Bus route suffixes

[TheGrandWazoo]

In your 194 example, I would expect only the 07:00 194f and 15:45 194g to show a suffix. The rest would most likely just show 194.

There is a Flickr image and it looks like the 194b to Bundoran does carry the suffix too whilst another (possibly the 194c) doesn't.

 

[Deerfold]

Outside of the Belfast and Londonderry city bus services (Metro and Foyle Metro), the suffixes are very rarely displayed on destination blinds unless they're highly relevant to the passenger - which does lead to occasional confusion as they are always displayed on timetables, journey planners and departure boards at bus stations.

That does remind me of a route which used to pass my house, the 78A Keighley to Skipton. It was an hourly route, significantly slower than the 66/A.
North Yorkshire Council decided to tender it to terminate earlier at Airedale Hospital and only run every two hours, taking it from needing 3 buses to needing 1. The operator that won pulled out after a while and the council has run it for several years with a minibus showing the number 78, with no suffix. I'm not sure why they don't reregister the route if they're never going to display the full number. There is no 78 and the only similarly numbered services are the 71 which is a peak time route sharing some of the route probably run with the same bus, the 72/72A in the opposite direction from Skipton and the 73 Skipton-Greenacres circular.

 

[tbtc]

How can the bus company put so many words on the destination screen? For example, if there are 6 permutations all mixed together in a single hour (one regular, one serving a school, one serving a hospital, one serving another school, two does skip-stopping, etc.), without the use of route suffix how can the bus company communicate to the passenger which is which?

Or in the case if the regular off-peak service runs A-B-C-centre, but peak hour services run only either A-B-centre, A-C-centre, C-D-centre, or even A-B-centre-elsewhere, how can they be recognised without the use of suffixes?

Why do I need a different route just because a journey serves a hospital/ a school/ a school AND a hospital?

Where do you draw the line, do you include all public buildings including libraries? Football grounds? The beach? What about those extensions/ diversions into soulless modern housing estates where there are no interesting features, just dull properties?

Lothian Buses are generally in people’s to five bus companies (albeit they, like Blazefield etc, suffer from that contrary enthusiast problem along the lines of “oh, my bus is two minutes late, but I thought that this operator was meant to be perfect”, just because they occasionally claim to be half decent in sheets etc… the same enthusiasts seem to turn blind eyes to the sins of lesser companies having problems but eagerly seize any chance to knock the “tall poppy” companies)…

…but these days Lothian out just the number and final destination on the screen - a few routes therefore serve alternative places equally

The 21 is from the Infirmary to Clovenstone/ Gyle
The 26 is from Clerwood to Seaton Sands/ Tranent
The 31 is from East Craigs to Bonnyrigg/ Polton Mill
The 37 is from Silverknowes to Bush/ Penicuik

Hard to keep up with frequencies as passenger numbers bounce back from Covid whilst companies now have insufficient drivers, but as far add I am aware all of the above routes run at least every fifteen minutes on shared sections so at least two per hour to each of the far destinations.

And that’s on top of routes that regularly had a large number of journeys terminating “short” or other services like the 10 or 11 or 29 where there were multiple southern termini yet just the one number used - partly due to the way that Edinburgh has expanded over the years I guess

But it seems to work - it’s simple, it’s effective, all you have to go on is the destination screen yet people manage

I suppose that, whilst having simple/ bold/ brightly lit destination screens makes some difference, the BIG difference is that, because Lothian control the bus stops, they ensure that these contain a lot of information about each service, so passengers have plenty opportunity to familiarise themselves with the route ahead

On paper I’d prefer to keep routes/ timetable as simple as possible so that passengers know which stop to walk to lovely where they can turn up and trust that there’ll be a bus along shortly - we could have each of the six journeys per hour on a corridor taking a slightly different route to serve slightly different markets but I think most people would use networks where there’s a simple service every ten minutes down the main road (especially if that means they don’t have to reorder the difference between the “a” and the “b”and the “c” and… it starts to feel more like algebra homework than a convenient alternative to the car

Ah, is that the problem, you’re used to public transport in a high density place where the nature of the congested layout mean that the car is less of a competitor?

Anyhow, i like what works. And, however user-UNfriendly the Lothian approach may seem, I guess passengers will soon clock on to whether they need check the destination screen for a specific destination or can just board any bus on the route (e.g. off I’m heading from the city centre all the way to Seaton Sands or Tranent then it matters, if I’m going part way to Meadowbank or Musselburgh then I can board any 26, if I’m heading west of the city centre then everything is going to one terminus so it doesn’t matter)

the fact that Lothian have been doing this for at least twenty years, rather than having a 21a etc suggests that they are relaxed that if you provide good enough information at stops and clear enough screens then people will trust the process

Lothian/ LRT have/still use some suffixes but these are generally services that divert via somewhere before rejoining the main route (whilst the 50% of 37s that go to Bush terminate there, the Peak time 47s that serve it rejoin the main Granton - Penicuik route so are identified as 47B… whilst some services split into distinct routes, the fact that the 50% of 5s diverted via Duddingston Park South used the western end of The Jewel to terminate at the same ASDA as the “traditional” 5s, so the 51 service number was used to differentiate them… essentially if the intermediate route isn’t discernible from just showing the destination then it generally needs a different number - the only exception I can think of is services at Leith which tended to avoid the docks area in the evenings and stuck to the main roads towards Ocean Terminal/ Newhaven/ Silverknowes - maybe because ALL journeys at that time avoided the docks they decided that they didn’t need a distinct number to identify them? Dunno

But Google the destination screens of modern Lothian Buses and compare with the much larger amount of info/ via points that they had a generation ago - simply showing “Bonnyrigg” seems to be enough to get the right passengers on the right bus, whilst the half dozen versions of the 38 in Glasgow confuses people… so I’ll try to be pragmatic and support what demonstrably works

 

[miklcct]

Why do I need a different route just because a journey serves a hospital/ a school/ a school AND a hospital?

Where do you draw the line, do you include all public buildings including libraries? Football grounds? The beach? What about those extensions/ diversions into soulless modern housing estates where there are no interesting features, just dull properties?

There is a bus route. A school is close to the route but not exactly on it so it's not worthwhile to divert the buses to the school apart from the school run. As the diversion adds time to the journey, normal passengers not requiring the school are better off taking other departures instead. Therefore a suffix should be added to the school journey to alert passengers that bus is special.

There is also a hospital some distance away from the route instead, and diverting every bus through the hospital is clearly a waste of resource, so only some journeys are routed through the hospital to cater for the needs of those requiring it. A suffix should also be added to those journeys to distinguish them from the frequent normal service.

