North West Transport Blog: July 2012

This Post is to look at the missing 620 route from St Helens to Bolton 4 years after being Withdrawn.

in 2005 Blue Bus decided to sell to Arriva (blue bus was the company that stared the 620) so Arriva started to run the 620, they then decided to run it every half hour. In 2008 they cut it down to Atherton-St Helens then later the same year they withdrew it fully, still in 2008 it returned, Arriva ran it to Ashton where GMPTE would tender it to run to Hindley Green so still no direct link from St Helens- Atherton or Bolton

Impact on passengers, the impact to the public who used the service was huge due to the fact if you live in St Helens and you want to go to Bolton you have to get a 352 from St Helens to Wigan and then get a 575 to Bolton this taking twice as long as it would on a 620, so what do you think happened? a lot of people stopped going to Bolton as it is to much messing around getting from A to B

I spoke to a good number of people who still go to Bolton and some who used to go and they all say the same thing *bring back the 620* and i for one agree with this 100 percent it is a route that is required and would be used Regularly by a lot of people including myself

i found Online a Blog done as a request of a regular (well was) on the 620 from St Helens-Bolton view here so there are a good number of people who would use the service on a regular basis

Arriva say that the service was unreliable yet they have a few spare buses parked up next to the bus station to cover late running buses so that would deal with late runnings, Arriva also stated that *the route was getting low customer numbers* when the route ended it was a 30 min service however Blue Bus had it hourly and made it pay so really they should of took it down to hourly and not withdraw the full service

today (27/7/12) i set a petition to get the service back to bolton view here

i plan to hand this into Arriva and GMPTE

thanks for reading this and we hope you support the move to get our service back.

Today i took a visit to Stagecoach Gillmoss Depot with one of my mates David Davies

Before i even got in the Depot i noticed the crashed damaged Renown in the pits with some new panels on the front (in white livery) so safe to say work on this bus is going well

Another question i know i will be asked is how many tridents are back at Gillmoss, i can tell you that when we left at 1:50 there was only 1 trident and that was on pits

Anyway the depot was cut into sections, the middle was in 4 sections ( i am calling themm sections A-D) then a numbers of buses parked at the back wall and a few buses parked in the corner

section A
buses here was solo's 47712, 47711,47710,47713 along with 24139

section B