Following the recent Government announcement, I am not surprised to see that Xelabus have decided that now is not the time to restore their service. This means that they will be running a reduced service across parts of their network from 04 January.
Xelabus are currently running the least frequent of their services, compared to last January. I would expect, being a small operator, they are probably feeling the financial pinch more than the big groups because they do not have the reserves available or ability to recover from staff shortages.
These are the changes that are announced:
- Service X4 will continue to operate to the current timetable
- Service X6 and X7 between Eastleigh, Hiltingbury and Chandlers Ford
- Reverts to it’s November Lockdown timetable
- Every 4 hours in each direction (Ever 2 hours combined) on weekdays
- Service X8 will continue to run Sundays
- Service X9 and X10 Bishops Waltham to Eastleigh / Southampton
- Reverts to a weekday 2 hourly frequency matching the Saturday timetable
- Service X11 between Southampton, Shirley and Lordshill
- This will run to the new timetable which is available in the BusTimes guide (available in Eastleigh and on buses) but is not available on their website
- Service X12 between Southampton, Regents Park and Shirley
- This bus will now divert via the Tesco superstore at Millbrook. This means timetables will change but will still run on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The timetable is available in BusTimes, but not online
- Service X21 for Southampton Science Park will not run it’s lunchtime shuttles to ASDA or Airport Parkway Station
I can only hope that this is not slowly heading towards the demise of Xelabus. There have been a number of complaints on social media about the lack of buses in some areas during lockdown, timetables advertised for services that are cancelled and the concerning issue of COVID-unfriendly tinsel everywhere.
On the plus side, Xelabus tries to maintain a fairly full schools and college bus service, not to the detriment of mainstream service timetables.