On paper I’d prefer to keep routes/ timetable as simple as possible so that passengers know which stop to walk to lovely where they can turn up and trust that there’ll be a bus along shortly - we could have each of the six journeys per hour on a corridor taking a slightly different route to serve slightly different markets but I think most people would use networks where there’s a simple service every ten minutes down the main road (especially if that means they don’t have to reorder the difference between the “a” and the “b”and the “c” and… it starts to feel more like algebra homework than a convenient alternative to the car

If all the 6 buses in the hour goes through all the interesting places off the main road, the route will be too circuitous that the service is no longer attractive, that people start to drive / take taxis / cycle / etc. and the route will soon enter a downward spiral. I have seen bus routes, which were reasonably direct and frequently overcrowded, got diverted into every new-built estate and became unattractive at the end and got killed as a result as passengers switched to alternative routes which were faster.

And there is another case that, the demand between A and E is high enough to warrant a frequent service. However, there are multiple routes between A and E, let's say there are 3 possible routes, all taking similar times. The en-route demand is low. In such case the best way to serve the market is to run an A-B-E, A-C-E and A-D-E route with combined frequency. In such case a suffix is definitely needed to distinguish the variations.

the fact that Lothian have been doing this for at least twenty years, rather than having a 21a etc suggests that they are relaxed that if you provide good enough information at stops and clear enough screens then people will trust the process

But Google the destination screens of modern Lothian Buses and compare with the much larger amount of info/ via points that they had a generation ago - simply showing “Bonnyrigg” seems to be enough to get the right passengers on the right bus, whilst the half dozen versions of the 38 in Glasgow confuses people… so I’ll try to be pragmatic and support what demonstrably works

How about two variations, one works A-C-E-G-H, another works A-D-E-F-H, on combined frequency? And long place names in a multilingual environment that you need to display both English and Welsh names on the destination screen?

 

[Ridercross]

They also ran a circular service at one stage (A6Y and C6Y via Nortfhield and Solihull) which was unique as it was the only Midlands service to have both a prefix and suffix (until the late 2010s when NXWM introduced the X51S)

Although almost counting is that in the late 1980's there were also short journeys on the WMT S3 (City to Shirley Station) which terminated at The Baldwin pub, these would display S3E on destination blinds.

 

[danm14]

There is a Flickr image and it looks like the 194b to Bundoran does carry the suffix too whilst another (possibly the 194c) doesn't.

It will vary from day to day depending on what the driver keys. Most only bother if it's actually relevant.

The 261u from Enniskillen to Belfast (Sunday evening variant of the regular 261 which additionally serves Queen's University and Ulster University for students) shows 261 most of the time, but 261u on the odd occasion.

 

[DunsBus]

Why do I need a different route just because a journey serves a hospital/ a school/ a school AND a hospital?

Where do you draw the line, do you include all public buildings including libraries? Football grounds? The beach? What about those extensions/ diversions into soulless modern housing estates where there are no interesting features, just dull properties?

Lothian Buses are generally in people’s to five bus companies (albeit they, like Blazefield etc, suffer from that contrary enthusiast problem along the lines of “oh, my bus is two minutes late, but I thought that this operator was meant to be perfect”, just because they occasionally claim to be half decent in sheets etc… the same enthusiasts seem to turn blind eyes to the sins of lesser companies having problems but eagerly seize any chance to knock the “tall poppy” companies)…

…but these days Lothian out just the number and final destination on the screen - a few routes therefore serve alternative places equally

The 21 is from the Infirmary to Clovenstone/ Gyle
The 26 is from Clerwood to Seaton Sands/ Tranent
The 31 is from East Craigs to Bonnyrigg/ Polton Mill
The 37 is from Silverknowes to Bush/ Penicuik

Hard to keep up with frequencies as passenger numbers bounce back from Covid whilst companies now have insufficient drivers, but as far add I am aware all of the above routes run at least every fifteen minutes on shared sections so at least two per hour to each of the far destinations.

And that’s on top of routes that regularly had a large number of journeys terminating “short” or other services like the 10 or 11 or 29 where there were multiple southern termini yet just the one number used - partly due to the way that Edinburgh has expanded over the years I guess

But it seems to work - it’s simple, it’s effective, all you have to go on is the destination screen yet people manage

I suppose that, whilst having simple/ bold/ brightly lit destination screens makes some difference, the BIG difference is that, because Lothian control the bus stops, they ensure that these contain a lot of information about each service, so passengers have plenty opportunity to familiarise themselves with the route ahead

On paper I’d prefer to keep routes/ timetable as simple as possible so that passengers know which stop to walk to lovely where they can turn up and trust that there’ll be a bus along shortly - we could have each of the six journeys per hour on a corridor taking a slightly different route to serve slightly different markets but I think most people would use networks where there’s a simple service every ten minutes down the main road (especially if that means they don’t have to reorder the difference between the “a” and the “b”and the “c” and… it starts to feel more like algebra homework than a convenient alternative to the car

Ah, is that the problem, you’re used to public transport in a high density place where the nature of the congested layout mean that the car is less of a competitor?

Anyhow, i like what works. And, however user-UNfriendly the Lothian approach may seem, I guess passengers will soon clock on to whether they need check the destination screen for a specific destination or can just board any bus on the route (e.g. off I’m heading from the city centre all the way to Seaton Sands or Tranent then it matters, if I’m going part way to Meadowbank or Musselburgh then I can board any 26, if I’m heading west of the city centre then everything is going to one terminus so it doesn’t matter)

the fact that Lothian have been doing this for at least twenty years, rather than having a 21a etc suggests that they are relaxed that if you provide good enough information at stops and clear enough screens then people will trust the process

Lothian/ LRT have/still use some suffixes but these are generally services that divert via somewhere before rejoining the main route (whilst the 50% of 37s that go to Bush terminate there, the Peak time 47s that serve it rejoin the main Granton - Penicuik route so are identified as 47B… whilst some services split into distinct routes, the fact that the 50% of 5s diverted via Duddingston Park South used the western end of The Jewel to terminate at the same ASDA as the “traditional” 5s, so the 51 service number was used to differentiate them… essentially if the intermediate route isn’t discernible from just showing the destination then it generally needs a different number - the only exception I can think of is services at Leith which tended to avoid the docks area in the evenings and stuck to the main roads towards Ocean Terminal/ Newhaven/ Silverknowes - maybe because ALL journeys at that time avoided the docks they decided that they didn’t need a distinct number to identify them? Dunno

But Google the destination screens of modern Lothian Buses and compare with the much larger amount of info/ via points that they had a generation ago - simply showing “Bonnyrigg” seems to be enough to get the right passengers on the right bus, whilst the half dozen versions of the 38 in Glasgow confuses people… so I’ll try to be pragmatic and support what demonstrably works

I remember the LRT 81, the predecessor of today's service 37, having five variants of which three used suffixes.

81 - the main weekday route between Penicuik and Muirhouse.
81A - the evening and Sunday diversion via Loanhead.
81B - this ran at the start and end of service, running to/from Deanburn via Queensway and omitting Penicuik town centre.
81C - a handful of Monday to Friday peak journeys which served Easter Bush.
X81, later X91 - ran at peak hours, running non-stop between Surgeons Hall, Cameron Toll and Mortonhall. The daytime service later became the X91 with the same stopping pattern.

