It hasn’t gone unnoticed that all of Nottingham’s bus operators performed very well in the brief spell of disruption brought by snow. This builds on good performance in the more severe spell of bad weather last winter.
The two aspects where our operators have excelled are absolute professionalism by the operators and their staff, and a commitment to communicate any disruption where it happens.
Well done Trent Barton, NCT, Premier and Yourbus, and credit to their first class drivers.
Some interesting news from Lincoln, is that Stagecoach are re-launching the open top bus tour around the city, in partnership with local organisations Lincoln BIG and Visit Lincolnshire. The bus will operate daily between 1st July and 2nd September – and at selected weekends.
The previous service (run under the Guide Friday brand) was withdrawn in 2004, as it was making insufficient revenue and the need to replace the ageing Leyland Atlantean double deckers.
More information can be found on the Lincolnite website.
NCT have sought approval to make a significant number of service changes, largely from 25th March 2012. The details are:
Deregistrations:
Registrations:
Variation (Timetable):
Variation (Timetable & Route)
A lot there! The main interest as usual is the de- and re-registrations. This seems to be a recast of the more minor “yellow” routes. The main corridors seem the same, and frequencies are seemingly similar. When combined with 68/69 changes, is this a move on the tram? Too early to say until the timetables are available. Skylink comes as no surprise, and the others could be quite minor.
Kinchbus have de-registered Kinch 9:
KINCHBUS LTD, MANSFIELD ROAD HEANOR DE75 7BG, GB
Operating between Nottingham, Broadmarsh Bus Station and Loughborough,
Baxter Gate given service number 9 effective from 25-Mar-2012.
For anyone not familiar with this service, it is effectively Wellglade’s on road competitor for Premier’s Red 9 (aka X9) which was itself introduced to replace Arriva’s discontinued 99 service. Premier grew this service quite vigorously in its early days, to provide a much more complete service than Arriva had provided in recent years.
The service is a simple stopping service between Nottingham and Loughborough via Ruddington, Bunny, Costock. and Rempston. It is the quickest bus service end-to-end, but relatively slow compared to the rail service.
It is unknown whether Wellglade intended to attempt to make the “9″ into a shared service. When all said and done, they have succesfully shared such services as the X38 (Derby – Burton) with Arriva and Pronto (Nottingham – North Notts) with Stagecoach. Not to mention Felix services.
Anyway, it is no more. With the additional recent de-registration of Midland General 2, and the Midland General 4 , and Premier Red 4 now just a memory, it begs a significant question: Is the Wellglade / Premier “bus war” coming to an end?
Piecing together the snippets of information released by Premier on their Facebook page is making their intentions for the Nottingham to East Midlands Airport service clearer.
The situation as announced is:
Premier now have quite a simple zoned fare structure, which shows EMA (which they don’t currently serve) as two zones from Nottingham – This is £2 single £3.50 two-trip based on their standard fares. Whether there is an introductory discount stands to be seen.
One likely route is to take the existing NCT No. 1 route from Nottingham to Gotham, then adopt what NCT call the Skylink “full diversion” via Kingston, Packington Hill (Kegworth) – but may include Kegworth Centre, and Pegasus Business Park. I can’t see an easy way of including East Midlands Parkway without adding a significant time penalty.
Premier’s record of resurrecting abandoned services is good. Red 9 shows what can be achieved with determination, and Red 5 made a success, where Long Eaton Express struggled.
I for one wish them well with the venture, and look forward to the half-hourly upgrade!
In the spirit of keeping the facts as found and analysis / opinion regarding the replacement of the existing sponsored Nottingham Skylink by Trent Barton separate, here are a few first thoughts.
The existing service has existed for eight years and has been a reasonable success. From a relatively quiet start, the service which then left the City via Queens Drive, Meadows, and ran direct to the airport, grew slowly. A later modification to the route saw it observe every stop via the Meadows, Trent Bridge, Wilford and Clifton. The service grew year on year and probably met its best loadings just before the recession, and a reduction in flights following the EasyJet withdrawal from EMA. Trent Barton’s Rainbow 5 / Indigo service long pre-dated Skylink
At is peak the service carried 0.5m passengers per annum.
So why sponsored? There seems two reasons. Nottingham City Council wanted a premium service, and the airport were willing to pay, and it fitted in with their environmental marketing. The subsidies provided two things:
Overall, however much of the service must have been quite close to breakeven.
Trent Barton have been expanding their Indigo service over the last few months, and I suspect have been looking at a way of expanding their semi-fast service to Long Eaton, in response to Premier’s Red 5. The expansion makes a lot of sense for TB. Best of all, it doesn’t erode the Indigo brand. It could also finally replace the Long Eaton Express, which has probably exceeded its life.
There are however, some significant limitations, as far as I can see, in comparison to the NCT service.
So, Is there life in the old route yet?
The existing route was very well resourced, and 24 hour. These requirements were determined on the basis of the tendered service. Is it possible that the service could be viable based on a more lightly resourced operation? If so, watch out for a registration of Nottingham – Wilford – EMA daytime / Evening service.
In a recent flurry of website postings, Trent Barton have announced that they intend to (or have already) registered a new service from Nottingham Broadmarsh bus station to East Midlands Airport from 25th March.
Nottingham City Transport have announced on their site that they intend to de-register the existing Nottingham City Council / East Midlands Airport sponsored Skylink service. TB intend to use Skylink as the new service’s brand, and NCT state that competition regulations require them to discontinue to sponsored service .
The TB service has broadly the same departure points in Nottingham as the existing service (Broadmarsh & Friar Lane) but will no longer call at the Station Front. The service continues via Castle Boulevard / Dunkirk / Beeston (Queens Road only), Long Eaton, Sawley, Castle Donington and finally EMA. One journey an hour will continue to Loughborough. The journey time is stated as 55 minutes, and departures are in line with the existing service, although no timetable is presently available to confirm this.
Fares are interesting – The emphasis is clearly cash fares – matching the existing service. The TB cashsaver zone C will be extended to cover EMA, and no information is given as to interoperability with other operator’s fares, other than the Citycard / Easyrider addon fare is discontinued. No details on the Kangaroo addon, but based on the wording of the posting, I guess it is discontinued.
These are the facts. This is however a significant change to one of the City’s flagship services, and I intend to offer some comment and analysis in a follow up post
