Changes at Bluestar in April

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It’s been a while (September in fact) since Go South Coast decided to tinker with the timetables within Southampton. With the summer coming up though it appears that Bluestar has enough drivers and vehicles to start a bit of a service uplift. Thanks go to Reece for the heads up on this one, and it has been a week or so since I last checked the registrations lists.

These changes take place between Good Friday and the middle of April, because of the variety of services that the Empress Road depot now diagram across the week.

Now Reece was saying that these are improvements to the service, however at the same time I am not convinced yet. It is not because the services are being increased because that is indeed the case, but because I get the feeling that many of the increases are merely bringing the service levels back towards the pre-COVID timetable that many are lamenting that the passenger numbers now support.

So without further ado and with less moaning, here they are:

From Good Friday 29th March

Time to moo, bark and tweet as the Z00 returns for the summer season. The service will run over a school centric timetable across the next few months running on weekends, bank holidays and during school holidays.

It is really important to say that the £2 price cap fare is valid albeit if you are travelling in a group or family then you might find a group ticket works out cheaper for you.

The service runs largely hourly as per last year, although check your times as the Sunday hourly service is at different times to the rest of the week.

From Sunday 14th April

There are quite a few changes to services, with some of them making more sense in a why did they not do that earlier mentality:

The Bluestar 1 is getting a larger number of additional trips in the timetable than the headlines suggest as schooldays will see additional trips from Southampton in the mornings (increased from every 15 to every 10 minutes) and a more consistent at least every 20 minutes from Winchester. Equally there is more variation between schoolday and school holiday services in the evenings, presumably due to a traffic.

The daytime frequency of Bluestar 1 is more generally returning on Monday to Saturdays to the level of service it had prior to January 2022 when the service was reduced due to staff shortages. I fear that in some of these big announcements about a better service…..

Some (but not all) trips that start from, or terminate in Chandlers Ford will now run to Southampton. It is not all, so this may benefit a few out there.

There are also an extra early trip on a Sunday leaving Southampton at 0620 as well as retiming from Winchester.

Bluestar N1

I will put this separately as I have not seen whether fares or T&Cs will be different to the daytime service. As we know, some bus companies run flat fare on night buses and / or do not issue child fares.

As for the timetable, it is two trips every Friday and Saturday night leaving Southampton at 0110 and 0240, returning from Winchester at 0155 and 0325. It should also be noted that the N1 will run via the Railway station towards Winchester.

It’s not quite the Nightstar service of 15 years ago, albeit that was supported by council funding.

I know, firstly, that this is definitely a bugbear of mine that probably affects absolutely no-one else. I see that the Traveline SW designation on timetables of stops to set down only on the outbound trips for the Bluestar 2 have appeared. The fact that the inbound timetable shows the same stops and not with an s is fine; sorry I just had to say or I will simply explode.

<insert some kind of comedy cartoon clip of Wile E Coyote exploding or something>

<I know…. there is no cartoon clip there, it was an internal monologue>

So anyway the core Saturday daytime service is also resuming the pre-2022 frequency of every 15 minutes. This was cut a few years back to every 30 minutes (and then the every 20 minutes it is now) and so it is probably a welcome change for the residents of Fair Oak.

What I think is a play on words though is the claim that the Monday to Saturday service is increasing to every 30 minutes. Well it is… if you are using the bus between Southampton and Eastleigh. The Eastleigh to Fair Oak section will remain at hourly, which is the section with no other option than a taxi from the rank at the railway station (other taxi ranks are also available).

There are also a few earlier trips on Sundays and Bank Holidays, although I am struggling to find the extra Sunday afternoon trips advertised:

The core changes to the Bluestar 3 timetable are almost exactly as you see it above:

• New additional 0625 service from Southampton to Fair Oak.
  From observations, it becomes the 0722 BS2 from Fair Oak, which no longer starts at Boorley Park, so that BS2 will become a BS3 until Fair Oak.
• New 2010 Southampton to Eastleigh service Monday to Saturday
• Cancelled 2115 Southampton to Eastleigh service (or rather, retimed 50 minutes earlier) Monday to Saturday

So the Bluestar 4, which runs between Southampton, North Baddesley and Romsey had already been restored to service levels fairly close to what it was in 2019 before the country went into a lockdown.

There are changes that now take it one step further and improve on what was the September 2019 timetable:

• Evening services Monday to Saturday will now be a more broadly hourly timetable with a last departure of 2315 (Romsey) and 2325 (Southampton)
• There is an additional weekday bus (0615 from Southampton), Sunday bus (0825 from Southampton) and Saturday bus (1800 from Romsey)

I did not really know what else to put other than minor changes. There is one route change which affects the end of the school day at Foxhills Junior School and the 1420 bus from Southampton will diverted away from the area.

There is also an additional Saturday round trip at 0750 (from Lymington) and 0920 (from Southampton)

From Monday 22nd April

There is a change affecting the Bluestar / Unilink U7 between Highfield Campus and Winchester.

This is predominantly a service for the Winchester School of Art and University of Southampton however it is an open service available to the general public. For those that are not familiar with the service it used to be a closed door service operated by…. I want to say Lucketts.

This weekday only service will have a broadly similar pattern to now, however:

• The morning trips will start from Highfield earlier than now
• The evening trips will start from Highfield later than now

This change to the timetable is better align with the lesson times at the Winchester School of Art, which is what the service has always been in place to cater for.

Summary & Thoughts

Although some of the changes to services are new and improved on the current set-up, in some cases the changes are merely reflecting Bluestar returning to a service that they used to run. I now have an incessant Gotye singing in my head and now it is just a timetable I used to know.

I don’t often think of you and I together though, have you seen me on a grumpy day complaining about buses and trains? There are still murmurings and complaints about the number of buses that are cancelled though, I can only hope that we will not make out like it never happened and that the timetable was nothing (ahh-ooh)