 

[bussnapperwm]

Although almost counting is that in the late 1980's there were also short journeys on the WMT S3 (City to Shirley Station) which terminated at The Baldwin pub, these would display S3E on destination blinds.

Funnily enough I forgot all about the Diamond S2A and S2C Solihull routes

 

[tbtc]

There is a bus route. A school is close to the route but not exactly on it so it's not worthwhile to divert the buses to the school apart from the school run. As the diversion adds time to the journey, normal passengers not requiring the school are better off taking other departures instead. Therefore a suffix should be added to the school journey to alert passengers that bus is special.

There is also a hospital some distance away from the route instead, and diverting every bus through the hospital is clearly a waste of resource, so only some journeys are routed through the hospital to cater for the needs of those requiring it. A suffix should also be added to those journeys to distinguish them from the frequent normal service.

Okay, in theory, but I don’t think that we have that culture of diverting one bus a day via a hospital and one via a school etc in the UK. There are some examples, of course, but often where it does happen you’ll see the “and then at these minutes past each hour” column have a letter at the top of the “47” departure (e.g. “C”) with an explanation at the bottom of the leaflet explaining something like “C - please note that the 14:47 additionally serves King Charles I Academy at 15:35” and runs five minutes later between Midpoint Avenue and Terminus Grove” - it doesn’t get a whole other number, and we don’t tend to do it on a huge number of services, certainly in urban areas

I think that a separate suffix was used when Mainline/ First diverted a couple of journeys a day via Lindholme Prison (a long diversion from the main road in quite a remote place, let’s face it you probably don’t want to build new prisons particularly close to main roads/people!) but when I checked if this was still standard practice I found that it’s now a bi-hourly terminus with a suffix (https://bustimes.org/services/84a-doncaster-lindholme?date=2022-11-04&service=45328&service=44967 ) - but these are rare examples, we tend to keep service patterns as simple as possible, certainly in anywhere large, often at school journeys are while other rites with whole other operators

Mind you, if I was a regular passenger and knew that the “14:47” would be flooded with school kids I’d quickly learn to avoid that particular journey where at all possible, it wouldn’t need a separate suffix to make me wait for the next departure and have a less stressful journey!

Maybe there’s some research that shows that an occasional school diversion of up to five minutes it’s okay for regular passengers but if the bus is going to be delayed any more than that then they’d want a separate number to be used, i don’t know?

And there is another case that, the demand between A and E is high enough to warrant a frequent service. However, there are multiple routes between A and E, let's say there are 3 possible routes, all taking similar times. The en-route demand is low. In such case the best way to serve the market is to run an A-B-E, A-C-E and A-D-E route with combined frequency. In such case a suffix is definitely needed to distinguish the variations

As I said about Lothian, where there are Multiple ways of getting to the sage ultimate terminus, they would use something to identify them, like the 5/51 example that I quoted (not “5a” though) - there was 17 used for journeys on the 16 corridor that ran through central Leith rather than down to Bernard Street (again, not “16a”), same with the 9/10 in Leith, just like loops and circles where there are multiple ways of getting to the same terminus have separate numbers

Edinburgh had a few “true” circulars like the 1/6 and 19/39 (generally withdrawn over twenty years ago) but doesn’t have the tradition that other cities have of corridors with suburban circles/ loops and yet the same final terminus - the 28/29 is the only one that jumps to mind right now

However, services where the destination was enough to convey which way they went didn’t necessarily get a separate number (11s that served Fairmilehead rather than Gracemount were just 11s, I think that 8s which extended beyond the traditional Gilmerton terminus into Midlothian were just 8s, certainly the 50% off 26s terminating at Eastfield were just 26s and the many journeys on many routes that have terminated at Elm Row or diverted slightly/terminated at Kings Road or for Longstone used the regular service number - people look at the destination screen, they with these things out

How about two variations, one works A-C-E-G-H, another works A-D-E-F-H, on combined frequency? And long place names in a multilingual environment that you need to display both English and Welsh names on the destination screen

Doesn’t sound ambitious enough, I think we need to include both versions of Gaelic and probably Ulster Scots too, plus maybe a few alternative languages that are actually widely spoken in the UK like Polish/ Urdu/ Mandarin?

Admittedly the destination screen would now take up 95% of the front of the vehicle, with the driver only afforded a little port hole to peek out of, but if we’re going to start being as inclusive add you want then we might as well keep going

In all seriousness, you do sound a bit too keen to rip up simple routes and complicated them for ordinary passengers so much that they need to carry round a notebook to remind them which services to Terminus Grove they can or can’t use (because, let’s face it, if you’re going to have the two routes mentioned above, there’ll be times in the day/week when you’ll want to run ACEFH and times when you want to run ADEGH because of the lower frequencies at certain hours or whatever, or because we need to balance other times because one route takes slightly longer, so we’ll need four suffixes now even if a couple of them are only used on Sunday evenings or whatever)

Thirty five years ago we had more of the kind of routes that you seem to adore, I remember two Wybourn journeys each evening in Sheffield were diverted via Gala Bingo, minibuses allowed diversions into housing estates that “big” buses couldn’t serve, but the culture post 1998 (the year of the Glasgow Overground) has been to focus on full sized vehicles providing simple frequent routes along main roads, and if the council want to pay for school services then they often use a specialist operator (often a coach tour company) who have a fleet of double deckers

Similarly, train serves in the UK have been settling down as clockface hourly (or better) paterns rather than the culture of “one a day” trains from “Yarmouth to Barmouth”. We seem to understand public transport better when you don’t need to pass a maths test or carry a notebook to work out which particular journey is most appropriate

Having so many variations just makes things off putting, and there’s the question of whether a “one a day” journey is good enough for passengers to rely upon it, it’s fine for school pupils who board the waiting bus when the bell goes at the end of the day but would you hang about outside the hospital for long at the end of Visiting hours for a specific bus when you could board one of the regular buses from the hospital to the city centre and change there


********


Sorry I messed up the quoting on my phone but @DunsBus said:
I remember the LRT 81, the predecessor of today's service 37, having five variants of which three used suffixes.

81 - the main weekday route between Penicuik and Muirhouse.
81A - the evening and Sunday diversion via Loanhead.
81B - this ran at the start and end of service, running to/from Deanburn via Queensway and omitting Penicuik town centre.
81C - a handful of Monday to Friday peak journeys which served Easter Bush.
X81, later X91 - ran at peak hours, running non-stop between Surgeons Hall, Cameron Toll and Mortonhall. The daytime service later became the X91 with the same stopping pattern.

