New Forest Tour / Sunday buses to Paultons Park & Ringwood

Bluestar's New Forest Tour starts again today for the summer, running daily until 14th September. See full details here.

Gardbus 139 launches tomorrow, providing a Sunday link from Southampton to Paulton's Park and Ringwood. Here are the timetable, route map and full stop listing:

See details of Monday to Saturday buses to Paulton's here.

More buses to Fareham / Less direct to Gosport / First mobile tickets

First have announced some changes to their Fareham and Gosport services from Sunday 27th July. Further details of all the changes can be found here.

Here in Southampton, this means that the 4 and 4A will disappear and be replaced with a half-hourly new route, the X5. This will run to Fareham via Warsash and then on to Gosport. The X4 is rerouted slightly, to now serve Titchfield village, giving them double the number of buses as they currently have.

Southampton Hill in Titchfield and the southern half of Hunts Pond Road in Locks Heath will lose their bus services.

Overall there will be more buses to Fareham, 4 per hour. There will also be more to Gosport, 2 per hour, but they will run via Fareham, so will take longer than the current route 4.

The new timetables for the X4 and X5 starting 27th July can be found here.

In other news, First tickets can now be purchased on some mobile phones, via the new First mTicket app. It only works on Apple and Android phones however and it isn't clear whether Windows phones will be included in the future.

Velvet A splits in two from Monday / Xelabus new timetables

From this Monday 23rd June, Velvet A splits into two separate routes:

• Southampton to Hedge End remains as Velvet A but gets a new timetable.
• Eastleigh to Hedge End transfers to Xelabus and becomes route X4. To confuse things, Velvet will still run a couple of evening journeys, also numbered X4 and First will still run the Sunday service, numbered (lettered) A. See the Mon-Sat timetable here and the Sunday timetable here.

Some Xelabus routes also get new timetables. Click the following links to see them:

• X3: Rerouted to serve Boyatt Wood and Nightingale Avenue. No longer serves Velmore or Valley Park.
• X4: Replaces the Eastleigh-Hedge End section of Velvet A.
• X7: Frequency doubled to every half-hour on weekdays.

Xelabus also introduce some new tickets, including a GreenDayRider valid all day on all Xelabus services for £6. They also issue and accept the new Discovery ticket, which is also valid on Stagecoach.