Wednesday 8 April 2009

Return of Service 2 and 12 in Grimsby, Bye Bye Service 5

Services to Bradley Park, Grange Estate, Gilbey Road and parts of Cleethorpes and New Waltham are set to see changes with the axing of services 5 and X1 and their replacement with the 2 and 12 on 20th April.

Service 5 currently links Europarc (weekdays only) and the Gilbey Road area of Grimsby with the Grange Estate and Bradley Park via Grimsby's Riverhead Bus Station. Services presently run half hourly Monday to Saturday daytimes. It will be replaced by new service 2 (or rather the return of the previous service) and new service 12 (or rather the return of the previous service with a changed route).

The 2 will continue to link Europarc and Gilbey Road with Grimsby Town Centre via Corporation Road; however there will be no Saturday service and the weekday service is cut in half to hourly, with a large gap in the afternoon. Or in other words a morning/early afternoon shopping service with a couple of evening peak journeys. Existing early morning/evening service 20 between Cleethorpes, Grimsby and Europarc provides some extra journeys along part of the route but this is a major cutback for the Gilbey Road part of Grimsby.

Many years ago Corporation Road had a tram service, now a rather basic bus service. How times change.

Bradley Park will also see a frequency cut; it's replacement service 12 is also just hourly rather than half hourly with another large afternoon gap. Though unlike the 2, it does run on Saturday's.

While the new 12 will serve Grange Estate, service 7 (Grimsby-Pleasure Island) will once again be extended from Grimsby Bus Station to the Estate to provide an enhanced service of 3 (as opposed to the current 2) buses an hour. As a result of the changes to service 7, interworked service 8 (Grimsby-New Waltham-Pleasure Island) and 9/9A (Waltham-Grimsby-Cleethorpes-Pleasure Island) have revised timings.

With the axe of service X1 (Hull-Humberside Airport-Laceby-Grimsby-Cleethorpes-New Waltham), new route 12 shall replace it between Grimsby and New Waltham. When service 12 last ran it linked Laceby with New Waltham, but on the Western end now serves Bradley Park and Grange Estate instead of Laceby, as mentioned above. The 12 is the same core frequency as the X1, hourly, except for a very poor morning peak service and the already mentioned large gap in the weekday afternoon service.

The current peak journeys extending to Waltham on the X1 continue on the new service 12. As well as service 12, the Humber Flyer also replaces route X1.

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