I think that these would probably all have suffixes if they still ran today (since it’s important to know which of the multiple routes a vehicle with Deanburn on the front has taken), although the relative simplification after the millennium removed a lot of occasional diversions across the network

However I was thinking of the 81 when I made my earlier post (but didn’t mention it in the end) because the service pattern off peak was generally every ten minutes from Muirhouse AFAICR but only half hourly south of the city, yet the frequent “shorts” were just 81s as far as I remember, rather than needing a whole other service number to explain that they terminated in the city centre, same with the competing CitySprinter C1 where the five minute frequency became five from Muirhouse into the city centre but every ten to Oxgangs, with the new C11 beefing up the combined City - Oxgangs frequency to every five - yet Eastern/SMT just used C1 for the short journeys. Maybe the difference is that Edinburgh people learn to read the destination screen and have more intelligence than those of other cities, who knows!

 

[DunsBus]

Okay, in theory, but I don’t think that we have that culture of diverting one bus a day via a hospital and one via a school etc in the UK. There are some examples, of course, but often where it does happen you’ll see the “and then at these minutes past each hour” column have a letter at the top of the “47” departure (e.g. “C”) with an explanation at the bottom of the leaflet explaining something like “C - please note that the 14:47 additionally serves King Charles I Academy at 15:35” and runs five minutes later between Midpoint Avenue and Terminus Grove” - it doesn’t get a whole other number, and we don’t tend to do it on a huge number of services, certainly in urban areas

I think that a separate suffix was used when Mainline/ First diverted a couple of journeys a day via Lindholme Prison (a long diversion from the main road in quite a remote place, let’s face it you probably don’t want to build new prisons particularly close to main roads/people!) but when I checked if this was still standard practice I found that it’s now a bi-hourly terminus with a suffix (https://bustimes.org/services/84a-doncaster-lindholme?date=2022-11-04&service=45328&service=44967 ) - but these are rare examples, we tend to keep service patterns as simple as possible, certainly in anywhere large, often at school journeys are while other rites with whole other operators

Mind you, if I was a regular passenger and knew that the “14:47” would be flooded with school kids I’d quickly learn to avoid that particular journey where at all possible, it wouldn’t need a separate suffix to make me wait for the next departure and have a less stressful journey!

Maybe there’s some research that shows that an occasional school diversion of up to five minutes it’s okay for regular passengers but if the bus is going to be delayed any more than that then they’d want a separate number to be used, i don’t know?



As I said about Lothian, where there are Multiple ways of getting to the sage ultimate terminus, they would use something to identify them, like the 5/51 example that I quoted (not “5a” though) - there was 17 used for journeys on the 16 corridor that ran through central Leith rather than down to Bernard Street (again, not “16a”), same with the 9/10 in Leith, just like loops and circles where there are multiple ways of getting to the same terminus have separate numbers

Edinburgh had a few “true” circulars like the 1/6 and 19/39 (generally withdrawn over twenty years ago) but doesn’t have the tradition that other cities have of corridors with suburban circles/ loops and yet the same final terminus - the 28/29 is the only one that jumps to mind right now

However, services where the destination was enough to convey which way they went didn’t necessarily get a separate number (11s that served Fairmilehead rather than Gracemount were just 11s, I think that 8s which extended beyond the traditional Gilmerton terminus into Midlothian were just 8s, certainly the 50% off 26s terminating at Eastfield were just 26s and the many journeys on many routes that have terminated at Elm Row or diverted slightly/terminated at Kings Road or for Longstone used the regular service number - people look at the destination screen, they with these things out



Doesn’t sound ambitious enough, I think we need to include both versions of Gaelic and probably Ulster Scots too, plus maybe a few alternative languages that are actually widely spoken in the UK like Polish/ Urdu/ Mandarin?

Admittedly the destination screen would now take up 95% of the front of the vehicle, with the driver only afforded a little port hole to peek out of, but if we’re going to start being as inclusive add you want then we might as well keep going

In all seriousness, you do sound a bit too keen to rip up simple routes and complicated them for ordinary passengers so much that they need to carry round a notebook to remind them which services to Terminus Grove they can or can’t use (because, let’s face it, if you’re going to have the two routes mentioned above, there’ll be times in the day/week when you’ll want to run ACEFH and times when you want to run ADEGH because of the lower frequencies at certain hours or whatever, or because we need to balance other times because one route takes slightly longer, so we’ll need four suffixes now even if a couple of them are only used on Sunday evenings or whatever)

Thirty five years ago we had more of the kind of routes that you seem to adore, I remember two Wybourn journeys each evening in Sheffield were diverted via Gala Bingo, minibuses allowed diversions into housing estates that “big” buses couldn’t serve, but the culture post 1998 (the year of the Glasgow Overground) has been to focus on full sized vehicles providing simple frequent routes along main roads, and if the council want to pay for school services then they often use a specialist operator (often a coach tour company) who have a fleet of double deckers

Similarly, train serves in the UK have been settling down as clockface hourly (or better) paterns rather than the culture of “one a day” trains from “Yarmouth to Barmouth”. We seem to understand public transport better when you don’t need to pass a maths test or carry a notebook to work out which particular journey is most appropriate

Having so many variations just makes things off putting, and there’s the question of whether a “one a day” journey is good enough for passengers to rely upon it, it’s fine for school pupils who board the waiting bus when the bell goes at the end of the day but would you hang about outside the hospital for long at the end of Visiting hours for a specific bus when you could board one of the regular buses from the hospital to the city centre and change there


********


Sorry I messed up the quoting on my phone but @DunsBus said:
I remember the LRT 81, the predecessor of today's service 37, having five variants of which three used suffixes.


I think that these would probably all have suffixes if they still ran today (since it’s important to know which of the multiple routes a vehicle with Deanburn on the front has taken), although the relative simplification after the millennium removed a lot of occasional diversions across the network

However I was thinking of the 81 when I made my earlier post (but didn’t mention it in the end) because the service pattern off peak was generally every ten minutes from Muirhouse AFAICR but only half hourly south of the city, yet the frequent “shorts” were just 81s as far as I remember, rather than needing a whole other service number to explain that they terminated in the city centre, same with the competing CitySprinter C1 where the five minute frequency became five from Muirhouse into the city centre but every ten to Oxgangs, with the new C11 beefing up the combined City - Oxgangs frequency to every five - yet Eastern/SMT just used C1 for the short journeys. Maybe the difference is that Edinburgh people learn to read the destination screen and have more intelligence than those of other cities, who knows!

Yes, you're right. The daytime frequency on the 81 was every 10 minutes between Muirhouse and St Andrew Square, every third bus continuing to Penicuik. As I recall, the "shorts" were screened part-route, the Bridges-Liberton-Bilston intermediate screen being used for the full length journeys.

 

[miklcct]

As I said about Lothian, where there are Multiple ways of getting to the sage ultimate terminus, they would use something to identify them, like the 5/51 example that I quoted (not “5a” though) - there was 17 used for journeys on the 16 corridor that ran through central Leith rather than down to Bernard Street (again, not “16a”), same with the 9/10 in Leith, just like loops and circles where there are multiple ways of getting to the same terminus have separate numbers

Won't they easily run out of numbers if they use a separate number for each minor variation? In your example, do the 5 and 51 run on combined headway?

