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.

First timetables change this Sunday / Velvet B4 starts Monday

Don't forget that tomorrow, Sunday 1st June, is when most First routes in Southampton get a new timetable and some also have route changes.

See all of the new timetables on First's website, as a PDF booklet or on Traveline.

The major route changes have already been mentioned in our previous post here.

From Wednesday, there's a new link between Bitterne and Bursledon in the shape of Velvet B4. It will run via Harefield, Thornhill and Sholing every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, providing a new direct link to Tesco Extra in Bursledon. See the timetable here and full details here.

Velvet timetable changes from Tuesday

Tuesday 27th May sees new timetables on Velvet A and S1.

See the new timetable for the A here. The biggest change is the cut to the Southampton-Hedge End Velvet Sunday service.

The new S1 timetable is here. Minor changes all round. Most significant is a weekday morning peak journey from Lordshill is extended to start back from Lordshill North. In fact all journeys that don't currently run to/from Lordshill North will do so from Tuesday.

Don't forget that it's a Sunday service across all operators this Bank Holiday Monday 26th May.

First new timetables out

First have published their new timetable booklet taking effect from 1st June. See it here.

It now includes route 26 from Hedge End to Fareham but bizarrely the 4/4A/X4 services have been removed from the Southampton booklet. The index page refers to them thus:

It also includes some fares info for major destinations, but stops short of providing the full fares table that you can find online. Maybe they didn't want to confuse people, but the fact that it only takes two images (taking up potentially no more than two pages of their booklet) to work out the single or return fare for any journey on their network is something they really should be shouting about.

We've already covered the major changes here. The biggest one is that the 8/8A to Hedge End are halved in frequency, becoming just the 8, and will no longer serve the village centre. This will send many much needed passengers the way of Velvet A and possibly Bluestar 3 too.

Extract from First's new network map showing the major changes in the east of the city.

Solent Travelcard price chaos / First managers online

First are holding another online 'Meet the Manager' event for their Southampton routes next Wednesday between 1700 and 1900 on Facebook and Twitter.

The Solent Travelcard has been around for a few years now, making it easier and cheaper to make journeys that involve more than one bus operator. But how much does it cost? According to the card's dedicated website, the one-day version is £7.50:

But passengers have reported to the ticket's Facebook page of being charged £8 for the ticket. Indeed, a look at First and Bluestar's websites confirms that they are now charging £8 for the ticket:

Meanwhile Velvet's fares page and Brijan Tours still give the price as £7.50:

Xelabus agree, with a scrolling banner on their homepage advertising £7.50:

Neither Stagecoach nor Wheelers appear to promote the ticket, despite the ticket's own website listing them as partners.

So does the Solent Travelcard now have two prices and you pay the one set by the operator from which you purchase it? If so, is there a risk of Bluestar and First drivers rejecting tickets purchased on Brijan, Velvet or Xelabus?

Sunday buses to Paultons Park & Ringwood

Just weeks after Ringwood yet again lost its direct bus link with Southampton, Gardbus have announced that they are to give it another go. Route 139 will only run on Sundays and bank holidays from 29th June, but will also serve Paultons Park, restoring another lost Sunday link.

Ringwood's most recent link was run by Velvet, but Gardbus have tried before: route 39 ran between July and September 2011.

We'll let you know as soon as the timetable is out.

In other news, our sister blog, Great British Bus Routes, has run a feature on Bluestar 6 to Lymington, detailing things to see and do all along the route. It also contains other posts about interesting bus routes from all around the country.