The Big Change – Lockdown 2

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Now, I had not planned to be watching the news yesterday. I had planned a trip to see family along the Solent with the family, after changes to schedules caused by the pandemic.

I had planned to post some photos of various parts of the trip, including into Gosport on the Eclipse on the Hampshire Bus Twitter. The rain made sure that children and smartphones complained about the moisture.

Then, like a flashing light in a news studio, supermarkets were stripped of toilet roll, home baking ingredients and tinned pilchards. Yes, Boris admitted there was a leak by calling a press conference.

Lockdown is upon us again!

So far, all we know is that there is a lockdown again from Thursday 5th November until Wednesday 2nd December. In this little realm of bus services, this gives the operators a few days to advertise any changes. Maybe, this will not be until next weekend, but it’s going to be expensive to carry fresh air around all day from Thursday.

In some parts of the UK, GoAhead have announced that they will not be reducing services. It is still early days though and I would hope that announcements will be forthcoming over Monday or early into Tuesday.

The Pre-Lockdown Sunday Changes

So this weekend there have been a number of bus service changes affecting the Solent area:

• Southampton – First Southampton are making some changes to their CityRed 3 and CityRed 9 services.
  
  Essentially, the CityRed 3 loses it’s Sunday early morning buses to and from Southampton General Hospital. Whether this will be reversed in light of the new lockdown, who knows.
  
  CityRed 9 will be getting a few minutes extra running time between Sholing, Woolston and Southampton City Centre.
  
  We covered this earlier in the week.
  
• Winchester – has some changes on Stagecoach South services in the King’s City. This will mostly affect the scholars services for Peter Symonds College, but also means a new timetable for the Andover route on service 85.
  
  We covered this later than usual over the weekend.
  
• Bournemouth & Poole – have had some changes to the Purbeck Breezer services as well. This is not the ones that were due to the suspension of the Sandbanks Ferry, but in addition.
  
  The winter timetable kicked in on the Breezer 40, reducing to two-hourly on Sundays.
  
  The Sunday service on Breezer 60 will only run between Sandbanks and Poole is cancelled for the winter.
  
  Thanks for the correction Robbob.

Now, the Breezer changes were not promoted, except within the timetable itself. You would have thought that in the grand scheme of things they would have at least offered a Tweet, a website new post, or something in advance.

We will wait and see what this week brings!