Admittedly, having numbers so far away for related routes is more difficult to recognise what route I should take, compared to choosing between a set of suffixes all sharing the same number. For example, London Buses now have got away all its suffixes, but routes sharing significant common sections are allocated numbers far away from each other. For example, from Cricklewood to Golders Green there are routes 245, 260 and 460, however, there is also a 226 which also shows Golders Green but I shouldn't take as it doesn't go direct! On the A5 corridor, there are routes 16, 32, 316 and 332 which run a significant portion of it, but the 245 and 266 also joins the A5 somewhere in between. Going north, I honestly can't remember the exact point each route leaves the A5, apart from the 16 and 316 which terminate at Cricklewood, and 32 which runs all the way to Edgware. When the numbers are all everywhere without a single clue where the route goes, it's hard to remember which is which.

In contrast, in Hong Kong or some other cities, numbers are allocated on geographical basis so routes in the same area are allocated numbers close to each other. For example, 1-29 represents a district, 30-49 for another, 50-69 for another, etc. Related routes are normally allocated suffixes, while routes serving similar areas are normally allocated consecutive numbers.

 

[tbtc]

Yes, you're right. The daytime frequency on the 81 was every 10 minutes between Muirhouse and St Andrew Square, every third bus continuing to Penicuik. As I recall, the "shorts" were screened part-route, the Bridges-Liberton-Bilston intermediate screen being used for the full length journeys.

Happy days

And a good use of resources because it meant that in peak times more of the PVR could focus on full length journeys to suit the tidal flow and commuter demand like Penicuik to the Western General and some big employers like Ferranti, whereas (without wanting to sound too patronising) Muirhouse probably had fewer people working nine to five “commuter” jobs so wasn’t as “tidal” as demand from Penicuik?

Won't they easily run out of numbers if they use a separate number for each minor variation? In your example, do the 5 and 51 run on combined headway?

They were every half hour each, fifteen combined, shared over 90% of the same route

But, as I say, Lothian keep things simple, until they started putting all Airport buses in the 200/300/400 numbers to sit with the main 100 Airport route, I’ve think pretty much every commercial route in the past twenty years has been under fifty, with very few requiring prefixes/suffixes/ three digits (other that a handful of “X” routes and Night Buses, where different fares apply, so fair enough) - Three digit numbers are used in some but not all East/West Lothian routes, but these have been in line with the “traditional” numbers that Eastern Scottish used for decades, plus they make it obvious which journeys in central Edinburgh are longer distance

They’ve taken the decision that passengers prefer simplicity, look at Balerno where traditional half the services went one side of the estate to the terminus and half the other way 43/44, 83/84, that kind of thing), but over the years decided that the eastern side is busier (44) and ran all but one southbound journey per hour that way, this was the 43, they tried regulating it as the 44A for a while before deciding that Simple was better and now everything runs anti clockwise around Balerno - it benefits some people in one direction but means a longer journey in the other, however keeping things simple so that people know which stop to stands at for a traditional ten minute service was seen as more important than going every twenty minutes each way or giving people just one bus an hour (in fairness, if I were in central Edinburgh around half past the hour, or whenever the hourly 43 was scheduled but saw a regular 44 I’d have a dilemma of whether to board it and face a walk at the far end, but maybe (in the era before bustimes dot org etc) my 43 was cancelled or just around the corner or had already departed… was that 44 running early or late… so much anxiety … now people know where to stand and the more regular simpler service seems to justify sitting on the bus a little longer in one direction

London Buses now have got away all its suffixes, but routes sharing significant common sections are allocated numbers far away from each other.

That’s the problem with London

Because every service change requires new contracts and tenders (and it seems more efficient to do something like tender one sixtieth of routes every month for a five year contract so that there’s always a similar number of new contracts in the pipeline, operators find a size that they can afford garage space for in our expensive Capital rather than taking over an additional two hundred buses worth of work overnight or losing a huge market share like this and having to wait a few years for the next contract to come up for negotiation -TfL are constantly changing things (and making demands about greener buses etc) so they can’t “rip it up again” like we saw with huge network changes in many provincial cities (First brought “overgrounds” to Aberdeen/ Glasgow/ Leeds/ Bradford/ Sheffield/ Manchester/ Bristol/ Southampton etc, often there was a huge set of service changes in a short period to get routes suitable - but we’ve seen a few huge city wide changes in other large conurbations too, Nottingham effectively cut all cross-city routes overnight

So, since London can’t change everything at the same time (it’d push the cost of tenders up significantly and scare away companies for a start), when they want to split a route into separate overlapping services they are restricted to the limited number of “free” service numbers, which are often nowhere near the route in question (the northern end of the 10 became the 390 IIRC?)

In contrast, in Hong Kong or some other cities, numbers are allocated on geographical basis so routes in the same area are allocated numbers close to each other. For example, 1-29 represents a district, 30-49 for another, 50-69 for another, etc. Related routes are normally allocated suffixes, while routes serving similar areas are normally allocated consecutive numbers.

Have you seen the Belfast map? I think you’d like it. Nottingham certainly tried to go in that direction, without being quite as anal about it

Maybe it’s our tradition of cross city services that makes this harder to achieve but cities do have some groups of numbers for common areas, e.g. in Fife, the Glasgow Express were something from x24 to X28, Edinburgh express we’re something from X50 to X61, a “thirty something” route was Cowdenbeath/ Glenrothes area, a forty something route was Windygates/ Markinch area, a fifty something was Levenmouth, most sixty somethings were in the Cupar area, seventy somethings were around Dunfermline, eighty somethings around Kirkcaldy, ninety somethings around St Andrews - those under thirty were less obvious, often they were longer distance ones that wouldn’t have fitted neatly into an organised system (the 7 remains Dunfermline to Leven, one of the best double decker bus journeys in the UK as you go through Burntisland/ Kinghorn etc watching the sun shine on Leith and the Firth Of Forth , the 25 from Dunfermline to St Andrews was a similar long distance one which coordinated with the 23 East of Cupar on its journey from Stirling to St. Andrews… I suppose that 16 to 20 were all Cowdenbeath area and 1-5 was local ish routes in Glenrothes, maybe gaps were left depending on how the new town expanded)

 

[GusB]

They’ve taken the decision that passengers prefer simplicity, look at Balerno where traditional half the services went one side of the estate to the terminus and half the other way 43/44, 83/84, that kind of thing), but over the years decided that the eastern side is busier (44) and ran all but one southbound journey per hour that way, this was the 43, they tried regulating it as the 44A for a while before deciding that Simple was better and now everything runs anti clockwise around Balerno - it benefits some people in one direction but means a longer journey in the other, however keeping things simple so that people know which stop to stands at for a traditional ten minute service was seen as more important than going every twenty minutes each way or giving people just one bus an hour (in fairness, if I were in central Edinburgh around half past the hour, or whenever the hourly 43 was scheduled but saw a regular 44 I’d have a dilemma of whether to board it and face a walk at the far end, but maybe (in the era before bustimes dot org etc) my 43 was cancelled or just around the corner or had already departed… was that 44 running early or late… so much anxiety … now people know where to stand and the more regular simpler service seems to justify sitting on the bus a little longer in one direction

In the summer of 1993 I lived just off Slateford Road (opposite the Caley Brewery) and the usual buses taken into town were the 4, 4A and the 44. I was never really concerned about where buses went at the extremities of the routes, but there was a certain amount of logic to the route numbers as they all went via Gorgie and Haymarket. I may be misremembering, but if we were ever going out for drinks near the university (Oddfellows seems to ring a bell), we'd take the 28 or 29.

