Variety Postponed

Saturday's visit to Bicton Park caused a bigger blog than expected so some of the Sunday Variety needed to be held over. To add to the blog-scheduling fun, some fascinating bits and pieces have flown gracefully through the ether and these are included as well.

Minute Half-Minute

Correspondent David, who edits the above learned periodical, e-mailed to inform fbb and our excited readership of some slick timing of Wolverhampton Trolleybi in the period between WW1 and WW2.

And here is the timetable extract.

This punctilious chronology had begun to disappear by the late '40s, becoming the more usual (e.g.) "and then every 7 and 8 minutes."

Drastic Frequency Cut!

A while back, fbb was exploring the improved Supertram service in Sheffield due at the end of January - improved, obviously, by reducing the frequency. Associated with this is the problem of the Supertram Link route to Stocksbridge which currently runs every twenty minutes alternately round the "estates" loop giving a combined bus every 10.

The "problem", you may recall, is that a 12 minutes service connecting with the "improved" tram doesn't really work memorably with a "alternate ways round" schedule.

Stagecoach have resolved this problem by introducing a revised service from 29th October and providing a very non-lavish leaflet.

The SL1/SL1A now runs "up to every 60 minutes"?!????

"Don't panic, dear; it's only a misprint," but rather a serious one. So what IS the change from the end of last month?

fbb has absolutely no idea; but probably no change at all. The Travel South Yorkshire timetables list shows nothing.

And on another point; one of the main reasons for having buses run alternate ways round the "estates" loop was to give a service to AND FROM Fox Valley Retail Park, the latest trendy shopping paradise designed to keep people out of Sheffield's "vibrant" (snigger snigger) city centre.

Find Fox Valley on the map! Find Stockbridge's traditional Co-op on the map. Find details of the evening service to Garden Village and Unsliven Bridge on the map!

Useless.

Ludicrously Late Leaflets

Still in Sheffield, here are three leaflets for changes from 3rd September. 

The blue versions are created by Stagecoach and refer to two out of three "partnership" joint services for which Stagecoach assumes their share of the publicity machine (machine illustrated below).

The leaflets appeared in mid October by which time that for the 83/83A was already wrong.

Both are littered with inaccuracies and confusion; errors which have been pointed out the First, to Stagecoach and to the PTE on several occasions since the non-Partnership began. 

The timetable implies that the 83 and 83A follow different routes.

They follow, in fact, exactly the same route between Hunters Bar and Ecclesfield Mill Road.

The 1/1A times are nonsense at Firth Park for the same reason as the 83s above ...

... and the map at Batemoor is a complete fiction.

You simply cannot get from Batemoor Road to Lowedges Road and no buses are scheduled to do so. Buses are shown as running to Batemoor both on the map and on the front page of the timetable. But no buses are shown as going there in the timetables themselves, they all terminate early at Dyche Road! Batemoor simply does not exist!

Utter nonsense all round!

The X1 folder is an exclusive First Bus product, also published just over 6 weeks after the timetable change.  Its map is equally potty.

It implies that only occasional journeys run to Salisbury Road. In fact half the service runs there. The Sheffield City Centre bit of the map is also wrong with Moorfoot shown in the wrong place..

The whole publicity thing in Sheffield is very, very poor and none of the Partners (snigger snigger) seem to have any desire to do anything about it.

And they wonder why passenger numbers are declining.

Baffling at Basel (1)

No 3 son is working in Switzerland, doing unfathomable stuff with confusers for a pharmaceutical company. He has started sending fbb little puzzles to solve. This one was easy; the question was "which station is it?"

The only meaningful fact that could be gleaned from the departure indicator was that it was on S-Bahn line 1 ...

... but without a comprehensive timetable that wasn't much help. But the office block was.

Thanks to the wonders of the interwebnet fbb could identify BUSS.

fbb is unsure exactly what BUSS AG "compounds" but they do it at Hohenrainstrasse in Pratteln. 

And there is BUSS on Google Maps next to Pratteln Station where trains connect with at least one bus services, in this case the 84 ...

... confirmed, as ever, by Google Maps.

Easy-peasy.

The next teaser was more of a puzzle.

It was a tramstop under a hole in a weird roof. But where? The tram was on route 2 ...

... and consisted of two powered cars (small trams) with a trailer sandwiched in between. Line 2 is the muddy brown one ...

... but where, Oh where on Line 2? Fortunately the interwebnet provides the clue. Look up Basel Trams Line 2 pictures on the Google World Domination site and similar pictures appear.

The tramstop is named Messeplatz, being the location of ...

"Messe" in German can mean just a mess (unhelpful) or a fair, i.e. a collection of stalls and or sideshows. One alternative meaning can be "exhibition".

Indeed Messe Basel is a huge complex of exhibition halls with a hole in the roof.

Looking from Clarastrasse (lower left) you can see what it is all about.

The road under the main "event hall", clad in some trendy "stuff", is just for pedestrians and trams and the hole provides daylight for the alighting and boarding passenger. The cladding is a super-giant version of expanded metal mesh ...

Our many customers all over the world use RMIG Expanded Metal for many different types of applications e.g for walkways, footbridges, footsteps, safety fences, reinforcing of concrete as well as for shielding in buildings and constructions. 

There have been Exhibition Halls on the site since the 1920s.

Two out of two wins for fbb, so far!

But the lad's third teaser is worthy of a blog all on its own.

 Next Baffling Basel blog : Tuesday 21st November