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| Be careful if you're planning a Sunday trip to Carnforth on the 555 |
A regular feature of service 555 is the twice-yearly service change between "Summer" and "Winter" that takes place in April and October each year. The change is most marked on Sundays, when in the summer all northbound journeys on the two-hourly service move forward by an hour and all southbound buses into Lancaster are retimed to run 21 minutes later than they do in Winter.
Naturally, Stagecoach re-issues its "Lakes Guide" timetable booklet to take account of the change.
But the 555 also appears in the 55 timetable leaflet as the two services are co-ordinated to provide an even-interval service from Lancaster as far as Carnforth. Last year, Stagecoach didn't issue a new "55" timetable in October so the timetable available to the public continued to show the out-of-date summer times (read about it here). The justification given to enquirers in the travel shop was that it didn't matter as "only the Sunday times are wrong"!
We thought the company had learnt its lesson for this summer and were pleased to see that the 55 timetable, which is included in a booklet with a number of other services that serve Carnforth, had been reissued dated "6th April - 27th October," these being the dates of the summer 555 timetable.
Southbound departures from Carnforth are shown correctly at 1005 1205 1405 1605 and 1805 but whoever compiled the leaflet has made a mess of the northbound journeys! Just for the record, these leave Lancaster at 0915 1115 1315 1515 and 1715 but the new timetable shows just four departures, one of which is wrong by 5 minutes and the rest by a whopping 55 minutes - a fifth journey is simply missing!
The on-line 55 timetable at the time of writing was showing the "working timetable" for the 55, which is correct but which makes no mention at all of the 555, which in the circumstances is perhaps just as well!
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