Similarly, when I used to stay with my other half at Heriot Watt, we would take the 22A into town in the evenings. I'm not sure how it differed from the 22, but the daytime route was the 65, and it stuck to Calder Road without the diversion into the housing estates.

 

[noddingdonkey]

Here in Huddersfield the convention seems to be to use suffixes to differentiate between different operators where they compete rather than cooperate, eg 302 First, 302A Yorkshire Tiger. Where a different operator handles evening journeys they typically use the same number. Slight variations in route tend to be handled by a new number, eg the 183 and 185 could reasonably be the same number with a suffix.

I think First Leeds have services with an A suffix to indicate a route variation. I suspect it's down to heritage and long established custom. If you subtract 300 from many First Huddersfield routes you get the number of the corresponding service in Huddersfield Corporation days. (181/3/5 are really the 349/350/352 in disguise). Or that Leeds has one or two digit numbers so had space on the blinds.

The approach across the Pennines where the 184 timetable has various symbols against each journey to denote the destination seems unnecessarily hard to follow in my opinion, and suffixes would not go amiss.

There was a trend of using M prefixes for buses that used the motorway. M1 was Huddersfield to Sheffield, M62 was Leeds to Halifax via the White Rose Centre.

School services in West Yorkshire are prefixed B, C, K, L and presumably W to denote the local authority.

 

[DunsBus]

In the summer of 1993 I lived just off Slateford Road (opposite the Caley Brewery) and the usual buses taken into town were the 4, 4A and the 44. I was never really concerned about where buses went at the extremities of the routes, but there was a certain amount of logic to the route numbers as they all went via Gorgie and Haymarket. I may be misremembering, but if we were ever going out for drinks near the university (Oddfellows seems to ring a bell), we'd take the 28 or 29.

Similarly, when I used to stay with my other half at Heriot Watt, we would take the 22A into town in the evenings. I'm not sure how it differed from the 22, but the daytime route was the 65, and it stuck to Calder Road without the diversion into the housing estates.

In the early days of deregulation, the Wallyford-Balerno service was numbered 44/83/84.
The 83 ran via Bavelaw Road and Mansfield Road at the Balerno end whilst the 44 and 84 ran via Johnsburn Road and Cockburn Crescent. It ran as the limited stop 83/84 during the day and as the all-stops 44 at nights and on Sundays. This changed at the January 1987 service change to become the 43/44 with the routes swapped at the Balerno end.

initially, the 43 ran in both directions but by the early 1990s had become westbound only, every 30 minutes. When the 44 was relaunched in 1999, the plan was to drop the Johnsburn Road/Cockburn Crescent section completely and have all journeys running via Bavelaw Road/Mansfield Road. This was changed at the last minute when the council agreed to fund this section, albeit at a reduced frequency, so what was the 43 then became the 44A with the frequency dropping to every hour.
In more recent years, it then went back up to every 30 minutes before the current Balerno loop was introduced. The Johnsburn Road and Cockburn Crescent section now has a better service that it did back in 1987.

To answer a couple of TGW's queries:

4/4A. This started at the November 1988 service change when daytime journeys on the 4 were diverted away from Northfield Broadway, running to Bingham via Mountcastle Drive North/South and Bingham Avenue as service 4A. It was a rare instance of the established service becoming the "junior partner." In October 1993, the 4A was withdrawn. All journeys on the 4 then reverted to running via Northfield Broadway and were extended from Bingham to Asda.

22A. This, I recall, ran as a loop (Constitution Street, Bernard Street, Commercial Street, North Junction Street, Great Junction Street) to maintain a link between Leith and the city centre at nights and on Sundays, after service changes at the start of 1992 saw the 16 coming off at these times.

 

[duncanp]

Whilst London no longer has suffixes, when there is a route that has common sections, or when a route is broken up into shorter overlapping routes, the numbers are related.

Thus you have

168 : Hampstead Heath - Old Kent Road
68 : Euston - West Norwood
468 : Elephant & Castle - South Croydon

At one time the 68 ran through from Chalk Farm to South Croydon, although no doubt there were many short journeys.

Another example is

93 : Putney Bridge - North Cheam
293 : Morden - Epsom

Before 1970, then 93 ran from Putney Bridge to Epsom, although some journeys did terminate at North Cheam.

In Birmingham the inner and outer circles are number 8A/8C and 11A/11C to indicate the anti-clockwise or clockwise directions.

Also in Birmingham there is the 12/12A Birmingham to Dudley, with a slight variation in the route at the outer end, and the 13/13A from Birmingham to Oldbury/Blackheath.

When a bus is only running over part of a route, National Express West Midlands will sometimes use the "E" suffix, so to use the example above, if a bus on route 12 was terminating short at Oldbury, it would show the route number 12E.

 

[SCH117X]

Transdev Blazefield in Harrogate use suffixes to denote continuing variations of a core route, something Transdev did when they owned Yellow Buses in Bournemouth. So a 1 is a Harrogate-Starbeck-Knaresborough bus station service or short workings on it, usually Harrogate-Starbeck (for the depot) while the services continuing beyond Knaresborough bus station have the suffixes - currently 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D. The other core route so numbered currently is that to the town's north-eastern suburbs (Bilton) - 2A and 2B. On-going house building is supposed to result in the current route 3 to north-western suburbs being split into two. Oddly they do not use suffixes to denote variations in a core route as there is no distinction between the few route 7 services that run via the trading estate at Thorpe Arch which when numbered as a 770 had those services numbered as 771.

 

[tbtc]

4/4A. This started at the November 1988 service change when daytime journeys on the 4 were diverted away from Northfield Broadway, running to Bingham via Mountcastle Drive North/South and Bingham Avenue as service 4A. It was a rare instance of the established service becoming the "junior partner." In October 1993, the 4A was withdrawn. All journeys on the 4 then reverted to running via Northfield Broadway and were extended from Bingham to Asda

Thanks for clearing that up

I remember the 4 diverting that way to combat the CitySprinter C2 (and Edinburgh Transport 333? Then again I’m not sure when the Northfield/ Milton Road service went from being the C3 to C2?), but did the 45 cover the “missing” part along the southern half of Northfield or am I remembering that wrongly?

