It's buried away in the small print of Stagecoach's website at the moment, but details of the company's bus services over Christmas and the New Year holiday are now available, although the detail on the website leaves several unanswered questions.
In previous years printed booklets have been produced and distributed will full details of what passengers could expect on each day of the festive period. That for Lancaster ran to 20 pages. This year's on-line only offer leaves out a lot of information and is set to cause much confusion in the minds of would-be passengers.
What we do know. . .
On Christmas Eve (Thursday, 24th December) and New Year's Eve (Thursday 31st December) a normal service will operate in the Lancaster and Morecambe area up until approximately 19.00hrs. The times of the last departures on each service can be found on this link. Services not listed will run to a normal timetable.
On Christmas Day (Friday, 25th December) and New Year's Day (Friday, 1st January) Stagecoach is having a day off. And hopefully everyone else is too, as there will be no buses at all on these days.
On Boxing Day (Saturday 26th December), Stagecoach a running a special service in the Lancaster and Morecambe area between the approximate hours of 08.00 and 19.00.
Service 1A will run every 20 minutes between Lancaster Bus Station and Heysham Towers
Service 6A will operate once an hour
Service 40 will operate once an hour between Preston and Morecambe
Service 55 will operate once an hour.
Service 100 will operate every half-hour between the University and Lancaster Bus Station with every other journey continuing to Morecambe and then as service 2X to Heysham, Combermere Road.
Full timetables are on this link
However you won't find any details of service 555 on that page. This important trunk service is operated by Kendal depot so it's obviously of no interest to passengers in Lancaster! To save you the trouble of searching for it (it's under "Kendal") a normal Sunday timetable will apply.
Any other services must be assumed not to be operating on Boxing Day.
. . .and what we don't!
Unlike in previous years, Stagecoach gives no details of what we can expect to be operating on the 27th, 28th, 29th and 30th of December.
The 27th December is a Sunday. It is not a public holiday and therefore we must assume, in the absence of any information to the contrary, that a normal Sunday service will apply. We will assume that - but it would have been better to have had it confirmed.
The 28th December is a Monday, but because Boxing Day falls on a Sunday, the 28th is an additional public holiday. However, the "Boxing Day" timetables on Stagecoach's website are only dated "26th December 2020" with no mention of the 28th. Lancashire County Council has contracts in place for a number of Sunday services in the District, the public timetables of which state that "on a Bank Holiday most services operate to a Sunday timetable" but again, there is no actual confirmation anywhere that we can find as to what - if any - buses will be running on the 28th. We suspect the worst!
Tuesday 29th and Wednesday 30th December are normal working days and we can assume a normal service, but really, it would have been better to have had this confirmed.
We assume, because that's all we can do, that normal service is resumed on 2nd January.
The above note refers to Stagecoach. Our other operator, Kirkby Lonsdale Coach Hire, usually follows a similar approach to Stagecoach but has nothing up on its website yet. In fact, in the case of the Sunday services 81A and 81B between Lancaster and Kirkby Lonsdale not only is there nothing about what might or might not be running on the 27th and 28th December but there is no indication at all that the services actually exist!
The Bus Users' Group will seek to clarify the position and will place full details of what we find out on our website as soon as possible.
