Friday 26 April 2013

April Selby-Goole Changes

Apologies for being rather behind covering recent service changes. In March I tried to work out what the new timetable for service 8 between Selby and Goole would be. The actual new timetable for the Utopia operated journeys is here (it's a bit different). The 8 is operated under contract to North Yorkshire County Council, and Utopia won the tender for the route commencing 15th April, except for a college day only working that remains with the previous operator Arriva.

Sadly I no longer have a copy of the old service 8 timetable to compare with the new one, but the weekday service is reduced, two services remain to/from Goole along with two short Drax-Selby return journeys, maintaining all key links offered by the route. The Wednesday and Friday diversion via Hook is however withdrawn, replaced by the 355. The two hourly Saturday frequency however seems to be unchanged.

As a result of the service 8 reduction, services between Airmyn village and Goole are reduced on weekdays to two return daytime services, an extra Wednesday and Friday daytime link with the 355, plus peak time journeys on the 400. The village is however better served on weekends, with the peaktime 400 plus two hourly service 8 on Saturdays, and a two hourly service 400 on Sunday daytimes.

Also since mid-April, Arriva's 4, 400 and 401 betwen Goole and Selby have seen some timing changes, but I don't think there have been any withdrawn or extra journeys.

Any clarification, additions or corrections to the above welcome.

1 comment:

Stevie D said...

There was no real reduction in service on the 8 when Utopia took over - apart from the transfer of the limited service to Hook and Tesco to another route.

You can see an archived timetable from late 2010 here: http://web.archive.org/web/20101215140415/http://getdown.org.uk/bus/bus/8-s.shtml, which is broadly similar to the service as it was before the changes this year. The 8 had been run down over the years since it was first introduced as 408 in 2005, and has been pretty thin for a while.

Compared with the 2010 timetable, the current one sees a reduction of 1-2 weekday services between Selby and Drax, but the weekday service from Goole improves from 1+1SD to 2.

The main disadvantage is that fare-paying passengers now have two different operators running between Airmyn and Goole - on weekdays, Utopia run 2 each way and Arriva (400) run 2 from Goole and 3+1SD to Goole. On Saturday, Utopia run 4 each way and Arriva run 1 each way.