And was the 51 replaced by additional journeys running as 5 at the same time (as the changes to the 4)?

Similarly, when I used to stay with my other half at Heriot Watt, we would take the 22A into town in the evenings. I'm not sure how it differed from the 22, but the daytime route was the 65, and it stuck to Calder Road without the diversion into the housing estates.

The 22 is a funny route, from a half hourly route that didn’t run evenings/ Sundays to one that ran every four or five minutes (in the pre-tram era when The Gyle and Ocean Terminal were THE places to go) to terminating in the city centre and the existing fifteen minute service frequency keeps brought up as a route to potentially cut further

From memory (and @DunsBus obviously knows these things better than me)

At deregulation the Herriot Watt service was the 61, shared with Eastern Scottish, I think it might have been one of the rare examples of LRT using the bus station at St Andrew’s Square? There were some Airport services which ran there as 200 rather than the 1

When Eastern were running the C5 every five minutes from Lochend down the A71 to Wester Hailes, and the C55 every ten minutes via a slower route that involved Leith Walk and Broomhouse, LRT hit back by introducing a 65 which was a brand new service from Lochend into the city centre and then a direct replacement for the 61 to Herriot Watt (at the time, one selling point for Eastern Scottish was that they fully served Princes Street whereas the LRT 34/35 and 42/46 served the Royal Mile and Mound, so the 65 was the first LRT route to the heart of the shops etc)

in the pre-Gyle era, Sighthill was a busy terminus, the 22/25 and the 34/35 all finished there (whereas the C55, which directly competed with the 22/25 from Leith Walk to Broomhouse, continued to the shops at Wester Hailes, a more popular destination) I think there may have been more terminating at Sighthill too? Anyhow, since the 65 was daytime only, 22 journeys were extended west of Sighthill to cover Herriot Watt evenings/Sundays, these journeys being 22a, as discussed above (I.e. there was still a regular service to the university but you had to take a slower route through Broomhouse rather than down the main A71)

I guess that the Lochend side of the 65 was replaced by the 87 at some stage? But the increasing importance of Herriot Watt saw the previous half hourly buses Blown away by a combined ten minutes on the 25/25a in about 2000 (the 25a being Holyrood via Regent Road, a rare turn into Abbey Mount, later replaced by all 25s running through to Lochend)

Then the 34 and 35 were extended to the university too, and you wonder how such a place ever coped with just two services an hour (plus the half hourly 45 which is essentially unchanged at the western side since the days of dinosaurs!)

(From memory, some 61s and 22a’s may have run through towards Currie/Balerno too, but I’m hazy!)

 

[DunsBus]

Northfield started being served by the C2 in November 1987, when the route was extended from St Andrew Square to Brunstane. That lasted until February 1990, a few months before Edinburgh Transport came on the scene, when the C2 was cut back to St Andrew Square and linked at the East Pilton end to Eastern's version of the 23.

The 45 served the full length of Northfield Broadway. On Saturdays it was run by Eastern Scottish as a council contract, running between Brunstane and Gray's Loan.

The 5/51 arrangement lasted until the 2000 network revamp. The 22/25 as I recall was a bit of a mess by the time that came around. For many years running between Sighthill and Blackhall, though with no evening and Sunday service beyond Newhaven, the northern end was gradually pruned after deregulation so that by 1993 it went no further west than there. At the south end it ran to Currie, though by 2000 on Saturdays only when the linked 45/65 didn't run. Throw in the evening and Sunday 22A, and the peak hours 22B and 25B, and you can see why Neil Renilson wanted to start afresh.

 

[TheGrandWazoo]

To answer a couple of TGW's queries:

I know I ask a few questions but I don't think they were my queries

 

[DunsBus]

I know I ask a few questions but I don't think they were my queries

Oops. I should've gone to Specsavers.

 

[duncanp]

At deregulation the Herriot Watt service was the 61, shared with Eastern Scottish, I think it might have been one of the rare examples of LRT using the bus station at St Andrew’s Square? There were some Airport services which ran there as 200 rather than the 1


(From memory, some 61s and 22a’s may have run through towards Currie/Balerno too, but I’m hazy!)

I definitely remember the 61, as it was the main service to Riccarton Campus when I started at Heriot Watt University in 1981.

It was joinlty operated with Eastern Scottish, and Lothian Region Transport vehicles did use the bus station as St Andrew Square.

There was a large gap in departures on the 61 from St Andrew Square in the evening, and Heriot Watt University used to run shuttle mini buses to and from Sighthill terminus to connect with the 22, 25, 34 and 35. On Sundays, only one vehicle was used, which resulted in a service frequency of every 90 minutes.

Fares were very uneven too if you went beyond the old city boundary.. I can remember it being 20p from St Andrew Square to Sighthill, and something like 40p for St Andrew Square to Riccarton Campus

Talking of bus routes with suffixes, the other bus to serve Riccarton Campus at that time was the 53A, which ran from the campus via Currie, Juniper Green, Colinton, Craiglockhart. Tollcross, Chambers Street and the Bridges to terminate at St Andrew Square. This was solely operated by Eastern Scottish, and had a common section of route with the 53 between St Andrew Square and Currie, with the 53 going to serve Balerno.

Eastern Scottish also operated the 52, which ran from St Andrew Square and ran via Slateford to Balerno.

In 1984, the 53 and 53A were withdrawn and LRT service 45 was extended from Juniper Green to Currie and Riccarton Campus. The 61 was also extended from Riccarton Campus to Currie and Balerno, serving Johnsburn Road in Balerno for the first time.

The extended 61 was very handy for me as I lived just off Johnsburn Road in Balerno for the last two years of my course at Heriot Watt, and also for a couple of years afterwards when I started work at Standard Life.

All in all, bus services to Riccarton Campus are many times better than when I was there 40 years ago, with night buses and both the 34 and 35 going there too.

I can't help thinking that there would be a case for building a branch of the Edinburgh tram from somewhere near Bankhead to serve Hermiston Park & Ride and the University in the future.

 

[Busaholic]

I remember the LRT 81, the predecessor of today's service 37, having five variants of which three used suffixes.

81 - the main weekday route between Penicuik and Muirhouse.
81A - the evening and Sunday diversion via Loanhead.
81B - this ran at the start and end of service, running to/from Deanburn via Queensway and omitting Penicuik town centre.
81C - a handful of Monday to Friday peak journeys which served Easter Bush.
X81, later X91 - ran at peak hours, running non-stop between Surgeons Hall, Cameron Toll and Mortonhall. The daytime service later became the X91 with the same stopping pattern.

Strange that London Transport (also for a short time known as LRT) also had a range of 81 routes, serving the West London borough of Hownslow and the Berkshire town of Slough, with some going to what was known as London Airport Central, but later Heathrow Airport Central. The 81B variant between Hounslow and Heathrow got replaced by a Red Arrow flat fare type service numbered A1 which ran non-stop from Hounslow West Station to Heathrow: that was before the Piccadilly Line got extended there.

