this splendid ground signal (called a ground signal because it's up the  pole)  but now disused (?) 
And there was the timetable frame at the end of the long shelter for waiting bus passengers. Interesting, thought fbb, but nothing special; just the usual unhelpful departure lists and a route diagram (with the station shown top left on this clip of the downloadable version).
The diagram looked a bit twiddly, but further investigation was needed.

fbb did consider that moaning about the lack of actual timetable information might be regarded as tediously repetitive by his regular blog readers, so parked the picture in the dark and dismal recesses of his confuser pending its utter destruction and expunging from the multiple giggle-bytes of memory.

But, just before "hitting the delete key", the old chap had another look.
And, oh dear! Oh dreadful dear! Oh doubly dreadful dear.

The whole thing is a shambles; of which more tomorrow.
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For the record and very very scary! After a feeble attempt to de-clutter, the house agents came and took their photos on Monday 8th April, posted details on their website that evening. They had the first enquiry at 0900 on Tuesday 9th, the prospective purchasers visting that afternoon. They made an offer which the fbbs accepted at 1600! A quick nip to Seaton, Devon on Wednesday 17th to re-visit a property examined back in January. fbb's offer accepted Thursday 18th at 1000! Move scheduled for May 31st.
PANIC!

But, seriously; having prayed long and hard about what is a momentous move after 30 years on the Island, the fbbs can only thank Him for sorting it so quickly and so well.

 PRAISE GOD 
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 Next Bus Blog : Tuesday 23rd April 

3 comments:

  1. 2 months to move, eh? Beats our 3 months which we thought was an answer to prayer.

    Hope the move goes well and that they have fast electric string in Devon, otherwise blogging by semaphore will be interesting.

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  2. Broadband in the new pad is significantly broader than our present rather thin facility; which is intrinsically slow, being at the end of the string. Although BT have offered us fibre optic thingeys at a high price. A benefit of the move is that we won't be pressurised into changing.

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  3. P.S. Two months? As of now (0920 Monday) it's five weeks and six days since agreeing our purchase! He-e-e-e-elp again!

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