Looking Back
Once upon a time First Bus was Northampton Transport!
Cutting Back
Stagecoach began nibbling and chomping and finally gobbling the whole of the Northampton town network. But from Sunday last, Stagecoach has been in retreat in several parts of the town. The usual reasons are given; fuel prices, Covid forcing passenger numbers down and shortage of drivers.
There is very little that Stagecoach can do about the fuel price: Stagecoach has done very little to recruit" additional passengers and, probably, has been slack in recruiting and training new drivers. So much of it could be seen to be the result of weak management decisions.
Whatever, the cutbacks have come and are not very well publicised.
The above is the sum total of visible printed publicity for the changes - which re considerable. On-line the changes do, at least, feature on the home page but they are in the form of longish panels of text and, importantly NO MAP!
The 7A (YELLOW), introduced to compete with Uno's 21 (BROWN), is withdrawn completely.
This halves the Stagecoach frequency along Broadmead Avenue but, from an occasional customer point of view, there are still plenty of buses into town.
The remaining 7 is every 30 min, the 21 better at every 20.
So probably a sensible cost cutting move by Stagecoach.
Route 3 (MAUVE) to the south west of town is packed with wiggles.
The last two of the wiggles, via West Hunsbury and on to the roundabout shared with the 12 and 17 where lurks the unmarked Tesco, will henceforth be pootly served by the rural 88. No replacement for the 3 has, as yet been announced.
The route now ends at its former terminus at Camp Hill Dayrell Road.
As the suburb of Duston has expanded tje traditional service 9/9A has been largely left alone and it remains so after Sundays changes. It does, however gain a small diversion to the Sainsburys store just off its Weedon Road route.
But he newer developments at Duston have in recent years been provided with two services, 5 and 15.
Service 5 (PURPLE) is withdrawn completely and replaced with an extension to the !5 (PINK), similar to the 15A which has operates on a Sunday. Unlike the 15A, however (which remains untouched) the new 15 will serve the whole of the bigger loop, calling at Port Road.
The 5 was cross-town to Southfields in the east and that section of route will remain.
There are some cuts to frequency elsewhere, but not utterly drastic.
One oddity is an improved service. In recent times the new development at Buckton Fields ...
... is now filling out the brown smear to the north of the town. Hitherto an occasional 14 tootled that way continuing on to the Moulton Park industrial estate.
From last Sunday the dotted extension is withdrawn but Buckton Fielda gets a proper service ...
... running every 30 minutes, seven days a week. Again, we have no map to tell the eager residents of the new development exactly where their new bus will run.
It seems that Northampton has been less affected by the Stagecoach cut-back policy than many other places.
Whether the reductions accords with one of Stagecoach's many PR "positives" ...
... is debatable.
Did You Spot This?The successful world record attempt was to celebrate 175 years of the Rhaetian Railway.
Puzzle Picture
It was Borough Market Junction signal box, close to London Bridge station. The box section is now at the National Railway Museum, York.
There is a bit more to tell, hopefully in tomorrow's blog.
Back to Perth (Australia) tomorrow.
Next FREE buses blog : Wednesday 2nd Nov
Perhaps the Ffestiniog Railway could try a (lesser) simulation of the Swiss feat on the Dduallt spiral? Might be hard though, simply with steam locos at the front!
ReplyDeleteThere is no shortage of rolling stock over there in Switzerland. But I did wonder about what happened to the normal passenger services on that day. Were there hundreds of rail replacement buses all over the network? Given the mountainous topography, I seriously doubt it.
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