 

[150249]

Don't know if specials count but Stagecoach South West have a 9W for an event at Westpoint.

 

[Deerfold]

School services past

Here in Huddersfield the convention seems to be to use suffixes to differentiate between different operators where they compete rather than cooperate, eg 302 First, 302A Yorkshire Tiger. Where a different operator handles evening journeys they typically use the same number. Slight variations in route tend to be handled by a new number, eg the 183 and 185 could reasonably be the same number with a suffix.

I think First Leeds have services with an A suffix to indicate a route variation. I suspect it's down to heritage and long established custom. If you subtract 300 from many First Huddersfield routes you get the number of the corresponding service in Huddersfield Corporation days. (181/3/5 are really the 349/350/352 in disguise). Or that Leeds has one or two digit numbers so had space on the blinds.

The approach across the Pennines where the 184 timetable has various symbols against each journey to denote the destination seems unnecessarily hard to follow in my opinion, and suffixes would not go amiss.

There was a trend of using M prefixes for buses that used the motorway. M1 was Huddersfield to Sheffield, M62 was Leeds to Halifax via the White Rose Centre.

School services in West Yorkshire are prefixed B, C, K, L and presumably W to denote the local authority.

School bus services past my house in West Yorkshire mostly start with a 9. Others start with a G, a P, or an V.

The local town services are prefixed with a K for Keighley.

 

[Taunton]

Visiting here from the railway side, but I recall that in Liverpool many years ago there were two principal street routes to the main Pier Head terminus, by Church Street or by Dale Street, and the numbers had C or D on the end. This was without there being a plain number equivalent. Some had one, some the other, and some alternately had both.

Younger times in Bristol, and they seemed to use a whole range of letters on the end for various alternatives, factory specials, etc. I remember watching them all being wound through, it seemed much of the alphabet.

 

[Siemens Trains]

Talking of bus routes with suffixes, the other bus to serve Riccarton Campus at that time was the 53A, which ran from the campus via Currie, Juniper Green, Colinton, Craiglockhart. Tollcross, Chambers Street and the Bridges to terminate at St Andrew Square. This was solely operated by Eastern Scottish, and had a common section of route with the 53 between St Andrew Square and Currie, with the 53 going to serve Balerno.

Eastern Scottish also operated the 52, which ran from St Andrew Square and ran via Slateford to Balerno.

In 1984, the 53 and 53A were withdrawn and LRT service 45 was extended from Juniper Green to Currie and Riccarton Campus. The 61 was also extended from Riccarton Campus to Currie and Balerno, serving Johnsburn Road in Balerno for the first time.

Certainly Eastern's 53A via Bryce Road was replaced by LRT's 45 service via either Riccarton Mains Road or Curriehill Road but I don't know if the 53 route to Balerno entirely disappeared at that time. The Balerno-Edinburgh via Slateford 52 was joined with routes to Penicuik and renumbered 64 to 67, with a few suffices into the bargain to suit the Penicuik variants. Latterly I believe several suffices were used when Eastern (or SMT/First) moved the 66 and 44 cores out to East Lothian. But the Balerno-Edinburgh via Colinton link was numbered 68 around the mid-1980s, and I think this service existed on either side of deregulation. I believe LRT ran a 47 service in competition with the 68 but it didn't last very long.
From what I recall these services all used Mansfield Road, as the Johnsburn Road & Cockburn Crescent leg never seemed good commercial bus territory.

 

[duncanp]

Certainly Eastern's 53A via Bryce Road was replaced by LRT's 45 service via either Riccarton Mains Road or Curriehill Road but I don't know if the 53 route to Balerno entirely disappeared at that time. The Balerno-Edinburgh via Slateford 52 was joined with routes to Penicuik and renumbered 64 to 67, with a few suffices into the bargain to suit the Penicuik variants. Latterly I believe several suffices were used when Eastern (or SMT/First) moved the 66 and 44 cores out to East Lothian. But the Balerno-Edinburgh via Colinton link was numbered 68 around the mid-1980s, and I think this service existed on either side of deregulation. I believe LRT ran a 47 service in competition with the 68 but it didn't last very long.
From what I recall these services all used Mansfield Road, as the Johnsburn Road & Cockburn Crescent leg never seemed good commercial bus territory.

As far as I can recall, the Eastern Scottish 53 from Edinburgh to Balerno via Colinton only ran a few times a day, possibly just in the peak hours.

The 53A to Riccarton Campus was more frequent, running every 30 minutes until the early evening.

I was living in Balerno at the time of bus deregulation in 1986, and I do not remember a service 68 via Colinton.

All this was a long time ago, and my memory is a little hazy.

 

[Siemens Trains]

As far as I can recall, the Eastern Scottish 53 from Edinburgh to Balerno via Colinton only ran a few times a day, possibly just in the peak hours.

The 53A to Riccarton Campus was more frequent, running every 30 minutes until the early evening.

I was living in Balerno at the time of bus deregulation in 1986, and I do not remember a service 68 via Colinton.

All this was a long time ago, and my memory is a little hazy.

Just had a rummage through some paper timetable archives before throwing them on the bonfire. Think I've uploaded them correctly below.
When the main Balerno route extended to Penicuik there weren't suffixes at the time my example was taken. Just numbers from 64 to 67. But I'm pretty sure I used services with numbers like 64A and 65B at some point.
But when running the Balerno route to East Lothian it's interesting that both prefix and suffix conventions applied.
As an aside (a little outside the prefix or suffix topic, apart from relevance to the 53A), I found a 61 diagram showing its extension from Currie up to Balerno and also a fare table and season ticket summary illustrating the seemingly sharp increase in cost for journeys on the rural fare stages. Nowadays of course the whole route would be in one zone.
A mid-1980s service 68 diagram from Eastern Scottish showing Balerno to Edinburgh via Colinton is attached along with LRT's 45/47 route, these being very similar to the previous 53 and 53A services.

 

[Ken H]

Just had a rummage through some paper timetable archives before throwing them on the bonfire. Think I've uploaded them correctly below.
When the main Balerno route extended to Penicuik there weren't suffixes at the time my example was taken valid. Just numbers from 64 to 67. But I'm pretty sure I used services with numbers like 64A and 65B at some point.
But when running the Balerno route to East Lothian it's interesting that both prefix and suffix conventions applied.
As an aside (a little outside the prefix or suffix topic, apart from relevance to the 53A), I found a 61 diagram showing its extension from Currie up to Balerno and also a fare table and season ticket summary illustrating the seemingly sharp increase in cost for journeys on the rural fare stages. Nowadays of course the whole route would be in one zone.
A mid-1980s service 68 diagram from Eastern Scottish showing Balerno to Edinburgh via Colinton is attached along with LRT's 45/47 route, these being very similar to the previous 53 and 53A services.

Send your scans to timetable world....